Activity Set: Capabilities
Capabilities Activities: Quick Overview
Part 1: Core Emotional Challenges
- Description: Identify emotional challenges that you’ve been through that you can help others overcome.
- Life Work Activity: List 1-3 Core Emotional Challenges you could help others overcome.
Part 2: Talents, Skills, and Gifts
- Description: Identify your talents and skills to determine the gifts that you can share with others.
- Life Work Activity: Identify and list your Top 5 to 7 Gifts.
Part 3: Activities
- Description: Identify the activities that you really love to do to see if there’s value in sharing it with others.
- Life Work Activity: Identify and list your Top 5 to 7 Activities.
Use the “Serve Profoundly in Your Right Pond” Worksheet to document your answers for each Activity in this section. Click on this link – serve profoundly in your right pond worksheet, 9-25-22 – to download a copy of the worksheet (Microsoft Word file).
Introduction
Part 1: Core Emotional Challenges (from the article, “Not Sure What Your Purpose at Work Is? This List Can Help You Spot It” by Laura Garnett)
This list of Life’s Emotional Challenges will help you identify the core emotional challenges you’ve faced in your life – and how these challenges can potentially help you define how you want to serve. To make this activity most effective, reflect on the personal challenges you’ve face over the course of your life – and how you were able to overcome them. As you think back to these challenges, you may have noticed a pattern that emerges, where a challenge/problem/issue continually appears in your life, but you also find easier ways to get through the challenge/problem/issue.
Your goal is to identify UP TO THREE (3) Core Emotional Challenges that seem to resonate with you the most. What challenge(s) seem to appear in your life, over and over? How were you able to overcome your challenge(s)? Your themes may describe the impact you’d like to have on others.
List of Core Emotional Challenges
- Acceptance: Making others feel accepted – You’re driven by being nonjudgmental and receptive to others because you feel like you weren’t accepted by your family for being who you are.
- Being Heard: Helping others find their voice – This might stem from growing up in a family where there was little to no communication or feeling like you were never heard. Helping others be open, find their voice, or fine-tune a message they need to share is endlessly fulfilling to you.
- Belonging: Helping people find a place where they belong – You’re motivated by helping people find the exact role in their workplace or life in which they will shine. This likely stems from feeling like you were constantly trying to identify your own place in the world.
- Boldness: Helping others be themselves – Based on a pattern of hiding yourself because you feared rejection, you want to help others be bold in a way that feels right for them.
- Calmness: Helping others navigate chaos – If you had to navigate ongoing chaos throughout your childhood, you likely learned a unique skill of adaptation and being calm in the face of a storm. You’re fulfilled by helping others navigate a hectic, fast-paced, or disorganized workplace by being a voice of calm and reason.
- Control: Helping others feel in control – If you felt inadequate and out of control in your early years due to an unstable home life or other events, it’s likely that helping others feel like they can take the reins in their own life is particularly meaningful to you.
- Difference: Helping others follow a different path, rather than the expected one – If you’ve always been drawn to do something different than what others expected of you but were discouraged from pursuing those things, helping others take the road less traveled will be exhilarating.
- Failure: Helping others overcome mistakes – This comes from dealing with the failures of others, most likely your parents or significant others. As a result, you’ve learned to make good decisions and avoid failures that negatively affect others. Also, you’re driven by helping others with this same challenge.
- Fairness: Promoting justice – If you felt unfairly disadvantaged or didn’t get the same opportunities as others, it probably stuck with you. As a result, being impartial and advocating for fair treatment of others is not only meaningful to you, but also fundamental to how you operate.
- Freedom: Helping others feel liberated – If you ever felt restricted in an unhealthy way, it’s motivating to you to help someone else feel free, unencumbered, and able to thrive as they wish.
- Heal: Helping others deal with pain and suffering – This comes from dealing with pain – physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual – and finding ways to not only deal with the pain, but to possibly overcome it and thrive.
- Ideal Environments: Creating spaces that allows people to thrive – This purpose is rooted in being raised in an environment, especially at school or at home, that felt like the wrong fit. As a result, you love creating ideal environments for others to thrive in.
- Included: Making others feel included – You enjoy helping others feel included, because you once felt left out, especially if you were a shy child and often felt isolated.
