At the heart of every person lies the secret to their greatest success, best quality of life, and biggest contribution to the world. This is their unique ability — a hard-wired set of natural talents that a person does passionately in every area of life. Has anyone ever encouraged you to get better in areas where you struggle? If you’re like most people, the answer is yes. This is how the majority of people think and operate. But does it truly improve your life? Do you absolutely love doing it now that you’re better at it? Our guess is no.
Unique Ability is a completely different mindset that honors every person’s natural strengths, what’s already within you and comes most naturally to you. It’s you at your very best—the way you achieve your best results and what people count on you for. Imagine knowing exactly what everyone’s unique ability is. The Unique Ability Discovery Process leads us to the answer. And to the possibility of having the happiest, most fulfilling, most fun life, whatever that might mean. As part of our 20 people happiness experiment , we decided to encaurage every team member to find their unique ability. Why we did it? Beacues we believe that happiness is a key to success – both in the office.
As Dan Sullivan says: “Happiness is anytime when you spend time with your Unique Ability”
By discovering the unique ability of each team member of United Partners and making sure they will spend more time doing what they actually like and are good at, we will make people happy and achieve better results.
HOW WE DID IT:
First we briefed all the team members about the Unique Aability concept to make sure we are all on the same page. Than we started the process step by step:
Step 1: Each team member asked 8-10 people (friends, colleagues, family who know them well) “What do you see as my Unique Ability?” My Unique Ability includes my talents and abilities, characteristics that describe me, what I’m good at, how I do things, what you count on me for, and any other distinguishing features you see about who I am.”
Step 2: When people received the answers – they looked for patterns – words, phrases, ideas. This is the foundation of their unique ability. Then team members listed them down.
Step 3: From all the answers, everybody discovered their top 10 unique ability Habits. How? Eeverybody chose the most meaningful things people say about them and asked: What makes these people say this about me? The way you describe a best habit starts like this: I ALWAYS….. So, at the end of step 3 every team member hadve a list of 10 good habits that describe how they achieve their best results (I always tell the thruth, I always have fun, etc ).
Step 4: Each team memberasked a few people, who know them well, to read the top 10 good habits and asked: “Does this sound like me?”.
Step 5: From all the answers everyone distilled 1 sentence that describes their unique abilities.
Step 6: Make your inventory. We listed all the tasks that we need to deliver during our working hours. Than each team member went through each task and checked in which category it belongs.
Step 7: Everyone made a simple action plan. Improvement ideas – we wrote down the changes needed in order to eliminate the non-unique abilities and have more time for the unique abilities. Benefits: We described how we will benefit from this change. Specific actions: What exactly do you need to eliminate that specific non-unique ability? Deadline: We agreed on a deadline for each improvement action.
