The 'Good At / Enjoy Doing' exercise

taken from "How to win from the start" by David Royston-Lee

This model is useful to use when you are initially looking at managing your career.

  1. Naturally when looking at what you want to do the box where you are both ‘good at’ and ‘enjoy doing’ is where you want to spend most of your time!
  2. The Box ‘good at’, ‘don’t enjoy’ are areas where at one point in time you ‘did enjoy’ but the fascination has gone out of doing that task through over use, and it has become like turning a wheel. This is often also an area where you become less adept, and you become prone to making mistakes the more that you have to ‘turn that wheel’. (Commonly if you stay with an organisation for some time you become known for doing particular tasks well, and if you are not careful you become ‘stuck’ in a particular role.)
  3. The box ‘don’t enjoy’, ‘bad at’ (if we are being cynical!) is commonly identified in organisations as your ‘development area’ when it comes to appraisal time! Often people are faced with pouring all their energy from ‘1’ into ‘3’ to get just above the line into ‘2’. This is a trap which is best avoided if at all possible. There is one good thing about this area – you may find that something you thought was a weakness actually becomes strength.
  4. The ‘bad at’, ‘enjoy doing’ is, in a sense, your real development area, moving into something where you are interested in developing your skills.