Your Strengths Are Clues, Not Coincidences
I think one of the hardest things about recognizing our own strengths is that the things we're naturally good at rarely feel particularly impressive to us.
If something comes easily, we assume it probably comes easily to everyone else too, so we don't think much of it. We don't put it on a list of strengths, we don't necessarily mention it in an interview, and we certainly don't stop to consider that this ordinary little thing we've been doing our entire lives might actually be trying to tell us something about the kind of work we're best suited to do.
It's just something we do.
For a long time, I think I did this with one of my own biggest strengths.
I am a figure-it-out person.
Give me something messy, unclear, inefficient, or not quite working and my brain almost immediately starts pulling it apart, asking questions, looking for connections, and trying to figure out how the pieces could work better together.
For years, I didn't think of that as a strength because it didn't have a neat name attached to it. It wasn't something I had been formally trained to do, and depending on where I was working at the time, it showed up in completely different ways.
I just thought it was how my brain worked.
Which, as it turns out, was kind of the point.
We Tend to Look for Strengths in the Wrong Places
Ask someone what their strengths are and there's a good chance they'll start thinking about work.
Maybe they're good at project management, sales, budgeting, public speaking, data analysis, training, marketing, or whatever other skills they've accumulated through their career.
Those things absolutely count, but I think sometimes we confuse skills we've developed with strengths that seem to follow us wherever we go.
A skill might be knowing how to build a spreadsheet.
The strength underneath it might be that you instinctively look for patterns in information.
A skill might be event planning.
The strength underneath it might be your ability to anticipate what people will need before they need it.
A skill might be managing a team.
The strength underneath it might be that you can recognize what different people need in order to do their best work.
Once you start looking underneath the task itself, things get much more interesting because the same underlying strength can show up in dozens of completely different jobs, businesses, volunteer roles, hobbies, and even relationships.
That's why your résumé isn't always the best place to look for clues about what you should do next.
Sometimes you need to look at your whole life.
Look for the Things That Keep Following You
When I look backward at my own career now, one of the things that stands out to me is how many times I was essentially doing the same thing in environments that looked nothing alike.
In nonprofit leadership, I was looking at programs, people, systems, experiences, and information and asking what wasn't working and how we could make it better.
When I built a cookie business after my first layoff, the subject matter was obviously very different, but there I was again, figuring out systems, solving logistical problems, creating customer experiences, noticing opportunities, marketing ideas, and constantly tweaking things to make the business work better.
Later, in corporate strategy, the environment changed again, but I found myself looking at information, finding patterns, solving problems, and helping connect what we knew to what we should do about it.
And now, in the work I'm building, I spend a lot of time doing that same thing with people.
Someone brings me a pile of ideas, experiences, fears, possibilities, and half-formed thoughts, and I start asking questions until we can see the thread running through them.
It took me a surprisingly long time to recognize that those weren't unrelated experiences.
They were evidence.
The jobs changed. The industries changed. The problems changed.
But certain parts of me kept showing up.
At some point, you have to stop calling that a coincidence.
What Do People Keep Asking You For?
Sometimes other people can see our strengths long before we do because they're the ones benefiting from them.
Think about what people consistently ask you for, particularly when it isn't technically your job.
Are you the person people call when they need to make a difficult decision?
Are you the one who gets asked to proofread everything because you somehow notice what everyone else misses?
Do people hand you the messy project because they know you'll get it organized?
Are you always the one planning the trip, explaining the complicated thing, calming everyone down, making the introduction, coming up with the idea, troubleshooting the problem, or getting the group to finally make a decision?
Pay attention to those requests.
Especially the ones that make you think:
Well, that's nothing. Anyone could do that.
Because no, actually, they probably couldn't.
Or at least they wouldn't do it the way you do.
One of the biggest clues to your strengths may be hiding inside the things you've dismissed precisely because they don't feel difficult enough to count.
Pay Attention to What You Notice
I also think there's another kind of clue that gets overlooked, and that's what you notice that other people seem to walk right past.
Some people walk into a room and immediately notice whether everyone feels included.
Someone else notices that the process everyone is using makes absolutely no sense.
Another person notices how the space looks and feels.
Someone notices the numbers.
Someone notices the person sitting quietly in the corner.
Someone notices an opportunity.
Someone notices the one detail that is going to become a problem three weeks from now if nobody deals with it today.
What you consistently notice tells you something about the way your brain works and what matters to you.
I've learned that I notice gaps.
