Confidence in Clarity: Finding Your Strengths
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Hey there and welcome. Are you a woman who is unapologetically ambitious, but you're also deeply focused on honoring God, loving your family well and pursuing meaningful work? Well, you've come to the right place. My name is Dana Byers and you and I are going to be fast friends. Let's get started.
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Hey there, everyone. Before we get started, I wanna take just a moment to share with you a review that I just received on Google. Stephanie said, working with Dana has helped me overcome the obstacles that were limiting my growth and success in running my business. Dana helped me map out a plan of action that will not only help me overcome the roadblocks, but will no doubt take my business to the next level. I highly recommend Dana Buyer's Coaching. Thank you so much for these precious words, Stephanie. It is so fun working with you, and I love watching your business grow.
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Hey there everyone, welcome to another episode of Been There, learned that this is Dana Byers, and I am really looking forward to our little conversation today because I wanna talk about the value of discovering your unique value. And as you think about it, you know, the ability to discover your unique value is something that is inherently unique to humans. You know, I have pets that I love. I don't think they have the ability to determine what value they bring. I think God gave us the opportunity to have self-awareness, to receive feedback, to make educated observations, and really determine how we can leverage our unique strengths for the benefit of the places that we work, for the benefit of our families, for the benefit of our community as a whole, for our local church. So it's really important to talk about our unique value, not for selfish purposes, because we just wanna celebrate ourselves, but instead to give us a more holistic understanding of the strengths that we have and our ability to plug them in intentionally and to key places to have a significant impact.
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So I wanna start with a little story. And this story is delightful to me because it just happened yesterday and I was like, oh my gosh, I knew I was gonna record this about this topic today. And this was the perfect lead in example. And I was getting a manicure yesterday, and the lady who was doing my nails, I asked her, Hey, can you do just a couple minutes massage on my neck? I had like a knot in my shoulder and her face lit up. She said, oh, I can help you with that. I'm really good at that. And it was the sweetest response that got me very excited. Like, oh, great, I found someone who can help me with this knot in my shoulder. And also she knows that she's good at it. There was no sense of pride in her response. She was energized and thrilled to have the opportunity to use her strength to help me in a time of need.
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And I think she turned a simple service into a really memorable experience because before she even started that massage, I was already anticipating the relief that was coming. She created for me what we call a win-win situation. You know, if you have taken the Energy Leadership Index assessment with me, you're familiar with level five energy, and that is a win-win. That is when both parties come to the table and experience a benefit. But there it's a, there's some give and take there. You also experience the benefit not only of receiving from someone else, but also the benefit and the win of recognizing that what you are bringing to the table is needed and appreciated. So when this lady's face lit up and she said, oh, I can help you with that, I was excited and I try to apply that practice to my coaching business.
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You know, when a woman comes to me and we're on a Zoom call and she tells me kind of what she's struggling with, where she feels stuck, I get excited when I can say, I can help you with that. Now the truth is, I'm not anyone's solution, but I am trained to walk people through scenarios where they feel stuck. And I pray, you know, I get to support my clients to bring accountability and to have that sense of, well, I'm not their solution. I get to be part of the journey towards the solution that God is providing them. So my face lights up when I have opportunities to sit at the table in win-win scenarios too. And I share that because I think you have maybe experienced that before or you would like to experience that. So that's what this episode is about today, because I wanna, I wanna start with my vision, and here's my vision.
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It is a woman, a world full of women who know what unique value they bring, and they communicate it with confidence. Did you catch that? That's it. That's all I'm asking. For a world full of women who understand, who know what unique value they bring, and they communicate it with confidence. Now, that might be a tall order, but I am willing to bet that if you stick through this whole episode with me and you can identify your unique value and start communicating it to others, you and I can start a revolution. So let's talk about the impact of knowing your value. There is a real positive impact of knowing and leveraging your unique value. And I want to emphasize how understanding what you offer can lead to really fulfilling work to meaningful contributions and to opportunities to serve other people effectively. When I used to work in hr, I would talk about the paycheck, okay?
