The Larsen Group

Circles of Change:  Conversations with Dr. Zara Larsen

 on Change Leadership and Career Fulfillment

April 13, 2008

“Revealing Your Wiring for Passion to Purpose”

Guest:  Marlys Hanson, Career and Knowledge Work Consultant, Author

Anchoring Points:

1. Identifying the behavior patterns in your life and work can help you recognize, appreciate AND celebrate the power of your motivated abilities – how you are wired – and leverage these insights for more accurate life and career decisions. 
2. Our behavior patterns – not so much our personality traits, skills and competencies – in the end influence our actions and thus our performance.
3. This is not a matter of taking off the rose colored glasses or changing the lenses.  You can’t.  But, you can become very aware of those glasses.
4. Companies/coaches often rely upon instruments to help you understand yourself better.  Conventional assessments are preference based, as you answer questions by choosing within a range of options, or rank items within a cluster of choices.  Respondents can “game” or bias their answers.
5. Our work is based on retelling your stories and revealing your patterns or recurring themes – your innate wiring – which is a unique system of motivated abilities, not a list of attributes with some measures of strength or relevancy compared to the norm, “typical people like you”. 
6. Your MAP (motivated abilities pattern) predicts your behavior, and the “why” of your priorities and goals.  Key dimensions are:
• Enduring:  Appears quite early in life and remains constant.  Values and lifestyle change, but not your essence – what you want to achieve as a result of your efforts.
• Pervasive:  Your MAP expresses itself somewhere in your life, regardless of the environment or circumstances.  If not at work, it surfaces outside of work.  Challenge automatically triggers it.  Only when we operate per our MAPs do we find meaning and purpose.
• Motivating:  Working to your MAP brings energy, engagement with ease.  You love what you do.  You “fit”.
• Explanatory:  Discovering the reasons behind behavior, priorities and goals, lends insight for career direction, and for organizations, more effective recruiting, selection, hiring and promotion decisions.

Additional thoughts from Dr. Zara Larsen:

1. You can’t talk yourself out of what you behave yourself into.
2. Talent leadership in this day and age should not be about fitting round pegs in round holes, or reshaping square pegs so they fit into round holes.  This is about allowing and in fact creating a place for all sorts of shapes and sizes – motivate abilities patterns.