5 Keys To Detect Your Skills

How can you identify your natural talents and develop them later? If you spend some time thinking about it, you will probably quickly find out what capacities you have a certain aptitude for.

Here are some guidelines, as a guide, to help you identify your talents, although it is important to remember that not all of the above characteristics need to be present to consider something to be an extraordinary gift or quality.

1. What is easy for you to do?

This is the aspect that can most help you to identify a gift. It seems to me that it is its cardinal characteristic, because when you are talented in something, you carry out the activities related to it with relative ease. And I say relative ease because it is not that it is always simple but that, compared to what happens to others, you require less effort to perform the same task. You could say that you have “fluency”, that you are good at it.

In addition, it is interesting to see that this facility is not limited to a single area but is manifested in all the activities that are related. A friend of mine has a gift for organization. I remember that when we studied at the university, he always knew the dates of the exams, got the best notes and put together study calendars with enviable and amazing precision. But that same facility manifested itself outside the academic sphere: he organized excellent parties in which nothing was ever lacking and he was always the promoter of meetings and shared vacations.

2. Develop mastery in an area

The ease with which you carry out these activities means that, in most cases, you quickly develop a great command over them. In other words, you can
translate what you propose to practice quite precisely. That which is beginning to take shape in your mind may find an expression that reflects it quite similarly in reality.

This is evident in those people who have a gift for music and who have the ability to “hear” the melody in their head before transferring it to a staff or playing it with an instrument. In the same way, those who have aptitude for the plastic arts can capture by various means what they already “saw” in their mind. And, on the contrary, those people who lack this gift, we can have this image or mental vision, but once it materializes, the result is not what we expected.

3. Do what you like

The combination of doing something with ease and also mastery makes undertaking activities for which you have a particular aptitude generally quite enjoyable. Not always, but many times, the activities that you like, that give you enjoyment and fun, are those in which some personal aptitude is being put into play.

To illustrate with an example: I know that my natural aptitude has to do with the use of language. I work on it every day but when I stop to think about it, I see that many of the things that amuse me are also related to this : I like jokes, I am quick to make puns, phrases with double meanings and irony and, now Since I was little, I have had a lot more fun playing games where you have to guess a word than playing games of chance or strategy.

4. Look for other opinions in your environment

In general, your skills are quite visible to others; at times, perhaps even more than to yourself. And it is that parents, teachers, friends or colleagues usually detect your most outstanding potentialities or abilities quite quickly. Therefore, listening to what those around you tell you can be a good way to investigate where your main virtues lie.

Of course, you should not take these other people’s opinions as definitive or dismiss your own perceptions or desires to jump on what others consider you suitable for. But I do find it enriching to take into account the gaze of others; Especially if, from different spheres and from different people, you coincide in obtaining encouraging information about those things in which you stand out.

5. Aspire to achieve good results

Finally, I mention the good results because I believe that, in some cases, these can be indicative of a gift or an aptitude. But I am convinced that good results are more related to talent – that is, to how you have developed your gifts – than to aptitude alone. Of course, there are results in which, in addition, chance and many other variables intervene that are completely out of your control.

Besides, it must be taken into account that, if a good performance can reveal an ease to carry out a certain task, a poor result in no way speaks of a lack of aptitude. It is more likely that what is lacking in that case is training … and patience, since as the well-known aphorism says: “Talent is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration.” In other words, much of the genius is found in the effort you put into it.