Discover your Superpower
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Insights from Jens Heitland's Leadership Bootcamp
Understanding and leveraging your unique strengths can set you apart both personally and professionally. Jens Heitland, a renowned leadership expert, shares invaluable insights on discovering your superpower in a recent Leadership Bootcamp session. Here's how you can uncover and harness your innate abilities to achieve success and fulfillment.
What is a Superpower?
A superpower is a natural strength or talent that requires no extra energy from you. It's something you do effortlessly and excel at without conscious effort. Identifying this superpower is crucial because it allows you to focus on what you do best, thereby maximizing your potential.
Jens Heitland's Approach to Finding Your Superpower
Jens emphasizes the importance of self-reflection and seeking feedback from those who know you well. He suggests starting with a personal reflection on your life experiences, from childhood to the present, to identify recurring patterns and activities that highlight your strengths.
Steps to Discover Your Superpower:
Reflect on Past Experiences: Look back at your life and identify moments when you felt most engaged and successful. What were you doing? Who were you helping? These instances often point to your natural strengths.
Seek Feedback: Ask family members, friends, and colleagues what they believe your superpower is. Their insights can provide valuable perspectives that you might have overlooked.
Analyze and Connect: Use a structured approach, like Jens' canvas method, to link your past activities and behaviors to potential superpowers. This helps in creating a clear picture of your unique strengths.
Real-Life Example: Jens' Journey
Jens shares a personal story from his childhood, where he naturally took on the role of integrating a new classmate who didn't speak the local language. This early inclination towards helping and connecting people became a significant part of his superpower. Throughout his career, he continued to bring people together, whether organizing football games or building effective teams at work.
Applying Your Superpower
Once you've identified your superpower, the next step is to leverage it in your personal and professional life. For Jens, this meant creating a podcast network that connects guests and fosters collaboration. By naturally doing what he excels at, he has built a thriving community and facilitated numerous successful partnerships.
Watch the Video of the Live Leadership Bootcamp here
Discovering your superpower is a transformative process that can enhance your career and personal life. By reflecting on your experiences, seeking feedback, and consciously applying your strengths, you can unlock your full potential. As Jens Heitland's insights show, understanding and utilizing your superpower can lead to greater satisfaction and success.
Start your journey today and discover the superpower that will propel you towards your goals. Remember, the key is to first understand yourself, then share your discoveries with others to gain deeper insights. Your superpower is waiting to be uncovered – take the first step now.
Transcript of the video:
So superpower is the thing for yourself. That is not taking any single energy from you. I always say, if you know your superpower, this is the most valuable thing for yourself because that's a thing you're naturally good at. And I ask quite often this question, so what is your superpower?
I ask this for example today in the morning to a very old friend. I asked him, what is your superpower? And we know each other for a long time. I've never asked him that question. And he didn't know. He is extremely successful in what he's doing, but he does not know what his superpower is.
And he thanked me afterwards for asking this question. So how do we get into superpower? We have two, two things. I always use this chart to enable you to find it. From childhood to today, there are a couple of things in your life which you have done, which you have seen, which you have experienced, which help you to find out.
Of course you can do this afterwards. If you have filled out this canvas, you can ask family members, you can ask brother, sister, siblings. You can ask mother, father, grandfather's friends who know you for quite a while, what they believe your superpower is. First, do it for yourself because it helps you to go deeper into that.
So what do we have in my examples? Here I go a little bit more into my superpower, just to give you an example.
So take care of other people. So an activity when I was in the first school, which is called primary school in Germany. I took care of people who are. Not obvious connected to the group. So I spent time in trying to integrate people into a group, into the class. People who came and moved into the city and haven't been connected to the rest of the class.
It's always difficult for people, or I still remember vividly, I'm not sure if he was Chinese or Japanese, definitely Asian. He moved with his family and they came when I think we were like seven, eight years old and he barely spoke German. So he needed someone who spent time with him and onboards him into the society.
So we spent a lot of time together and I tried to bring him into my friendships and really took care of him. So this is an example I did early on in, in childhood. And then as I grow I organized football.
The football gathering Hey let's go out doing something after school. Let's meet for playing football. So I was always the trigger of organizing this, getting everyone on board and as well, bringing people in that are not connected. Then of course, both my first team in a job, so I started working on construction sites and when I was starting working on construction sites as better, you work together in a bigger company on construction site.
If you need to move things quickly with the demand of finishing things on a construction site as better, you work together as more, you are a team as better than it is. So I found very quickly that hey, if we work together, if we enjoy working together, it's way easier and it way more fun. So I was organizing this things.
And then as well, connecting friends who benefit
each other. So that was another thing, and I still do this on a daily basis, connecting people together I'm doing this naturally. So this all topics which helps you to understand.
So my superpower, what I found out is connecting people, bringing people together, and helping people. So how do I utilize this and what I'm doing. One thing today, what I'm doing, I have a, a, a podcast, and within this podcast network, I'm building a community around the podcast guests. So it's guests only, it's only people who have been on my podcast.
I'm connecting all of them together. And the basic function is WhatsApp group. The fascinating thing of that is I just do this naturally. I am saying, Hey, you should talk to this person because you might be beneficial to each other. You are talking about the same topic. Maybe you could help each other.
And there are people who have been building businesses together. There have been people who have worked together. They're like client relationships with each other. I just heard the other day that someone has rented out his holiday house for, I think it was like three or four people inside of the WhatsApp group, which is fascinating.
So that just gives you an example of my superpower, and you for sure have a superpower. Whatever it is you, this will help you to find it out. And then if we just link this two below, I'm just changing the color here.
So if you then link to what were the behaviors that are connecting to that activities. So here, for example, if we take care of other people integrating, for example, the Asian person, it was listening, so I listened. And seeing some, seeing someone struggle. So just being there, and this sounds Like business thinking.
Of course I'm formulating that to you that it makes sense from a business perspective as a seven, eight year old boy, you're not thinking about these things. You're just like, do I like this person? Do I not like this person? And that's almost it. Do I want to play with that person? Does it make fun to, to be connected to that person?
It's not that you're thinking, Hey, this person is struggling. I want to help them. But it's also the environment, how you grew up, how your parents treated you, how the parents grew you up. So there's a lot connected to that as well, especially early on then if we look into the football team, it was bringing people into the game.
So in, in this case, it was, there are a couple of people who have not been connected to this. There, they wanted to play football, but they have never been asked. So I was bringing people in. Who have not been asked to do that. So you see there's already, obviously I've done this a couple of times, so I know exactly what my superpower is.
And for me it's quite easy to formulate a lot of things into this. But for you, it's most probably struggling the first couple of times to find out what it is. So go deeper into this, and if we just take the last one here is build, building. My first team at a job. It was a topic around diversity.
I have seen that people are good at certain things. So how do we combine, again our superpowers and on a smaller level, from a, from an action perspective, how do we combine this, that it helps us to be more efficient in what we are doing? So use this canvas for yourself. Find out your superpower.
Do it first alone. I really encourage you to do that alone. Then share it with people you love. That's the easiest level. Share it with people and maybe not share it straight away. Just ask them, what do you think my superpower is? And listen to what they're saying. Try to ask them a couple of questions.
How did you get to that example? Why do you think that is my superpower? I often hear when you talk to your parents that they can tell you a hundred percent what your superpower is, but they have never told you. So having that conversation with family members with best friends is fascinating. And it's a good conversation started as well.
If you do this with your teams, so if you do this with your co-founders, hey, what is your superpower? How can we combine our superpowers? Has our superpower, something to do with our business? Which of course is then the ultimate opportunity for you.