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And I'm not talking about the money that's direct deposited into your account maybe every two or four weeks. I'm talking about the real value and experience you have and contributing the gifts that God has given you and seeing the impact that they make. That is the paycheck. Your ability to leverage your unique value to contribute to a team, to a cause and see God work through you. And to do that without hustling, because you just show up as you are with your experiences with the value you already have. You communicate how you can help, and you're able to contribute with others to serve effectively and get results. So your ability to understand why it's important to know your value and communicate it is what's going to usher you towards that win-win scenario. So I'm also gonna give you some practical exercises to get to know yourself better.
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So first I'm gonna share with you four benefits of knowing your true value. And then I'm gonna share with you two exercises you can try immediately to identify your own unique value. So let's keep going. Here are the benefits. First, learning about these things, you know, learning these things about yourself, it really diminishes your risk for burnout. This is huge, ladies, I would just, I'm just totally making up this number so don't hold me to it. I don't know that it's true, but I would imagine for every five women I communicate with in a day, two or three of them are in some, you know, experience of burnout. So if you understand your true value and your unique value and what you bring, the solutions you offer, you significantly diminish your risk for burnout because you won't be striving as much. There's clarity about what you bring and clarity about what they can expect from you.
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And it also limits your scope of work, which can help diminish anxiety that could lead to burnout. So if you accept the fact that you are one heck of an administrative person and you decide not to bank on that music career, instead, well, you're gonna be more targeted and intentional about finding work or finding opportunities or places to serve that is a match for your administrative gifts instead of trying to create or force something along the lines of a music career. So having that clarity is gonna energize you instead of draining you. And you may have heard this before on the podcast, if you're one of my clients, you've heard this, but it bears repeating. We all experience catabolic and anabolic energy in our lives. Anything that's anabolic is something that builds us up. It's something that kind of brings oxygen to our lives, if you will.
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But catabolic things drain us. So if you have catabolic experience, it's like being out on the water in a small boat that has a hole in it. And instead of enjoying being on the water, you're spending all your time trying to plug up that hole or, or get the water out of the boat. So you see how, let's say using the example earlier, let's say if you're better at administrative things than you are at maybe pursuing a musical career, you can plug up the hole in that boat by stopping pursuing the music career and leaning into your administrative skills. Okay? You know, we've all heard stories about people who are stuck in catabolic pursuits, right? There's no judgment for that. But some example, some examples I can think of are someone I know whose parents told him he should become a doctor just like his dad.
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But he really longed to write books instead. Someone else who might be on a catabolic pursuit could be a woman who really wants to start a business, but she keeps her corporate job for fear of failure. So she's missing out on the anabolic opportunity of starting a business because of the fears of making that change. And those are lose lose scenarios because in in the case of the woman, she isn't gaining energy from her current job and it's catabolic work for her, but she also has nothing on the horizon that could be more anabolic or more life-giving or energizing that uses her strengths even more. So, it's a sad picture to paint, but it's something that a lot of us have experienced in various areas of our lives over time. So I wanna remind you about the difference between catabolic and draining energy and anabolic and energizing or helpful life-giving energy.
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Side note there no job or relationship can be 100% anabolic, okay? Just wanna make sure I'm not setting those expectations for you. We all have catabolic elements to our lives that's to be expected, but we're looking to increase our anabolic experience. Okay? So another benefit, the second benefit of discovering your unique value is the power of understanding. What bringing what you bring to the table is that it's not selfish, but it can have the opposite effect of selfishness. The benefit is if you understand what you bring to the table, you can show up without pride, but you can show up with confidence. A limiting belief of many people I know is that if we're confident we're prideful. I don't think confident has to involve arrogance at all. Once you develop confidence, you realize it's a quiet sense of peace that you can bring whatever you've offered, whatever you've offered, and that you will help someone move towards a solution.
