Looking for Strengths

Time to dust off the cobwebs and get this blog back on track. Quick update on my life:

- graduated from the U of A with a BSc in Mechanical Engineering
- travelled with Luke and Nevin for 3 months in Thailand
- currently living in Calgary with my brother, Jeff, and Nevin and Dan
- working downtown for ConocoPhillips in the Foothills Drilling department

I'm two weeks into my new job and the excitement level is still high even if I haven't done much yet. My boss has been on vacation the whole time but he has given me one task already. Find my strengths. I'm reading a book his secretary gave me called "Now, Discover Your Strengths". It's a good read, gets you to think a bit about what you do best and actually makes you eager to work on them to improve your life. We'll see what comes of it when I finish the book and tell him what I've found. Here's a list I'm putting together of what I think my "talents" are...not strengths. The book defines strengths as a combination of talent, knowledge, and skill. The first step is to identify talents and then you can work on the knowledge and skill part after.

Quickly learning
- Can remember facts after only hearing once (trouble with multiple instructions)
-- Comes through when writing tests, don't have to study much, I remember almost everything that was said during the whole course
- Photographic memory
-- Often picture in my mind the page in the book where a certain piece of information was written when I learned it
- Especially good with mental visualization
-- Can picture physical things and actions in my mind
-- Can also add physics to mental images (ex. How would gravity/friction/wind affect the process?)
- Learned to listen to my intuition/gut feelings
-- Found this when I was a lifeguard (I would get a weird feeling from something that I saw out of the corner of my eye/heard amongst the noise that was just out of place. Couple times let me act on a rescue before the person was really in trouble.)
-- Now I can enter a room, feel something is out of place, and then quickly identify what that is.
- Very observant
-- Often catch "errors" in movies where something small was changed from scene to scene. (Again kind of a gut feeling thing.)
Computer programs
- Finding out how they work
- Learning shortcuts
- Customizing (new reports, ways of organizing data)
- Good at aesthetics (good looking documents, graphs, presentations)
- Examples:
-- Excel
-- WellView
-- Business Objects
Other computer talents
- Video editing
- Creating webpages (my blogs)
- Quickly organizing files/folders
Teaching
- Others have often commented on my lessons
- Can relate to different audiences and their frustrations
- Like to use analogies, can think of them quickly
- Best at teaching math, computer, engineering topics
Athletics (not professional level)
- Pick up new sports quickly
- Begin to see strategy early
- Very determined to stay in good shape (allows me to do more)

I'm not saying that this list is complete or even accurate. They are just some things that I think I do well and that might be able to help me a lot in the work place. It's good to be back people.