Ep82 Transcript: How to Find Your Strengths – Quick Fix Friday

Andrea Vahl: Hey, late starters. In today’s episode of Quick Fix Friday, I’m gonna dive into finding your strengths because in episode 80, I talked to Tony and Alisa DiLorenzo of one Extraordinary Marriage, and they talked about how working together as a partner was a little bit more challenging until they found their strengths and knew what each of them was good at.

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So you probably have some idea of what you like to do, but sometimes you’re not quite sure of where your strengths really lie in a business.

So there’s lots and lots of tests out there. There’s the Meyers-Briggs, there’s the Disc test, there’s the Clifton Strengthsfinder. There’s a test called High Five. There’s, Kolbe, there’s all kinds of tests you can take. And now I am a big fan of tests. I love taking all the tests.

I’m an Aquarius, ENFP, Integrator, Enneagram seven with a six-wing Colby QuickStarter.

But, but that can get really expensive. Sometimes I don’t think is totally necessary when you’re just starting out in a business. So I’m gonna offer some ideas on how I’ve worked with my previous business partner Phyllis Khare in how we developed our strengths when we were launching our social media manager school.

So I think the first thing is making a series of lists. I’m a huge fan of lists, and I think a list is a great way to just put some ideas on paper and share those things. So some lists could be, what do you like doing? What do you good at doing, and what do you hate doing? Now you might consider putting some bigger picture skills in there, like, I hate business planning, or I hate doing financial analysis, or I hate working in customer service, for example.

You also might do some more focus skills, like, I hate creating images, or I hate writing blog posts, or I love connecting the backend technical pieces together. And this might also be in people skills. Like, you like customer service or you like building community. And this was definitely something that my business partner Phyllis and I found is that she was great at the community piece of things.

She was in our, Facebook group, really making sure everyone was engaged, tagging people, getting in there. Making sure no one was left behind and things like that. And she was the lead in doing that, and she would just pull me in a little bit more often. I would certainly go in and check as well, but she would also tag me when I needed to be tagged.

So it was finding her as the lead on that, on that particular skill, and me coming in as a support person. Same thing with marketing. I was more often doing the marketing. I was arranging, like writing the ads and setting up the ads and really getting into the email marketing piece of it and she would come in more as a support person. For sure we were co-creating some of that content and things like that, but I was more of a driver in some of those aspects.

So finding those places where one person could be the point person, the lead is a great idea, and then having the duties defined on what that’s going to look like for that person is also a great idea.

So start with some lists on what you like, what you don’t like. Maybe, group it into areas of your business, soft skills, more technical skills, big picture skills, more day-to-day skills, and really dive into that.

And then take a look at everything that needs to be done. And I know that sounds like a big list, but maybe just start with a brain dump on what does a week look like in your business?

And then assign the tasks to the person who is better at that skill, who has that better affinity for that skill and is maybe better at that skill. And if you have a type of thing that neither of you like, such as creating images, I know I’m not great at creating images. So I make sure I hire someone to do that for me because otherwise I will procrastinate all day long on creating those images. Cuz I don’t like it and I’m not necessarily good at it.

So, like I said, while I’m a fan of some of these tests and I think these tests can be good assessments, I think sometimes just making your own list and really remembering where you get into a flow state with some of these tasks or what you’ve liked in the past in some of the jobs you’ve done before, can really help and then figure out what you need to assign or outsource to someone else.

Hope that was helpful, and make sure you grab the free guide Top Tools for Late Starters on the website at latestartersclub.com and let’s turn dreaming into doing.