The
first part of my upcoming book on Working Naturally and Natural
Enterprise focuses on gauging your readiness for natural work, an
explanation of how it differs from the kinds of work most people do
today, and the challenge of finding your 'sweet spot', where your Gift
(what you do uniquely well), your Passion (what you love doing) and
your Purpose (what's needed) overlap -- the work you were meant to do.
Since I developed this model, which is an extension of Dick Richards' 'Genius' model explained in his book Is Your Genius at Work, I've used it to help a lot of people find what might be their sweet spot. I've learned a number of things from this process:
- For some people there is no sweet spot, at least not yet:
I know some people whose Gifts and Passions simply do not overlap at
all, and I know others whose Gifts and Passions do not intersect with
any recognized, affordable need. Some people would assert that they
just have not yet discovered these intersections. I would counter that
there is a reasonable chance that some people never will.
- The sweet spot moves:
Just as the strike zone in baseball has changed as both pitchers and
batters have gotten better, so too does the sweet spot for many of us,
as we learn more about what we're good at, and what we love, as we
acquire new competencies and lose our edge in others, as we develop new
passions and grow disenchanted with others, and as the recognized,
affordable needs of the market evolve over time. Resilience in Working
Naturally requires a constant attention to these changes, and a
constant stretching for greater self-awareness, so that as the sweet
spot moves your Natural Enterprise can move with it.
- Discovering your sweet spot is a complex process:
Intuition may tell you where to start, but probably won't get you
there. The approach is iterative -- you can start with your Gifts and
try to discover which of them you love doing, and then research how
those Gifts might in part address an unmet need, and then discover
other people whose Gifts complement yours in meeting that need, people
you know you'd love to work with. Or you can start with unmet needs
that you care about and then figure out which partners you would need
to bring together to address it. Or you can start with a group of
people you think you'd love to work with and inventory your collective
Gifts and figure out what unmet needs you could collectively meet. And
as all of these things are constantly changing, the dynamic of
establishing and evolving a collective Natural Enterprise becomes an
extremely complex one that requires you and your partners to become
skilled at improvisation, and sometimes, when that doesn't work, to
change partners. In that respect it's a lot like that other type of
partnership, marriage.
After thirty years, I've honed in quite precisely on what is, at least for now, my sweet spot:
The capacity to be a sounding board,
observing, listening, imagining and interjecting relevant
possibilities, and showing tools and methods that might improve
effectiveness, to help people let themselves become who they really are
and do what they were meant to do.
This is a curious combination of Gifts and
Passions -- attending, imagining and demonstrating. I've indicated that
they involve more active intervention than facilitation or provocation,
but less than coaching, catalyzing, or guiding. The word 'advice' means
'how it appears', so perhaps I'm an advisor in the original sense of
the term, a reflector, or even, in its original sense of 'one who
brings forth', a parent. An emerger.
Enough about me.
The
three-part website accompanying my book will contain tools to help
people (a) find their sweet spot, (b) find people to make a living
with, and (c) expose needs, ideas and innovations to 'the wisdom of
crowds'. I need your assistance to design these tools. How might they
work? Help me imagine the possibilities.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
