118: Your Unconscious Competencies

Leadership

Welcome friends to Episode #118 of the Own Your Best Life Podcast. One of the things that make it easiest to move around in this world is knowing our gifts. What are our competencies? What are our strengths? How do we make what’s unconscious, conscious so that we know how best to show up in any given situation? Today’s podcast is on this very thing. Your unconscious competencies and why it’s so important for you to understand them.

So we’ve been on a journey, literally and figuratively. I’m still in Costa Rica. I took 2 weeks to take my mom and her cousin on a trip with us and the family, which has been life-changing in the best way. I’ll dedicate a podcast episode to this concept of life-changing trips, but I did want to share that one of the most important insights I had over the course of those 2 weeks was that the way one lives is valuable.

These are similar to your unconscious competencies. You might have no idea that the way you get up in the morning and start your day is a valuable experience for someone else. You might not realize that the activities you choose and the places you go would be unbelievably rich for someone else to experience, as well – but they are. We often don’t think about how valuable we are innately, just because we are alive and expressing ourselves through the way we show up – but we are.

Allow me to introduce yourself

When I work with clients on unconscious competencies, they emerge as if they are a new person. Something that seems so obvious to them such as the way they approach life, work and any given activity becomes a distinctive strength. They go from feeling like they’re casually aware that they do things differently to being highly aware that they are not like everyone else.

This is a good thing.

Life is easier when you utilize your strengths

When we are tasked to figure out hard problems, achieve the unachievable and live new lives filled with healthier habits, it can often seem overwhelming. If it was so easy, you would have already done it. Yet, when you utilize your strengths it is much easier to do the hard things. Suddenly, things seem to work. You spend less time and energy fighting against yourself or wondering why you do things differently. You know you do it differently. When you know this about yourself, you figure out how to make things work for you.

One of my favorite aspects of working with people is that they are all different yet the same. We all want to feel seen, heard and appreciated. We all want to do great work in the world and have fun along the way. The way we go about it, however, can look different person to person. From the outside, one would think that we have very different views on life because we are doing it differently, but when you dig deep down – it’s just a different means to the same end.

Each person uses different sets of unconscious competencies. Every person has a different combination of life experiences to bring to the table. When we are asked to put together a cohesive story of our lives – where we are going, where we’ve been and where we are now – it can be challenging to see the whole picture. Yet, when you’re trying to figure out what you want to do next with your career and life, that’s exactly the journey you are on. You want to understand your own story. You want to understand your distinctive strengths and you want to know what to do next.

What comes next is easy when you see what comes naturally to you, doesn’t come naturally to other people. That’s how we solve problems and build highly valuable careers. We see where we add value in ways that only we can and do it to an increasingly higher level that we keep setting new benchmarks for ourselves. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need to be exactly like successful people and do everything they do. You need to notice how successful people do what makes them successful, and how you can do more of what makes you successful as well.

This doesn’t mean that you don’t do anything and just let your awesomeness speak for itself. You do still have to increase your competencies even more to fit new and different situations. It means that you become aware of how you can overuse your strengths and steamroll others because of your desire to do it your way. Without awareness of your strengths and a game plan for how you want to develop, build and harness your talents you will be underutilized. 

Our potential in this world is infinite. Underutilizing your talents is often one of the thoughts that keep achievers awake at night. How are you going to stretch yourself if you don’t know in which direction to stretch towards? This is the power of understanding your unconscious competencies.

In our work together, we will map your strengths out so that you can begin to understand what’s already working for you. We will also help you understand why you can eradicate self-doubt in certain areas as a result. This will increase your leadership branding, not by choosing what we want to be but by articulating who we are even more. Work and life becomes simpler when you understand that your defaults can be strengths and instead of pushing yourself even harder in these areas, the work is to have more finesse and style. It’s to make your work and life an art form. It’s to see each experience and challenge as another way for you to hone your talents even more.

This is the power of understanding your unconscious competencies. It is truly one of the most life-giving experiences when you understand yourself and who you are to a whole new level. You start to see why you’ve lived life a certain way, and how this has already shaped the life you’ve chosen to live and the work that you do. Instead of things being a confusing jumble of activities and memories, they begin to tell a coherent story. It becomes so clear what you’ve been up to and why, which makes it extremely clear what is available to you, next.


I love doing this work with my clients and I hope that if this interests you as well, and you want to understand yourself even more, that you join me on this journey. Sign up for a consultation at https://mayempson.com/contact

That’s it for this week. Have an amazing one and I’ll talk to you next time.

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