Season 1 Chapter 6 -Unique Gifts and Talents
8 Jan 2021 · 11 min
This podcast episode (Season 1, Chapter 6) features Dr. Eric Janowitz and Jenny discussing 'Unique Gifts and Talents' as part of the Synergy Success Cycle. The episode emphasizes recognizing and leveraging God-given talents (strengths) as the foundation of personal power and purpose, recommends practical tools (StrengthsFinder/Clifton/Gallup, DISC profile), and gives examples of how understanding one's style informs career, health, relationships, volunteering, and goal-setting.
Chapters
Welcome to the Synergy Life Podcast. Our purpose is to help multiply the positive experiences of your life in all areas. Dr. Janowitz, best selling author of the Synergy Health Solution, is the creator of the Synergy Success Cycle, a framework that helps uncover what makes top achievers successful in areas of their life. We interview amazing people who are excelling in light and help our listeners gain valuable insights so they can apply them to achieve their best life possible.
Chapter six Unique Gifts and Talents As I'm sure you've seen already in some of the last few podcasts, you've witnessed that Dr. Eric is quite a talented doctor and he's experienced dealings with many people of different walks of life that have different talents and gifts. And this is something that you talk about in your book as well, that every person has a unique gift or talent and you want to help them find what those gifts and talents are so that they can build on them.
That's right.
So tell us how someone who may not be aware of what their gift or talent is. Some are, they're sure, but there are others that are kind of questioning what their gifts and talents are, and that's fine too. But how do you help them find their gifts and talents?
Thanks, Jenny. So here's where we get really tactical with the Synergy Success Cycle. So at this stage here, we're talking about the quadrant, the first quadrant of power. So when you look at power, you want to look at your talents, right? You want to look at your, at your gifts, you want to look at your values, your viewpoint. And in this segment, we're really going to tackle how to identify your strengths. And strengths are something. And talents, I use those terms interchangeably. They're oftentimes hard to recognize because by nature your strengths come easy. So it's hard to know what you're good at because you're unconsciously good at it, right? And so a lot of times, you know, you can, you can find your talents by by asking other people, like, hey, what, what do you think are three things that make me successful in this category? What is it about me that does this? So you can, you can talk to your friends and see that you can take assessments. There are a lot of ways to see that as well. So I like assessments. As a, as a physician, I'm quite analytical and data driven, so I'm into assessments. So there's different ones that we can unpack in this segment. But the point on this, first thing is that the first thing is to recognize that you have talents. And God gives Us talents, like we have natural talents and they're God given and many of us don't think we have them because, you know, it's all where we focus. If we focus on what's not working right, then we can see, oh my God, I'm awful at this thing. And a lot of times people tend to not want to be like, you know, seem, you know, aloof in a certain way or seem aristocratic and be like, well, I'm good at this. Well, I think it's important to know what you're good at because, you know, we are meant to contribute, we're meant to grow and we're meant to expand. And the best way to do that is to focus on the talents that God has given you and really learn how to recognize them and then develop them and most importantly, use them to help people around you right in life. So that's what I believe is the greatest gift you can give is in the service of other people. And so one way to identify talents, like I said, is to take an assessment. So one thing that I love is there's a book called Strength Finders. There's like Strength Finders 2.0. Clifton strengths, Gallup strengths. I love this stuff. And you can take an assessment, it's like a 20 minute assessment and it gives you a definition of, of what you have. There's 34 characteristic strengths. They've studied over millions of people. And you can take this test in a matter of 20 minutes and know your top five strengths. So now you can know what is it about you that makes you great, Right? And you have a vocabulary for it too. So like one of my strengths is maximizer. So I look at things in a lens and say, wow, I see this, but I also see it and I ask myself this continual question, how could I make it better? Right? And so that's one area there. Achievement is a big goal or activator. So an activator is another theme that I have where activator means making things into action. So once I see something and I understand it, I'm all about then taking action, right? And so, and then another aspect could be strategic and I can also see and go, what are the different ways that this can go? And then how can that help? So when I think it's great for patient care because I can be very strategic in creating them a plan and then helping them take that into action. So that's kind of one way to unpack it. Another way to unpack it is to do things like what's called The DISC profile, it's an, an acronym for disc.
