Leading‎‎‏‏‎ ‎with Your God-Given Talents | An Interview with Dustin Peterson

This is a rebroadcast. The episode originally ran in December 2018. 

Dustin Peterson was raised in Dallas, Texas, and served a mission in the Puerto Rico San Juan Mission. He graduated from BYU-Idaho in Communications where he met his beautiful wife and fellow Texan, Samye Martino, and later completed a Master's degree in Educational Leadership at Indiana University. Dustin has trained and coached executives and leaders at a variety of organizations. He is currently the founder and CEO of Proof Leadership Group, a career coach, and the author of Talented: Discovering and Using Your God-given Talents to Find More Joy in Life and RESET: How to Get Paid and Love What You Do.

Dustin lives in Houston with his wife and four kids and serves as the branch president of a Spanish unit in the Friendswood Texas Stake. He has previously served in a stake presidency, on a high council, and as an early morning seminary teacher. He loves bacon, Dallas sports teams, and is a believer that everyone has a God-given superpower! In this podcast, Dustin talks about why we often believe we don't have talents, and how to identify and put our talents to work to bless those we lead and serve.

Highlights

8:00 Calling to the Stake Presidency

10:10 Talents: People believe they don’t have them and don’t know how to identify them; helping people identify their talents is a tremendous gift

11:35 Identifying talents first allows us to magnify them

12:20 Talents are superpowers. They are powerful skills that make you unique.

14:30 Men are that they might have joy (2 Nephi 2:25)

15:10 Parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30)

* Every person has talents (verse 15)

* You can gain more talents (verse 15)

* Talents lead to joy (verse 21)

* When we are afraid, we tend to hide our talents (verse 25)

* Everyone that uses their talents gets more (verse 29)

* Those who bury them have them taken away (verse 29)

16:30 Elders Quorum discussion of talents vs. 6th-grade class discussion of talents

19:45 The Broken Paradigm: What’s the problem with identifying our talents? Our mindsets

* Deficit perspective: we identify our weaknesses

* (22:30) Scarcity belief: a few people have talents and the rest are left behind

* (25:30) Humility complex: we overvalue humility when it comes to talent and talk ourselves out of our own talents

28:00 The secret is to be grateful.

29:00 How do we identify our talents?

* Definition: Things you do naturally, consistently well. Think energy.

* Skills are transferable and can be taught; talents are innate, energizing, and can be developed; a sign of talent is that it is instinctual

* 33:50 Talents energize and makes us feel good; we can become highly skilled at a weakness

* 34:20 What moments in my calling do I feel energized in?

* 36:00 God knows our talents and if we use our talents to serve, we will get where we need to be

* 36:30 Diversify your perspective on talents; talents come in three varieties, but we only give respect to “doing” talents

* Doing: arranging, organizing, developing, communicating, writing

* Thinking: connecting, influencing, positivity, relating, empathy

* Feeling: ideating, inputting information, learning, analyzing

41:30 What do you do when you don’t have a talent in a certain area? God expects us to develop all of these talents

42:15 Examples of talents that are easy to identify, and talents that are more difficult to notice

* Easy: being a good athlete, gardening, singing, dancing, playing a musical instrument, drawing, painting, sculpting, cooking, baking, writing, public speaking, teaching, acting, composing songs, sewing,