Imagine you had a superpower but didn’t realize it? How much would you be missing out?
Whether you notice it or not, some things come more easily to you than they do to others. These are your instinctive strengths. Because they feel effortless, you might not even recognize them as strengths. We often overlook what we’re naturally good at because it feels too easy to count as a real skill.
When you identify these hidden talents, you can use them more intentionally. Answering a few questions can help you see your instinctive strengths, so you can better use them to your advantage.
14 Questions to Identify Your Instinctive Strengths
- For each question, extrapolate what your answer says about you. For example, if you love grocery store couponing (which relates to question 4: What problems do you enjoy solving, even if they seem trivial?), it might reveal you’re strong at optimization. If you instinctively explain things to others using analogies, it suggests you’re strong at pattern recognition and learning by analogy.
- To make answering the questions more manageable, I’ve broken them down into buckets. Answer one bucket at a time, based on what you’re drawn to.
Effectiveness
1. What do you do well even when you’re half-asleep or distracted?
2. What are you “oddly good” at, even though you’ve never studied or trained for it?
3. What mistakes do you never or rarely seem to make?
Problem-Solving
4. What problems do you enjoy solving, even if they seem trivial?
5. What patterns do you notice before others see them?
6. How do you instinctively explain things to others? What are your go-to methods—storytelling, analogies, step-by-step logic, or emotional connection?
7. What do you instinctively fix or improve, even when no one asks you to?
Efficiency
8. What’s something you do so efficiently that people assume you’re cutting corners (but you’re not)?
9. What decisions do you make faster than others?
10. What do people assume you put a lot of thought into, but you actually just do on autopilot?
Social & Emotional
11. What’s an easy way you get people to like or trust you quickly?
12. How do you instinctively know what to say to defuse tension?
13. How do you get people to do what you want without them realizing you influenced them?
14. What’s a social “cheat code” you use to make conversations go smoother?
More Tips for How to Answer These Questions
- Try using a voice recorder app. Read through the list of questions, and when an answer pops out at you, read the question and your answer into your app. Start with the questions where answers easily come to mind.
- For the remaining questions, let your unfocused mind do the work. One approach: Each night before sleep, choose one question for your unfocused mind to work on. When you wake up, let your mind drift to this question for a few minutes before getting out of bed. If an answer comes, be ready to record it with a notepad or voice recording.
- Alternatively, try another method from the “bed, bath, bus” trilogy to utilize your unfocused mind. Set an intention for your unfocused mind to answer a particular question while you’re driving, riding public transportation, or taking a bath or shower.
Enjoy and Celebrate What Comes Naturally
Better self-knowledge of your instinctive strengths will help you become more confident about the value of those strengths, lean into them during challenging times, and save mental energy by doing what comes naturally. When we make our unconscious strengths conscious, we see more avenues for them to enhance our lives and performance.
We all tend to have hidden capabilities we take for granted or don’t recognize. These can be innate talents or aptitudes that you might undervalue precisely because they don’t require conscious effort, as we’ve explored here, or unconventional approaches you’ve been conditioned to view as weaknesses or quirks rather than strengths.
Life is more joyful when we can see how our daily activities are an expression of our strengths.
