Finding your sweet spot
© Pete Longworth
The other day, I had nine phone calls back-to-back. NINE. All with people who believe in my work and who are interested in having me speak to their organizations.
That means I spent close to nine hours on the phone. And you know what? I loved it. It didn’t feel like work at all.
You might be sitting there thinking you’d rather do anything else than fill your day with one call after the next. And that’s okay. We are all fulfilled by different things. The goal is to find your “sweet spot”—the place where your motivations meet your talents.
Clearly, one of my sweet spots (you’re not limited to one!) is sales. I’m highly motivated by the thought of growing my business because it allows me to take care of my team and provide the means for us to continue making our mark on the world. I’m also really good at sales. I’m a relationship person; my strengths are in building meaningful connections and partnerships.
On the other hand, ask me to do detailed research or analyze accounting records, and I will dread it. I’ll do it, but it will take me forever. I don’t love nitty-gritty work and I’m not good at it, so I will put it off as long as possible.
Working in your sweet spot helps you to be energized by your work instead of depleted by it. In an ideal world, 100% of your work would fall in your sweet spots (though that wouldn’t always help—sometimes work feels like work no matter how much you love it, right?). In reality, sometimes you have to do things you aren’t great at or don’t like to do. But if you can get to a place where 80% of what you do on a daily basis falls in your lane (and if you are leading a team, get your people to that place as well), that’s where true fulfillment and success happens.
My best tip for discovering sweet spots is to keep a daily journal. When you’re working on something that makes the time fly, write down what you were doing. Being so focused that you forget to look at the clock or check your phone probably means that your work is exciting or interesting to you and you’re good at it. That’s a sweet spot! Keep track of the opposite too: When you notice that you’re procrastinating or that you feel a sense of dread, write down the tasks that made you feel that way. Give it a month or two, and you’ll start to notice some trends. The goal is to get as many of the things that drain you off your plate and onto someone else’s who will be energized by them. The opposite is also true: If one of your teammates doesn’t enjoy doing something that you’re really good at and also happen to love doing, do a little switch-a-roo. We do it often on my team. It makes things a bit more complicated, but I’d rather have someone really energized and excited doing the work because I know they’ll be more engaged and we’ll have better results.
We will always have to do some things that aren’t fun to us. Some parts of your job just come with the territory whether you like them or not. But even the slightest shift in your daily to-dos can make the biggest difference in how you feel about your work.
This year my goal is to stay true to my sweet spots and help my team find and stay true to theirs too. Hope you’ll join us!
Big hugs,
