Finding Your Talents

Both this week's workshop and my talk at The Cheltenham Festival were about finding your talents. The children (and some of the grown-ups too!) who came to The Festival workshop were brilliant - they knew they were talented at sport or being a leader or being creative, but those in my Westminster Life Club were much more dubious.

I don't know about you but I could tell you exactly how brilliant everyone I know is and what they can do really well, but when I used to think about myself I didn't know what made me special.

It was the same in my club. Although my clubbers had written down that they loved adventure and creative writing and all sorts of other things, they just couldn't believe that that meant they were talented in those fields - and yet I believe it does.

Malcolm Gladwell in his book, Outliers, puts forward a very strong case for needing 10,000 hours of practice in order to be really good at something, and I would agree - talents don't come overnight - but each clubber had identified their passions and it's those passions that make you unique and can be turned into talents with just a bit (10,000 hours!) of practise.

One of my passions is colour. When I was a small child I used to ask to be taken to the local department store so I could admire the carpets displayed so stunningly (just look at those reds!). As I got older my favourite present was always colouring pencils and now we call rooms in my home after the colours they're painted (the purple room... the red room... and so on). Just look at the Life Clubs logo - that too shows my love of colour.

You may not call colour a 'talent' of mine, but that's really just semantics. All I know is that without colour I feel bereft.

What are your 'talents'? Or, if you prefer, the things without which you feel bereft? Don't be modest!

Hope you have a great weekend,
Nina
PS I was at The Cheltenham Festival to celebrate the publication of my book, How To Get What You Want. Do have a look at a copy - it's fun.

Add Post To: | | | | | | | | |

Finding your talents

These exquisite colours are a display of frilly knickers in a shop in Florida. They were laid on a table in the middle of the shop, just put there for us to buy them in a pick 'n mix type of way and I stood there for ages enjoying the colours and the way they were put together. I didn't want to own just one pair, I wanted to own them all and exactly in that combination. In the end I just took a photo and marvelled at the talent of it all. The talents of the designers who chose that colour palette, the talents of the store designers who decided they'd be arranged in that order and the talents of the shop assistants who kept them looking so neat.

This week's (week of 10th August) workshop, Finding Your Box of Gifts, is what I did before I started Life Clubs. I helped others discover their talents - what made them unique - so they could use those talents in the world. This workshop is the very first step to doing just that. You'll leave either knowing something new about yourself, having found one or more new talents, or being amazingly reassured that you're already on the right path.

And maybe I could revisit photography as being one of my talents and clean my camera lens.
See you this week,
Nina
Founder of Life Clubs, author of The Big Book of Me and (just handed into editor) The Life Book

Add Post To: | | | | | | | | |

What's in your box of gifts?

I love this picture of a box. It reminds me of Pandora's box and how, once opened, you can never go back to how you were before.

That's what this week's workshop is about - finding the talents you have buried deep in a box. So many of us were told at a young age that we just weren't creative and it's haunted us for the rest of our life. It's liberating feeling that you're creative and we all are. Imagine how you would decorate that box if it was yours - or would you leave it grungy and mysterious - a nod to previous owners and what they may have kept in it.

Notice what's in your box this week. When can you be like Pandora and open it?

See you this week to discover your talents,
Nina
Founder Life Clubs

Add Post To: | | | | | | | | |