Do you find yourself thinking €If only I had a great figure like Jennifer Lopez, my life would be so much better.€ €If only I had the charm and wit of Jennifer Aniston, I could be a successful actress.€ €If only I was more like Mark Zuckerberg, I could be rich and successful and create the next Facebook.€ €If only I got into Yale, I could be the most successful lawyer?€ Stop! Use what you have and make it great.

But what do you have? You have talents and strengths that separate you from your friends, that make you unique, that give you a certain aura. You have a natural ability within you to create something powerful and successful. Everybody is born with an innate talent. Most people don't realize it. Those that do, harness and strengthen that talent and create success, recognition, power and wealth with it.

So what is your talent? I just read a book called €Now, Discover Your Strengths€, by Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton. They define talent as any recurring pattern of thought, feeling or behavior that can be productively applied. Some of the talents they defined are: inquisitive, charming, persistent, responsible, obstinate, dyslexic. All of these qualities can be productively applied. Yes, even obstinacy and dyslexia. Someone who is obstinate can become a very successful salesperson or lawyer in a courtroom because their talent is to stick to their guns when faced with overwhelming resistance. Dyslexia can cause a person to use language that is direct and straightforward and not overbearing and flooded with long and complicated words. As pointed out in the book David Boies -- a celebrated trial attorney and one of the best litigators in the United States -- uses dyslexia to his advantage. He was recruited as counsel for the US Government's antitrust suit against Microsoft. His dyslexia causes him to avoid using long and complicated words.  He knows what these words mean, but doesn't use them in his arguments because he's afraid that he will mispronounce them. This need to rely on simple words makes his arguments easy to follow. The authors point out that "for David Boies, dyslexia is a talent because he has figured out a way to apply this recurring pattern productively, and by combining it with knowledge and skills, to turn it into a strength."

Here are some key characteristics that define your talents:
What is your spontaneous reaction to a situation, event, crisis, or conversation. How do you react? Are you nurturing, critical, emotional, or apathetic?
Talents create yearnings. What do you want to do on a daily basis and why?
When talent is present it causes rapid learning. Because you are talented at something, you learn something at a much more rapid speed. You cannot wait to get the next assignment. You read; you research; you seek people that have knowledge in the same field and you apply yourself far beyond normal expectation.
You feel a strong satisfaction when using your talent. It feels good.

Using the above list you should be able to find your natural talents. If you feel stuck and unsure about your talents, don't worry. You have been conditioned by society to hone in on your weaknesses. As the authors of €Now, Discover your Strengths€ point out "unfortunately, most of us have little sense of our talents and strengths. Instead, guided by our parents, our teachers, our managers and psychology's fascination with pathology, we become experts in our weaknesses and spend our lives trying to repair these flaws, while our strengths lie dormant and neglected."

The problem is that focus expands. If we focus on our weaknesses, we get more weakness? Here were a couple of findings from the studies Buckingham and Clifton conducted:
Parents were asked which grade they would spend the most time discussing with their child if they came home with the following report card: A in English, A in Social Studies, C in Biology, F in Algebra. The results: 77% of the parents said they would spend the most time discussing the failed Algebra grade.
The authors did a search to determine how many studies have been done on depression. They found more than 40,000 studies on depression, vs. only about 40 studies that had been conducted on joy and fulfillment.

While you hone in on your talents, here are a few ideas on how to deal with your weaknesses. A weakness is "anything that gets in the way of excellent performance." Here are four strategies to manage weaknesses as you strive to build your life around your strengths:
1.Hunker down and get a little better at it (whatever the weakness is). You know you have to pass your French class to graduate High School. So just hunker down and do the work. Keeping your focus on what lies ahead will help get you through the tough times.
2.Design a support system or hire a Life Coach who will help you with your weaknesses and keep you motivated and focused.
3.Use one of your strongest themes to overwhelm your weakness.
4.Find a friend, parent or coach to help you handle the areas that are not strengths of yours.

Stop focusing on the €if only€, instead find your own talents. Use your talents to create the life that you want. Once you know your talents, start dreaming your own personal dream so that someday someone else will say €if only I can be like you.€