- Opportunities: Opening up options for others – If your core emotional challenge was growing up with a lack of opportunities (financial or otherwise), creating them for others offers great fulfillment.
- Possibility: Helping others step outside of their comfort zone and realize what they’re capable of – Any activity that allows you help others step into possibility is rewarding. This is because you may have felt trapped, you didn’t believe in yourself, or you witnessed a parent not become fully actualized.
- Potential: Ensuring life is operating smoothly and to its highest potential – You might identify with this if you were raised in a chaotic environment that didn’t allow you to cultivate your potential. Now, you are constantly managing situations in order to keep things running smoothly. The net result is that you help others operate at their full potential.
- Positivity: Being a force of optimism – If you were raised in an environment that was often critical and negative, you’re fulfilled by bringing positivity to as many situations as possible.
- Prioritization: Helping people realize that their wants and needs matter – You’re motivated by helping others understand that their wants and needs should be a priority because you know the pain of not having your needs met by others.
- Standing Out: Helping others not feel invisible – You live to help individuals or organizations stand out. You know what it’s like to feel invisible, so you strive to help others speak up and say what’s on their mind.
- Support: Exceeding expectations by supporting others – You love helping other people achieve great things. You may be counteracting a childhood experience during which the bar for achievement was high and support wasn’t provided for you to reach it.
- Understanding: Helping others feel understood despite being different – This is meaningful for you because being understood by your family and close friends was a constant challenge.
- Value: Making others feeling valued – If you were raised in a family where who you are was not valued, you may have been encouraged to be someone that you weren’t. You therefore want to help others feel valued for being exactly who they are.
Take a minute or two to write down up to THREE (3) Core Emotional Challenges resonate with you. Again, if something isn’t on the list, feel free to write down your own core emotional challenge. As you identify your challenge(s), think about you you might be able to help others overcome the same challenge.
- Core Emotional Challenge #1: __________________________________________________
- Core Emotional Challenge #2: __________________________________________________
- Core Emotional Challenge #3: __________________________________________________
Part 2: Talents, Skills, and Gifts
Talents are your natural, intuitive abilities to do well in particular activities. Skills are the talents you develop to become better as a result of additional time and effort. Gifts are the talents and skills you give away to make lives better by solving problems for others.
The “Talents, Skills, and Gifts” activity will have you identify the things that you’re good and the things you like (or love) to do – with the goal of using these gifts to help others solve problems and make their lives better. Be honest as you evaluate what you good at and what you like to do. Note: If there’s a talent and/or skill that you have that’s not listed, use the blank spaces at the end of this document to add it to the list.
Review the list below; place a check or an “X” next to the activities where “I’m good at it.” Place another check or “X” next those where “I like to do it.” Once complete, identify those activities that have marks for both what you’re good AND what you like to do. These are most likely the gifts you can share with others, which may help identify potential job and/or entrepreneurial activities. Your goal is to narrow down your options to the TOP FIVE (5) to SEVEN (7) activities that would come easy for you AND you would like to do.
| I’m good at it | I like to do it | I’m good at it | I like to do it | |||
| Adaptable/flexible | Inspiring others | |||||
| Analyzing data | Learning from mistakes | |||||
| Appreciating things | Learning new things | |||||
| Arranging things | Leading others | |||||
| Asking good questions | Listening | |||||
| Being adventurous | Living in the moment | |||||
| Being fair | Making decisions | |||||
| Being funny | Making food and drink | |||||
| Being optimistic | Making arts and crafts | |||||
| Bringing out best in others | Making music | |||||
| Building things | Making people beautiful | |||||
| Buying things | Making people happy | |||||
| Caring for others | Making people laugh | |||||
| Cleaning | Making money | |||||
| Collecting | Managing money/budgets | |||||
| Coming up with new ideas | Managing/supervising people | |||||
| Compiling statistics | Managing time | |||||
| Connecting people | Meeting people | |||||
| Cooking | Memorizing | |||||
| Coordinating events/activities | Motivating others | |||||
| Counseling | Moving | |||||
| Creating new things | Networking | |||||
| Dealing with pressure | Note-taking | |||||
| Dealing with relationships | Organizing | |||||
| Debating | Parenting | |||||
| Decorating | Performing | |||||
| Demonstrating | Planning events/activities | |||||