And again, that could be a whole segment in of itself. But the DISC profile is a behavioral assessment. So D is like dominance, right? I is like influencer, S is a stabilizer, and C is conscientious. So you can use a DISC profile to see are you people oriented, are you task oriented, are you fast paced, are you slow paced and methodical? And I do a lot of teaching at the University of Central Florida for multiple colleges. And I say, look, life is hard enough as it is, right?
Why don't we find ways to go through our natural talents, our natural behavioral style. I remember.
My mentor, Dr. Elliott told me, he says, if you love working with people, be a chiropractor. If you don't love working with people, if you like tasks. He didn't say if he didn't like working with people, he just said he didn't like working with people. But what he really meant is if you're task oriented, be a radiologist. And it's not that radiology is bad and working with people is good. It's what is your natural talent. Because if you're a radiologist, you're looking in front of a computer screen and you're dictating findings. Well, if you're into people, that's going to not fill your emotional needs.
So then I should have been a chiropractor?
I think so. You know, I think you'd be a great chiropractor because you love dealing with people.
I do. I came up as a strong S stabilizer.
That's good.
And then my next one was a C. Oh, good.
When you took the test. Excellent.
I did.
So if you're a stabilizer and you add stability, so the stabilizers are wonderful team players. So it's great to have stabilizers in your life, especially if you're kind of a go, go, go person. You need that stabilizer. And then a conscientious person is going to be slower paced and also really dealing with the details as well. So they're detail oriented. So they're the ones that kind of pick it up. My wife is the opposite. She's a, she's a shoot first and aim second type of a person. And so she just gets things done. She gets things done very quickly. She loves people. She's highly influential. She's like a 99. I, I'm a di, so I'm driving and I love working with people. I say when I run my practice, when I'm running the actual management of it A di which is task oriented and people oriented. But when I'm in patient care mode, much more I oriented about the relationship and helping that person get well and then giving and then driving that process to help them get the emotional juice for them to get to where they need to be.
Well, it's interesting you say that because not only can the disc profile change throughout your life, but it can also vary depending on what approach you use when you take the test. So if I take the test, maybe from a mother's perspective, how I am with my child and my family, and the results may be a little different than if I take it from a professional perspective and how I behave and react at work.
That's right. It varies based upon the relationship, the.
Experience.
The event, the circumstances. So it all does. But the point is, you want to see where you naturally go. You want to see where you naturally go when you're stressed and then going back towards your health. You want to say, how can I use this? Right? Like, how can I use my talent of maximizing in regards to my health, what are things that I can do? Or how can I be strategic about it? Or knowing that I like to work out with people? Right. My wife can watch a video and watch exercise videos and just do that on YouTube. Well, me, I need and I drive off of the relationship. So I hire a trainer because it gives me the accountability structure, but I also enjoy the communication process as well. So I feed off of that energy. So we want to learn ways of who we are and then use that to leverage our health, Use it to leverage our relationships, our finance, our spirituality, all those areas, right? Like if you were to serve in your. In your church or volunteer, like, where are your spiritual gifts, where are your talents? And how can you use that in volunteering with your church? Or how do you use it in the work that you do as a career or where you work, or what kind of business you might be in as well, right?
There's a quote that I'd like to share. You quoted Leo Buscaglia in saying that your talent is God's gift to you, and what you do with it is your gift back to God. That's so beautiful.
Hey, shout out to Leo. He did a great job there.
So beautiful. And shout out to you for finding it and putting it in the book. The reason I wanted to share that is because, again, I want to emphasize that everybody has strengths and everybody has unique gifts and talents. And you may not know what they are, but there are tools to find them. It didn't come naturally to me to figure out what my gifts and talents were. I grew up as an inner city kid in a very low economic area with a single mom. And so I grew up with this negative mindset that I don't have a talent. Who am I? I'm nobody. Right. And a lot of people deal with that mindset. And I see it all the time in my industry where people just need that little boost of confidence and they need a plan to follow.
That's right.
And so that's what you do in this book. You give them really the keys to unlock these doors that they may have otherwise not been able to do.
Absolutely. And that's why the Synergy success cycle starts with power. Because your level of power will be the floor or literally will be the ceiling of the level of purpose that you can live. So if you have these, you don't recognize your talents, you don't know your values, you don't know your viewpoint, your beliefs, your limiting beliefs that are all operating you. That is creating the capacity of how much purpose you can create and what your vision and what your goals are. It becomes the cap. So super stuff.
It is super stuff. And I think you'll be surprised by how many gifts and talents you actually do have.
Absolutely. Find them.
Find them.
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