What are you good at?
What are you good at?
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Go ahead, think about it. I'll wait.
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Got it? No? Me either.
If you're anything like me that can be a really tough question to answer. Not because you aren't good at anything, but because it feels weird and a bit wrong to say "I'm good at ____ thing."
It feels wrong for me anyway. If it feels fine for you, then you rock, and I'm sort of envious of that state of mind.
Just before I got into bed I checked my phone and realized I still needed to complete about 1,500 steps to get my 8,000 for today.
Before you go "good for you being healthy!" let me state that I do not do this for health. I do this for some level of competitiveness. For similar reasons as to why I am still taking a photo every day, 1,044 days later, why I blog every day, why I journal every day. While these things all have positive impacts on my life as a result, I will be the first to admit that it is definitely based in the pride of a having an unbroken streak.
Anyway, I had to do some steps. So I started doing laps from my bedroom, down the hall, to the kitchen, to the living room, and back. I have a fairly small suite, so I have to do a lot of laps. On one of the laps, I snagged my Kobo. You might recall a couple of weeks ago I wrote about how walking makes my brain work. I figured I might as well pick a Kaizen question from my book, and think about that while I walked. The question was "What is one small thing that is special about me?"
I struggled to come up with anything. I paced and thought, repeating the question over and over in my head.
Eventually, I got to the point where I was repeating the question so quickly that I didn't have any time to think about an answer in between. So, then I tried to slow the thoughts down. And I came up with this idea for a blog post (not an idea of what's special about me.)
The idea is that I think some people struggle with this. And I also think that, as a society, we generally suck at letting people know what we admire about them, and what we think they do well. When we ask someone what they think we are good at, they may struggle to answer as well, because it puts them on the spot.
I have a challenge for you this weekend:
Lets share the love, since we know its hard for us to come up with things that we’re good at, lets help someone else out. Pick a person, any person* you will interact with this weekend. Tell that person one thing that you think they are really good at, that they do well, that you admire about them.
*I say any person because it really can be any person. The people closest to you may be easiest, but you never know. You may witness a bus driver being very helpful or cheerful and friendly to customers, or a barista who provides service above and beyond the average, or a retail associate who clearly cares about their customer's wellbeing, or medical personnel who are compassionate beyond what is expected.
If you want to share your story with me after doing this, please leave a comment on this blog post or on social media. I'd love to hear about it.