Inventory Your Assets

Take an asset inventory, using the attached worksheets to lift your leverage-ability and vault your value-ability.

The first is a Business Strengths Evaluation Form, and the second is a Personal Talents and Abilities Checklist. These forms are by no means all encompassing, but they'll give you a good starting point to assess your strengths. Add anything you feel is important that might not appear on these lists.You can finish them in less than five minutes.

Next, use the worksheet to prioritize your personal and work strengths. Identify the changes you want to make to begin to leverage your strengths and vault your value-intrinsically (how you feel inside about you and your work), and extrinsically (to enhance the market and service value you bring to the workplace).

It's healthy to see your weaknesses not as faults but as areas to be leveraged with and through others.There isn't enough time in a dozen lifetimes to become good at everything. Michaelangelo didn't play the piano, and Mozart didn't paint ceilings. Rather than trying to become better in areas in which you aren't naturally gifted, why not use the rest of this lifetime to enjoy the process of becoming better at what you love?

Move toward opportunities that support your best talents, life skills, and success-abilities-and move away from people, careers, and environments that drain your life energy. Look for alliances with others who can 'pick you up' in the areas that aren't your strengths.

In an interdependent world, life is too interconnected to go it alone. If you pursue a path of finding a higher and better use for your talents and abilities, you'll make progress toward enhancing your market value. As you bring your strengths to the marketplace, you also boost your sense of intrinsic value. Take time to identify your best talents and strongest abilities, and answer these key questions:

• What is your most leverage-able asset?
• What can you do right now to jump-start your career, if you don't have any baggage from the past? What can't you do?

Wipe the slate clean-'zero base' your thinking. Start as if this were the first day of the rest of your career, and go forward from right here, right now.

• What can you do to command your highest market value and maximize your personal income?
• Where can you bring your best talents to bear to make the greatest difference?

Go outside of your normal box of operation and expand beyond your conditioned way of thinking. Go where you've never gone before.

It's possible that your highest and best value doesn't lie in your current line of work or in the career path you're currently travelling. You might be most valuable in a totally different industry or a different market. Or you may find that where you are right now is the right place to leverage your talents to the max. You'll discover this only if you look inside, up, down, and all around.

Two years ago, when I moved away from corporate consulting as my main source of income, I had to box up my client files and put them in the garage. The sight of them tugged at me, reminding me of the challenge of giving up the certainty and security of my six-figure consulting work in favor of a more uncertain future serving a wider entrepreneurial audience. Once the boxes were no longer in sight, I could look to the future with a 360-degree view and see all my options.

If you're very happy where you are right now-great! Take this time to think beyond where you are today, where you'd like to go, and what you'd like to do next. Don't be weighed down or held back by what you don't know or think you don't have. The 'how' will emerge from the 'what' and 'why' once you identify your best talents and see your most leverage-able skills and abilities.

My friend Harvey Schoof is a consultant who uses an instrument called the Value Profile. This instrument can measure your intrinsic and extrinsic values with the precision of a thermometer measuring temperature. It's a profound and enlightening experience to see how your values influence your life's choices and career satisfaction. If your work is out of alignment with your highest values, talents, and abilities, you'll never be able to do your best or be your best.

When assessing their skills, talents, and abilities, most people ask themselves the age-old question, 'What do I want to be and do when I grow up?' Harvey says this is very limiting. It frames our past-where we've been and what we've done up until now-as a failed experiment in trying to find ourselves. Harvey suggests a better question: 'What do I want to do next?' He says this question reframes the past, eliminates a lot of the baggage that we hold onto (like my corporate client files), and frees us up to see the past as prologue to - and preparation for - the present. Then we can view our present, where we are right now, as ground zero, the launching pad for our next mission.

Once you determine your strengths and areas of greatest value, ask yourself,

• What would I like (or love) to do next?
• What will be the next chapter to my life story that I will write?

This puts your past, present, and future back in your control.

Then think about how your current talents, business skills, and success-abilities (life skills) can be leveraged to provide the thrust for liftoff. Whether your next step is a career promotion or advancement in your company, a new job in a completely new industry, or a new and improved strategy for your own business, this process will serve you well. Turning your natural talents, life skills and success-abilities into leverage points will make you more marketable, profitable, valuable, and successful-today, tomorrow, and for life.

Former President Jimmy Carter once said, 'I have a lot of unfulfilled ambitions. Our primary purpose in our golden years is not just to stay alive as long as we can, but to savor every opportunity for pleasure, excitement, adventure, and fulfillment. We have an unprecedented degree of freedom to choose what we want to do-and what we don't want to do. We have an opportunity to build on our past experiences and do exciting and challenging and adventurous and unpredictable and gratifying things. We have a chance to heal wounds that might have existed between us and other people. We have an opporunity to expand the ties of understanding with the people we love most.'

The bottom line: Start today by expanding 'the ties of understanding' with the one person in your life you must love and value first and foremost-you! Reach out to others who can help you uncover, discover, and appreciate your unique talents and abilities. Take stock today. Find your USP-unique special person-inside. Go to that place in you that holds the secret to your special purpose, and allow it to speak to you as only it can. Listen to it, and act on it. Leverage your talents and skills, and watch as you begin to vault your value-ability.

Rate yourself in the following key business skills:

Today's Date: ________

_____ 1. Prospecting: sifting through large numbers of people or businesses to find the ideal or best candidates for your products, services, issue, or cause

_____ 2. Marketing: building relationships and benefit bridges to attract your ideal prospects

_____ 3. Communicating: using every medium to send a message that people will hear and act on

_____ 4. Getting appointments: getting face-to-face meetings with people who are ready to buy or who can further your career path

_____5. Qualifying: assessing a person's interest, state of dissatisfaction, and readiness to make a decision and take action

_____6. Gaining trust and credibility: earning respect, developing professional rapport, being believable and reliable

____7. Questioning: the master business skill-the ability to investigate, find facts, and elicit the important wants and needs of another person to determine how you can be of service

_____8. Demonstrating competence: presenting solutions and benefits to solve people's problems; recommending an appropriate course of action that results in a win-win outcome for all parties involved

_____9. Preventing objections: answering questions, handling concerns, disarming resistance, and resolving issues as an adviser, not an adversary

_____ 10. Obtaining commitment: asking for and receiving agreement from another person to proceed with your recommendation(s) and/or course of action

_____ 11. Following up: delivery and service; reinforcing and expanding your relationships; implementing an ongoing, value-added service commitment to maximize leverage-ability

_____ 12. Getting referrals: obtaining continuous introductions to qualified new prospects from clients and centers of influence

_____ 13. Managing business: being able to balance and manage time and activities necessary to run a profitable business

_____ 14. Using technology: harnessing this power to serve you, rather than becoming a servant and slave to it; using E-mail and the Internet to further your business and career

Using the same 1 - 5 scale, rate your personal attributes:

Rating of My Business Strengths

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Rating of My Personal Strengths

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

What I discovered about myself:

What was revealed that will help me is:

Skill areas that are sources of confidence to me:

Areas in which I'll make the first improvements or enhancements:

Minor shifts that will greatly improve my effectiveness:

What I'll do starting today to move to my next level of mastery:

How I'll use my strengths to my advantage:

• Business _____________________________________________________________

• Personal _____________________________________________________________

Areas I want to improve:

Areas in which I'll focus my development:

Four of my important personal and professional improvement goals:

Four good ideas I have: