Re-Invent yourself: Explore your hidden potential

If you have been one of the brighter students in school , kind of “teachers pet” , you would have always carried a small burden of expectations on your tiny shoulders, the expectation to perform and keep performing consistently. Even in today’s world, I am sure children carry this weight during their school days while some probably continue doing so even during their college years. In high school , they are expected to score at-least in the top five or ten students,while in college , the expectation is to get a first class graduation degree to get a job with the top five or ten multinational institutions. Those who have been “first-benchers” in their school life will probably relate well to what I mean while those who were “last-benchers” will not even read this post so far so lets not worry about them.

The point I want to make is that a similar situation exists in our professional life as well. Those of us who put our hearts and souls in our jobs, who are passionate and focus on delivering results and value to the organisation irrespective of all the odds we face, probably end up having the maximum of the workload within our domain / department.While the procrastinating lot , those who have been mediocre in their corporate performances , who have failed their bosses in the past (but still manage to keep their jobs due to umpteen reasons which all of us are aware of ), end up having routine tasks just enough to justify the existence of the job position on the organisational chart and on the payroll.

An important fact to note here is that you are being continuously assessed and evaluated at your work place.Knowingly or unknowingly, there is a constant 360 assessment ongoing throughout your life at your workplace. The assessors are in form of your immediate bosses, your peers , your direct and indirect reports, your vendors, customers and all those who you communicate with through whatever mediums, places or times.The better you perform at your job, the more work you receive. The lesser you perform , your life is more at ease.

Just for the sake of this article , lets exclude the “morals” , “ethics”, “professionalism” and other similar “but that’s not true” debates and keep them aside for another article.

But having said that , I was thinking, as we already have our evaluation done for what we do at work , why not evaluate our own self to explore our own potential hidden talents. And why not use the social media , open forums and similar platforms to showcase our talents and receive feedback from our friends, colleagues and family on those aspects of our personality that were unknown to us as well as to others (the fourth quadrant of the “Johari window”) . I would urge each one of you who have read this post so far to think about one hidden talent that you just feel , yes just feel, that could be a potential hidden talent within you and come up with a mechanism of showcasing it using the social media. If you would like to receive feedback , please feel free to comment on this post and others who read your comments might share their ideas, suggestions and ways to use other mediums. This attempt of creating a post on linked-in is a result of a similar exercise that I planned in order to explore my potential at writing “linked-in posts”.

This is what I plan to do with the suggestions, advice , criticism and compliments that I receive on this posts. The “advice” will be taken as my attempt being good but it still needs to change, the “suggestions” will be taken as my attempt needs improvement and may or may not reflect in the short term, the “criticism” will be taken as my attempt needs lots of improvement and needs to change immediately while your “compliments” will be taken as my attempt being good and can only improve as I write more.

In return for your time and effort for reading and/or commenting on my post, I can share my “Balanced Scorecard 4×4 approach” a new approach to accelerate the achievement of strategic goals and objectives using the revolutionary BSC 4X4 APPROACH in which I provide step by step process for implementing the BSC as a pilot project with 4 departments, 4 objectives, in 4 phases over 4 months.This approach is based on tried and tested practical implementation of the Balanced Scorecard to maximize the quick wins in a minimal time period with a controlled impact of change in the organization. The same is available on YouTube which was an attempt to start an YouTube channel ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd9HwaWZKfU ) and /or on my website at www.avinashdeshpande.com (which by the way, was an attempt to explore my potential for creating my own website)