Unveil Hidden Powers: Find and Use Your Special Sauce

It’s hard for us to see our own strengths or to reveal our own internal processes. As humans, we’re just not great at uncovering the things we do easily or naturally. We tend to think that what's easy for us is easy for everyone else too, which leads to minimizing our strengths. And, we tend to overlook the steps we took internally to solve problems or overcome challenges because we’ve been doing those very things for so long. We might not be aware of our process, and if we are, we assume everyone else does the same thing too.

As a brain coach who helps teens and adults reach their potential, I thrive on helping people uncover their strengths and internal processes. I call this combo their “special sauce” and have an exercise that I walk them through to find it. The beauty of this exercise is that it takes an accomplishment from their own life and gives them a chance to break it apart a bit to identify what they did to achieve it and how those same steps could be applied to other goals or dreams.

Success Stories

I did this exercise with several clients last week. Despite two of them identifying athletic accomplishments as their biggest achievements, their "special sauces" were entirely different. One had a special sauce of discipline, consistency, and teamwork, while the other emphasized goal setting, resilience, and self-belief. This personalized approach reveals that each person has a unique set of strengths that, once identified, can be applied to any new goal.

For the individual whose special sauce is made up of discipline, consistency, and teamwork, we were able to see how she could use those three things to help with a 5-year goal that she’d been stuck on for a while: Establish a leadership academy within her organization to train and mentor the next generation of female leaders, with a target of promoting 30% of graduates to executive roles within five years. While this goal had previously been broken down into quarterly, monthly, and weekly goals, she wasn’t seeing the progress she desired. We were able to identify how discipline, consistency, and teamwork could help her, and we modified the overall goal plan to incorporate each.

We realized that she was often pulled off track from the leadership academy development and spent time focused on less meaningful projects. Once identified, we minimized her distractions, changed what meetings she attended, and reduced daily interruptions (discipline). We also found that there was more she could be doing on a weekly and daily basis to mentor female leaders and added those things to her goal sheet (consistency). Finally, we realized that she wasn’t really utilizing her team to build this academy and instead, was trying to do everything by herself. She quickly included her admin staff in the workload and delegated tasks to colleagues who were eagerly standing by and wanted to be a part of this project (teamwork).

In contrast, for the individual whose special sauce is made up of goal setting, resilience, and self-belief, we found that he was using goal setting to help achieve his annual goal (attend at least two industry conferences and join three professional networking groups within the next year to build connections and learn about new job opportunities), but he wasn’t using resilience or self-belief. Once we discovered how he didn’t think he deserved to be at these events, we were able to build his resilience muscle through accountability and change his self-belief through mindset work so that his secret sauce could elevate him to the next level.

Here's How It Works:

1. Reflect and Write: Start by writing about your achievement in detail. What’s a great life achievement you’ve accomplished? What is it, and why is it so important to you? This step helps you recognize and appreciate your success.
2. Identify Key Actions: Next, pinpoint the three main things you did to achieve this success. These are the critical actions you took, without which your achievement wouldn't have been possible. Writing out this list helps you understand the specific behaviors and strategies that led to your success.
3. Analyze and Apply: Think about how these three key actions – your unique "special sauce" – contributed to your success. Finally, explore how these same strategies can be applied to other areas of your life. Whether it's academic goals, personal development, or future aspirations, knowing your "special sauce" empowers you to tackle any challenge with confidence.

Identifying and understanding your "special sauce" can empower you to achieve your goals by leveraging your unique strengths. By reflecting on past achievements and the actions that led to success, you can apply these strategies to various aspects of your life, enhancing your ability to overcome challenges and reach your potential.