What are your ”superpowers”?
🗡️ What are your superpowers, and when did you start developing them?
As a kid, I remember asking questions about a lot of stuff. What does this mean? And why is that? But why? So why? Too many questions to understand things… As you can imagine, I demanded a lot of time, and my curiosity was insatiable and probably tiring for people, though my mum got most of it. However, I know now I was also developing some of the “superpowers” I use today. One of them is my natural ability (and obsession) to try to read people and understand them. And, fun fact, when I started school at the age of 3 my teacher told my mum I could already read. The funny part was that nobody had taught me, I had learnt by asking thousands of questions like: “What does that sign say?”.
Years ago, even before the pandemic (which feels like another life), we started using this concept of superpowers - with Rob Pierre, Ed Ball, Yolande Battell, Marie Raimbert-Galtier and the rest of the team - and how much more rewarding it is to strengthen them instead of focusing on the “underpowers”. By our own definition, every person has skills or abilities that come unusually naturally to them: communication, memory, calculation, assertiveness, concentration, perseverance, caring… to name a few. ”Underpowers” is just the term I came up with to describe the skills or abilities that are less natural to us, to avoid using the word that starts with W.
Whether some of it is innate or not, we start developing these abilities much earlier than we realise. E.g. I started developing an interest in people, watching them, asking myself and others questions about them, trying to read their actions, their faces, the multiple whys behind them.
Then, you might have opportunities to strengthen them. In my case, working in a team, managing people, and leading big teams were some of the opportunities I had to become better at working with people. They allowed me to see and understand the many different ways people can be, see things from their perspective, understand their goals, aspirations, strengths and obstacles, and navigate both rewarding and difficult situations. Those are the ones that come to mind, but I’m sure there were many more in both my professional and personal life.
But beyond having those opportunities, you also need a desire to get better and, in an ideal world, a purpose for it. And you can only do that by acknowledging where you can improve: self-observation, feedback or reflection are just a few ways to understand and accept where you have room for growth. And then you can work on those areas: reading, getting help from others, practising new techniques.
Perhaps one way to discover your superpowers is to look further back, instead of just focusing on your current CV:
What did you naturally do before anyone paid you for it?
What were you endlessly curious about?
What did you do so much that you occasionally drove everyone around you mad?
So, what are YOUR superpowers?