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And a, a quiet sense of confidence is the belief that you don't have to carry all of the responsibility. You don't have to be 100% of a solution. Rather, you get to compliment a team, you get to meet a specific need the team has, and together a team can bring the solution using the different various strengths that everyone around the table has. So I wanna share with you a client success story. I love this story. We met for a long season, and then after our coaching relationship ended, she reached back out to me again not too long ago, and we just had another check-in session. And she shared with me how she used her understanding of her unique value and that quiet sense of confidence that she has in such a way that it actually landed her the incredible job that she has today. And so she found out after she got the job that one of the executives came to her and said, Hey, I wonder if you know what it is that led us to hire you as compared to the other candidate that she was essentially neck and neck with.
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And she didn't know, my client didn't know what the difference was between the two of them. So she wanted to know, and the executive let her know that in fact, the other person she was in competition with for this role was someone that she had worked with previously and knew quite well and trusted deeply. But they hired my client instead because at the end of her final interview, she said to them, if you're looking for someone who can do X, Y, z, I'm your girl. I'm the woman who can do this for you. I've done this before. I love doing this. This is my strength within my wheelhouse. And so she was able to communicate that with just a quiet confidence, whereas the other candidate clearly wasn't able to communicate that. So the ability for you to highlight your strengths and the value that you bring can help you stand out and succeed if you are indeed in a competitive environment.
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And the beauty about that is you don't have to be competitive yourself. And in fact, I wouldn't really encourage that. I would just encourage you stating the truth of your experience and what you're able to contribute, and that brings a sense of confidence that you can transfer to the people who are either interviewing you or considering working with you. So another reason that discovering your unique value and what you bring to the table is so important is that it allows you to see where you fit into a team. We don't just want you sitting at a table. We want you knowing which seat to sit at around the table, right? This allows you to go where your need is and not duplicate the efforts if you are contributing to a team or a one-off project. Or for example, if I'm talking to a potential client and she's already seeing a coach, I wouldn't tell her if she couldn't hire me, but I might say, Hey, am I gonna be duplicating efforts here?
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We wanna make sure that you have the greatest benefit for your investment of time and money. So that's how I think about this in my business. And I want you to think about this in your own experience of being yourself and how you present yourself, either to clients or to your coworkers, or maybe cross-functional teams at your job. Figure out if you're duplicating effort by sitting around this table so that it doesn't slow the team down. But it also, it could be really helpful for you to understand this is your role in the team and this is what you bring so you can speak up at the proper and best times. So you see, it's not that a hundred percent of your work, as I said, would ever be anabolic, but you can find ways to make it more so. And as you are empowered to support yourself, to use your strengths to get the outcomes that you long to see, you're gonna be able to recognize that the tables that you sit around, the places that you're invited, or the places you invite yourself to, yes, I did say that the places that you invite yourself to, you can do that.
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You have permission to put yourself out there. You're gonna have increased anabolic experiences because you know that you are providing that want match. You know that you are providing that win-win scenario. So I wanna encourage you to look for opportunities to apply these strengths in various areas to serve others well without pride, but with confidence and humility. And then the fourth amazing reason it's important to know your value is that it identifies for you the path you can take to sharpen those strengths. You see, personal development is a key element of life satisfaction. So if you are spending your time earning an MBA that you don't really want or need for your job, that's gonna drain you potentially to the point of burnout. However, if you are a, let's say you're a yoga instructor and you take a weekend away every year to improve on a certification or to earn a certification, and you're growing your community of other yoga instructors, this is going to energize you to learn even more about your craft, to bring more excellence to what you're doing.
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So your understanding of your strong points helps you lean into those strengths. Once you've identified them, you can practice them more mindfully with significant intentionality. It allows you to join a community of others who share your gifts and your passions, and who bring similar solutions. When I share this benefit with you, I can't help but share with you one of my favorite quotes. It's by Marcus Buckingham, the creator of the StrengthsFinder assessment. And here's what he said, don't worry about being well-rounded, focus on being sharp in your areas of strength. And that allows you to take that step to give yourself permission to lean into the things that you're really good at that are anabolic for you, that you want to bring solutions in. And you might be saying to me, okay, Dana, this all sounds great. I really wanna join you in this revolution you're talking about and helping women let others know what they're great at, but I just don't see yet what I'm good at.
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Well, let me ask you this, would it surprise you to know that sometimes I feel the same way? I'm not kidding you. Sometimes this happens to all of us, especially in a season of transition. You might find yourself stepping back and thinking, I'm not sure this is something I'm really that good at. It doesn't feel revolutionary, you know? Or maybe, yes, it's absolutely anabolic, but I don't see that it is unique for me. So your ability to look at these two exercises I'm gonna share with you is going to help you revisit or discover for the first time how to identify your unique value. So first, the first exercise is observation. Go back and look at, maybe you've got previous annual reviews or emails that you have received and saved where other people in the workplace, or maybe people you volunteered with, people at your church, maybe they've shown you appreciation or celebrated you.
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I want you to reflect on the moments when you have received positive feedback or recognition for your contributions. And think of the projects you've done at work or at home, maybe in the past year. Which of them felt most rewarding or anabolic and why? Why was it life giving to you? So a little comment I wanna make here too, as an aside for you, is this idea, this suggestion I have for you of something I started more than 10 years ago. I don't know quite when I started it, but I, I started something where I create a strong moments email folder, and it's nothing more and nothing less than when someone sends me an email of appreciation or how something I contributed to impacted them. I just move that puppy over to the Strong Moments email folder. And that helps me keep a pulse on where I'm serving, how I'm being impactful, and how I'm being effective at that.
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But also, it really, really serves me on the days where I'm questioning what I'm doing, the days where I am doubting my impact, or the days where I'm doubting my investment, I go back to that strong moment's email folder, and it just serves as a reminder. It strengthens me. I'm able to encourage myself and the Lord as I read through the comments of other people, because I can't refute those, right? If I was just sitting, giving myself empty affirmations, oh, Dana, you can do this, Dana, you're a great coach. That's not gonna have near the impact of reviewing people's stories that they have taken the time to share with me. So walk away from this podcast episode later and create for yourself a strong moments email folder, my friend. You will be so glad you did. Okay. The second exercise to really give you an understanding in discovering your unique value is to focus on feedback and reflection.
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I want you to intentionally seek feedback from others. Be very clear about what you need feedback on and why you need this feedback. This feedback can highlight the strengths that others may not, that that others have noticed, that you may not have been aware of, or they may not have been fully acknowledged yet. And here's a great open-ended question you can ask whenever you ask for the feedback. Here it is. When did you see me make something look easy? When did you see me? Make something look easy. And then here's just an added bonus. Offer your answer to that question back to the person who is giving you feedback. Let them know, you know, I said this whole vision is for women everywhere, and of course, men, for all of us to understand the unique value that we bring, and to communicate that you can help another person understand their unique value by letting them know at the same time that you are asking them.
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So by incorporating its practical strategies into your life, you can recognize and celebrate other people's unique value. You're gonna be able to recognize and celebrate your own unique value leading to greater confidence and success in your personal and professional life. So let's go back for a minute to that vision. I shared with you earlier, a world full of women who know what unique value they bring and who communicate it with confidence. You and I, we are starting a revolution right now. Okay? You and I can do this together and we can help other women see their unique value and communicate it as well. And we can celebrate when we see other women communicate their unique God-given abilities with confidence. So I wanna invite you to go through these exercises, share your experiences of recognizing your unique value in creating win-win. So win-win situations or solutions. Email me at dana@danabycoaching.com. Let me know your unique value and what you offer. I would love to hear from you. See you on the next episode. I'm so glad you joined me for today's episode. I don't know if you know it, but our conversation doesn't actually have to end right here. In fact, if you go on over to Dana by coaching.com, I have a bunch of resources available. Take a look, see what's available, see if any of them would benefit you in the specific season that you're facing in your life right now. I'll see you here next week.
