What is your mission? What are your top 3 talents and what contribution will you make to the world?

By John Nieuwenburg

Recently, I received an email from a highly esteemed colleague that had this challenge:

What is your mission as a coach? Specifically, what are your top 3 talents and what contribution will you make to the world?

Here is how I responded, and I trust you'll agree it is worth sharing.

My Top 3 Talents/Strengths are:
Strategic: People who are especially talented in the Strategic theme create alternative ways to proceed. Faced with any given scenario, they can quickly spot the relevant patterns and issues.
Ideation: People who are especially talented in the Ideation theme are fascinated by ideas. They are able to find connections between seemingly disparate phenomena.
Empathy: People who are especially talented in the Empathy theme can sense the feelings of other people by imagining themselves in others’ lives or others’ situations.
These are the results from the Gallup Strengths Finder sometimes known by the book "Now Discover Your Strengths.  I've done the test twice. These three strengths are common to both tests.
As you can imagine, I come from the more intuitive side of coaching and less from the empirical side.  I don't see my contribution is to the world per se. Rather it is to a community of people whose lives and businesses are better because I've helped them along the way.  Gave them a hand up. I use the Socratic method. Which for me means, helping my client find the answers to their challenges that are right for them.  So that my client can own it. And as a result committed to seeing it thru to success. I trust my clients to be motivated (with occasional encouragement from me of course) and that I help them direct that motivation in the best way possible to get the results they want.
So my mission is to make the world a better place because a community made up of my clients have better lives and businesses.

Now let me ask you, what is your mission? Specifically, what are your top 3 talents and what contribution will you make to the world?

1 Comment

  1. Veronica on November 18, 2014 at 11:03 AM

    Hi John,

    Thanks for this really awesome post. I enjoy reading it and im wondering, do you have newsletter so i can setup adn receive daily updates of your site?

    Veronica