I notice when something doesn't quite connect, when an idea has potential but isn't fully formed, when someone has several pieces of a puzzle but hasn't recognized how they fit together yet.
For a long time, I probably would have described that as me having a lot of opinions.
Which, to be fair, may also be true.
But I've learned to pay attention to it because noticing the gap is often the first step toward figuring out what belongs there.
What do you notice?
Look Beyond What You're Paid to Do
If you're trying to figure out your next chapter, I think it's especially important to look outside your professional life because your strengths didn't suddenly appear the first day someone gave you a paycheck.
Think about who you've always been.
Maybe you were organizing neighborhood games when you were eight years old and you're still the person who instinctively takes the lead when nobody knows what to do.
Maybe you've always been the friend people confide in.
Maybe you make things beautiful without really trying.
Maybe you've always loved researching things until you understand them completely.
Maybe you can sell something you genuinely believe in without ever feeling like you're selling.
Maybe you see a blank page and immediately start imagining what could go on it, while someone else sees the same blank page and wants to run away.
None of those things automatically tells you what career you should have.
That's not the point.
They're clues.
And when you start collecting enough clues, patterns begin to emerge.
Don't Turn Every Strength Into a Job
I want to say this because I think we're living in a time when we're encouraged to monetize absolutely everything we're good at.
You don't have to.
Being good at something does not mean you need to build a business around it, create a course about it, become an influencer in that space, or find a job where you do it forty hours a week.
Some strengths are allowed to simply make your life richer.
And sometimes something you're naturally good at becomes something you don't want to do professionally at all.
The goal isn't to take every strength you identify and immediately turn it into income.
The goal is to understand yourself better so that when you're deciding what comes next, you're working with more information than a list of job titles and qualifications.
Your strengths are one part of the puzzle.
Your interests matter.
Your values matter.
Your circumstances matter.
The life you want matters.
But your strengths give you clues about where you might naturally have something valuable to contribute.
Start Collecting the Evidence
If you're having trouble identifying your strengths, don't sit down with a blank piece of paper and demand that you suddenly produce a list of ten impressive things about yourself.
Instead, become an investigator of your own life.
Look backward.
Think about the moments when you felt particularly capable, useful, energized, or proud of something you'd done, and then ask yourself what you were actually doing in those moments.
Think about the different jobs you've had and look for the parts that followed you from one environment to another.
Think about what people consistently ask you for help with.
Think about what you notice.
Think about what feels surprisingly easy to you.
Think about the things you've been doing for so long that you stopped realizing they were unusual.
You might even ask a few people who know you well:
What do you think I do really well that I probably take for granted?
And then don't argue with them when they answer.
Just collect the evidence.
You don't have to know what it means yet.
The Pattern May Matter More Than the Title
I spent a lot of time trying to figure out which parts of my career counted and which direction made the most sense based on what I'd already done, when some of the most useful information was sitting underneath those experiences the entire time.
The title wasn't the clue.
The pattern was.
That's something I wish I had understood much earlier because it would have changed the way I looked at some of the twists in my career. Instead of seeing each change as evidence that I was starting over, I might have recognized sooner that I was bringing the same strengths with me and simply learning new ways to use them.
Maybe that's worth looking for in your own story.
If you've worked in three completely different industries but somehow always become the person who trains everyone else, that's a clue.
If every job eventually finds you solving problems that technically aren't yours, that's a clue.
If people have been coming to you for the same kind of help since long before anyone paid you for it, that's a clue.
If there's something you do almost instinctively that other people repeatedly tell you they're impressed by, even though you can't understand why they think it's such a big deal, that's probably a clue too.
Your strengths don't necessarily arrive with a label announcing what you're supposed to do with them.
Sometimes they show up quietly, over and over again, in completely different parts of your life until you finally stop long enough to notice the pattern.
And if you're trying to figure out what comes next, maybe you don't need to invent an entirely new version of yourself.
Maybe you need to look more closely at the person who's been there all along.
Because the things that keep showing up in your story probably aren't coincidences.
They're clues.
What clues keep showing up in your story?
Sometimes it’s easier to recognize patterns in someone else’s life than it is in our own. We’re simply too close to our experiences to see what has been quietly repeating itself all along.
If you’re trying to figure out what comes next and you have a lot of pieces but aren’t quite sure how they fit together, that’s exactly what we can work through in a Next Step Session.
We’ll look at where you’ve been, what keeps showing up, what matters to you now, and the possibilities that may be worth exploring next.
You don’t need to come with an answer.
You can come with the clues.