How do I discover my talents and take advantage of them? The question of how to discover talents and make use of them is in the brain of most youths today. In this article, I want to share a deep understanding of the concept of talent and how people can realize their talents.

What is a Talent?

A talent is a gift or a natural ability to do things well without being taught. Every human being is naturally gifted with a particular talent since everyone is good at something, but most people find it challenging to discover their abilities. As a result of failing to discover your talent, you may run a miserable life while you have abundant resources in you. One of the common questions is if there are people without talents

Are There People Without Talents?

Being talented or not is perceptive. It depends on your perception and the perception of the people around you. Some might think that they do not have any talent and try to make people understand that they are gifted with nothing. The truth is that everyone is good at something but might be inactive and indiscoverable. Thus, change your thinking and open doors so you will see your talents. You have a personal responsibility to activate your talents and make them beneficial to you and to the society you are living in.

The following are some tips that can help you to discover your talents and take advantage of them.

Tips to Help you Discover your Talents

As a general rule, you need to thoroughly assess your life from childhood up to where you are today. Making such an in-depth assessment may need the support and help of others. Can be your parents, your relatives, your schoolmates, and friends. Specific tips to help you discover your talent include the following:

Your Past Hard Times can be a place where your talent rests

Take a look at the times that you faced serious challenges and how you dealt with them. Hard times might reveal your hidden skills. The skills you used to solve some of your past challenges might be one of your biggest talents. Once you discover your talent, start planning for the successful utilization of the talent. Such skills can be a source of generating income.

Take the example of the challenge of unemployment facing many developing countries. Its citizens struggle so much to make a living. In struggling to make a living, one discovers hidden abilities. I have a good example of some of the celebrities, artists, and singers; if you ask them how did they come out to be that much known, most of them will tell you that they had to look for a reason to live and all to find that they are good in such activities. So do not underrate what comes out during difficult times.

You can find your Talent in Your Passion

Think about what you like to do most in your daily life activities. Consider things that make you happy. Think about what people say when you do something. What do most people ask you to help them with? You might take the answers to the above questions for granted, but it is an undeniable truth that your passion carries some of your talents. If you like singing and dancing, sing and dance, and with time you will see and benefit from that talent.

You can let Nature Take its Course

Think about the things that come to you naturally and your natural way of handling them. Think about the activities that you don’t struggle to implement. You might take them easily and all to find that it is where your talents rest. Most of our talents are within the weird things that we do every day but, we take them for granted. Think about how many times you succeeded in something that you just wondered how you managed it. In such weird things rest one’s talent.

Your Childhood is your Pond of Talents

Your childhood can be a pond of your talents. However, talents hidden in childhood require the support of the parents and people around you to uncover them and nurture them. Parents have the responsibility to see and understand what those capabilities in their children are? They are responsible not only to discover them but also to nurture them accordingly. You might be interested in asking your parents, your brothers and sisters about the kind of things you used to do and like during your childhood. Once you get a clue, you can begin discovering your talents and plan to take advantage of them.

Let me make a call for the parents who like to put a lot of pressure on their children to pursue the parents’ interests instead of their interests. Let our kids find their destiny, and parents remain facilitators in helping the children realize and grow their talents. Pressing children to follow their parents’ interests is why we are left with a lot of graduates without employment.

Prayer can Uncover the Hidden Talents

Talents are inborn. For those who believe in God, talents come from God. A Prayer, therefore, is a powerful weapon in uncovering and activating hidden talents. Talents that are not utilized to benefit society are like dead because God has given different talents to different individuals to make the world complete and the best place to live. Therefore, pray and ask God to reveal your talents to you and show you how to multiply the talents of the people of God.

How do I Turn my Talent into a Career?

It is a fact that a dormant talent is as well as dead. Turning your talent into a career means making your talent active and valuable. The question that most people ask is how to do one turns talent into a job. How does one turn a hobby into a career? All those are easy questions that require complex answers. The following are a few tips on how you can make your talent into a career.

Thinking outside the square

Turning your talent and hobbies into a career is not as simple as drinking a cup of tea. It requires deep thinking, commitment, and investment. It also depends on the time and your age while making such a decision. If you decide to change your talent into a career at the age of 45, it may become a challenge because much as you like and enjoy dancing, you are likely to be limited by your age as it can not allow you to perform on stage efficiently. In such an environment, you need to think from a different perspective. You may still maintain your hobby by establishing a band, maybe, a magazine, a journal, or a blog to promote dancing. Here you have successfully turned your dancing talent into a career.

Determine the Social and Economic Needs of your Community

Activating your talent makes the talent useful to you and the community you are living with. Therefore, once you have discovered your talent, you must undertake a situation analysis that will enable you to determine the community’s day-to-day needs, and the challenges facing the community that require some solutions. Furthermore, consider the types of solutions available and prepare a matrix that shows the needs and challenges of the community. The matrix should also indicate a collum reflecting the available solution and the adequacy level.

Assess and link your talent and the required solutions of the community

From your social and economic needs matrix prepared in number 2 above, extract those without solutions and assess the extent to which your talent can offer solutions to those challenges. Thus, you can turn your talent into a career by looking at situations that are useful to others but missing, or the available solution is not adequate, and you can do it better. With time, this talent becomes a career in that you can make commercials.

What is essential here is to make sure that once you start commercializing your talent, you must make sure that you identify yourself from the rest of the service providers and uniquely offer your services.

Need for Support

Most people fail to recognize or utilize their talents because they lack support from the people around them. Many people, especially the youth, have dreams coming from their skills and passions, but they lack support from the community and their parents. Most parents, especially in African countries, tend to ignore their young boys’ and girls’ talents, passions, and dreams. As a result, we are left with a big group of unemployed youth.

We have to value everything that we do because our talents lie within our daily doings and if we discover them and utilize them properly as we live. Let’s inspire and support others to grow their abilities. We also need to value skills and help each other turn our talents into a career and stop complaining about unemployment. Let’s use our gifts from God and create employment.

By Deodatus Robert Mgembe