Ploymint Guide: 4 Ways To Identify Your Talents

If you’ve ever had to interview for a job then you’ve faced a familiar question: what are your strengths? Mustering up a passable answer is one thing, but truly understanding your talents is a different story entirely.

Sometimes a failure to understand ourselves ends up hurting us at work—you’ve probably encountered a coworker who keeps botching the same project over and over again—and sometimes it leads us down the wrong path entirely. Particularly with the millennial generation being criticized as generally narcissistic and listless, we could probably stand to understand ourselves a bit better.

Check out our four ways to identify your talents below:

Revisit your work history.

Not everyone engages in the type of work that leaves an obvious trail, but your work history is one of the best ways of tapping into your previous successes. Use your gut here: if there’s a project or result that you’re personally proud of, then there’s probably something worth mining there. Think about what went right in that example and what exactly your proud of. Even better? Try to retrace your steps. If the outcome was good, what was the process like? Sometimes it’s the intangible skills like patience under pressure that are our most endearing. And, don’t forget that sometimes, it’s perfectly okay to flex on job interviews.

Read some of your work correspondence or published work.

We’ve all got the capacity or tendency towards revisionist self-histories: hang around your family for the holidays and you’ll no doubt experience some bickering over opposing stories; it’s not uncommon to inflate our SAT scores years later; if you ask people how often they go to the gym they’ll throw out embarrassing overestimation. So how do you self-correct? Look back at the source. If you carry around a particular work project in your head as your landmark achievement, it might be worth revisiting the outcome to see if you’ve really got it right. If you’re a writer: reread the article you’re most proud of. (Warning: you might end up cringing instead of patting yourself on the back.)

Ask a friend or coworker.

This can be a precarious approach, but there’s no better way of pinning down how others perceive your strengths than just asking outright. You’ll want to get a fair assessment, so rather than asking a new friend or coworker, try to rely on someone that’s known you for a long time and is familiar with your track record and work. Of course, there is something alluring about a first impression and there’s nothing wrong with asking a new manager: “Is there anything I can be doing differently or something that I should keep doing as I am?”

Take a test.

Both inside and outside of the workplace, our strengths rarely just jump out at us; instead we have to encounter them in times of need. (This sounds like a superhero backstory.) But seriously: the odds are slim that you’ll suddenly have an epiphany about an unrealized talent. Put yourself in situations that will require you to try new things and test your patience. It might not be as organic, but taking an actual skills test can go a long way too.