Do You Know When You’re at Your Best?

I just completed an exercise designed to help one explore who they are when they are at their best. The Reflected Best Self Exercise™ (RBSE) is available to anyone and was created by the Center for Positive Organizations (Ross School of Business, University of Michigan). In summary, the exercise enables you to collect and aggregate stories from colleagues, friends, and family depicting times that they witnessed you at your best in any type of setting. It is an eye-opener and a pleasant experience in general!

As one would imagine, there are things that you know you are good at and yet you may question their importance to others. What was most powerful about this exercise to me was finding out how much value was placed on things that come naturally to me and how often there were common themes in moments different people cited. You learn that what you may have dismissed as effortless for you and not unique may be highly-esteemed and appreciated greatly by others.

How many of us have jobs, even careers that center around skills that make us money or were natural progressions from our background experiences or our collegial studies and yet may not be vocations that exploit our best qualities and skills? What if we have undervalued the things that showcase us at our very best because we never knew just how profoundly they affected others? What if we just presumed that they were not marketable abilities or just seemed frivolous or we considered ourselves unworthy to explore things that we enjoyed so much and came so naturally to us?

Whether it be through the RBSE or just collecting data informally from the people that know you, it behooves you to find out what others think you do best. The answers may surprise you! Moreover, they might just change the course of your career!