| Designing things | Playing instruments | |||||
| Developing | Playing games | |||||
| Driving | Playing video games | |||||
| Eating healthy | Playing sports | |||||
| Encouraging people | Programming/coding | |||||
| Enhancing beauty | Public speaking | |||||
| Entertaining others | Reading | |||||
| Exercising/being fit | Recruiting people | |||||
| Fixing things | Reflecting | |||||
| Future-thinking | Remembering things | |||||
| Gathering information | Repairing things | |||||
| Giving advice | Dealing with adversity | |||||
| Giving people hope | Repairing relationships | |||||
| Giving presentations | Reporting | |||||
| Having conversations | Researching | |||||
| Having fun | Problem solving | |||||
| Healing people | Saving lives | |||||
| Helping/serving others | Selling/marketing | |||||
| Implementing things | Showing compassion/empathy | |||||
| Including others | Managing energy | |||||
| Speaking languages | Understanding law/legal issues | |||||
| Spending wisely | Using computers | |||||
| Starting new things | Using electronics | |||||
| Storytelling | Using/working with my hands | |||||
| Taking care of people | Using technology | |||||
| Taking/editing pictures | Working on cars | |||||
| Taking risks | Working outdoors | |||||
| Talking | Working with numbers | |||||
| Teaching | Working with tools | |||||
| Training | Writing | |||||
| Critical thinking | Working in teams | |||||
| Traveling | Creative thinking | |||||
| Being curious | Accounting/bookkeeping | |||||
| Working with machines | Meeting deadlines | |||||
| Interpersonal skills | Strong work ethic | |||||
| Attention to detail/accurate | Accepts responsibility | |||||
| Managing stress | Managing conflict | |||||
| Negotiation/persuasion | Showing enthusiasm | |||||
| Being patient | Being trustworthy | |||||
| Handles criticism | Being resilient/gritty | |||||
| Designing people’s lives | Designing rooms/environments | |||||
| Ambitious/achievement | Follows instructions | |||||
| I’m good at it | I like to do it | I’m good at it | I like to do it |
As you review your list of Talents and Skills, narrow down your list of Gifts (those activities where you have both “I’m good at it” and “I like to do it” checked or marked with an “X”) to the FIVE (5) to SEVEN (7) Gifts that you enjoy using the most. List those activities in the space below. (Note: They DO NOT have to be ranked.)
- Gift #1: ___________________________________________________________________________
- Gift #2: ___________________________________________________________________________
- Gift #3: ___________________________________________________________________________
- Gift #4: ___________________________________________________________________________
- Gift #5: ___________________________________________________________________________
- Gift #6: ___________________________________________________________________________
- Gift #7: ___________________________________________________________________________
Part 3: Activities: What Brings Me Joy?
The “Activities: What Brings Me Joy?” activity provides you with a tool to use to come up with ideas, based on the activities you like/love to do. If there are activities you like/love to do and/or delivery methods that aren’t listed, feel free to include them on your list.
Review the list below; place a check or an “X” next to the activities that you really enjoy doing. Keep in mind that you ARE NOT identify business ideas right now, you’re just identifying those things that you enjoy doing, those things that bring you joy when doing them. Eventually, you’ll be able to use this list (as well as others) to identify potential job and/or entrepreneurial activities.
Your goal is to narrow down your options to the TOP FIVE (5) to SEVEN (7) activities that would come easy for you AND you would like to do. If you don’t know where to start, use these questions to help you decide:
- What do you LOVE to do?
- What do you do for fun?
- What are you curious about?
- What are you interested in?
- What do you do when you lose track of time?
- What excites you?
- What brings you joy?
- What problem could you solve for other people?
- What can you contribute that makes a positive difference to others?
- What makes you angry or drives you crazy?
- What matters to you that also matters to others?
- What activities are so engaging that you lose track of time?
List of Activities
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Now that you’ve reviewed your list of activities, use the space below to identify your TOP FIVE (5) to SEVEN (7) Activities that you would like to explore as a potential ideas to start something yourself. List those activities in the space below.
- Activity #1: ______________________________________________________________________
- Activity #2: _______________________________________________________________________
- Activity #3: _______________________________________________________________________
- Activity #4: _______________________________________________________________________
- Activity #5: _______________________________________________________________________
- Activity #6: _______________________________________________________________________
- Activity #7: ________________________________________________________________________
The Dream Dean 