The Table Briefing: Giftedness

By Darrell L. Bock and Kymberli M. Cook

[Darrell L. Bock is Senior Research Professor in New Testament Studies and Executive Director for Cultural Engagement at Dallas Theological Seminary in Dallas, Texas. Kymberli M. Cook is Assistant Director of the Hendricks Center and a PhD student in theological studies at Dallas Theological Seminary.]

“What should I do with my life?” is a question many young adults struggle to answer. Perhaps more haunting, older people often find themselves asking, “What should I have done with my life?” or “How do I use the time I have left?” Bill Hendricks, the Hendricks Center’s Executive Director for Christian Leadership, has long engaged these life questions as an author and vocational practitioner. He is one among many who utilize the System for Identifying Motivated Abilities, which attempts to capitalize on a particular phenomenon of success and satisfaction occurring at the unique intersection of an individual’s motivations and abilities. Springboarding off that system, Bill has developed a more accessible approach that he simply calls “giftedness discovery.” The Center regularly offers workshops that help individuals identify their personal giftedness, but it has also engaged the topic from a variety of perspectives on The Table podcast. This is one of the transformative processes the Center has developed to help people in their pursuit of leadership and flourishing. Here are some conversations that show what this involves.

Spiritual Gifts And Giftedness

Many people ask if this “giftedness” is another way of discussing spiritual gifts or attempt to clarify a distinction. Here, Darrell Bock and Bill Hendricks address that relationship:

Bock: Our topic is giftedness, and most people will think that might mean we’re going to talk about spiritual gifts and 1 Corinthians. My guess is that’s sort of right and sort of not right. Sort us out.

Hendricks: Let’s just start with the fact that whatever gifts we have are always from God, and I personally wince when I hear people talk about spiritual gifts and natural gifts because that somehow creates a hierarchy in people’s minds. At the end of the day, I think we’re talking about all the same stuff. God has endowed human beings with actual abilities and strengths and motivations to accomplish things that he wants done. Every single person in the world has their own unique form of giftedness. But it would be fair to say that when we talk about giftedness we may be in a broader array of categories than people tend to think about when they think about the topic of spiritual gifts and the Bible.

Bock: Correct.

Hendricks: In the New Testament passages we have lists of gifts, and none of these lists are identical, which should be our first clue that the lists are not exhaustive—they’re suggestive. It’s as if Paul’s saying we have a lot of kinds of people in this church. We have some teachers, we have some leaders, we have some administrators, we have some givers, and then there’s this catch-all for everybody else. Then we have just a lot of people that love to help. You still have to look inside an individual person to figure out how did they go about exercising the gift of administration. So when I use the term giftedness, I’m using it in a somewhat technical way, and I guess the simple definition that I’d give is that giftedness is a set of unique core strengths and natural motivations that you instinctively use to do things that you find satisfying and productive. It’s not just about what you can do, it’s about what you’re born to do, and what you frankly love to do.

Giftedness As A Luxury?

Another common question surrounding giftedness arises from a concern that the concept is only applicable in affluent or free environments where people have a measure of financial or political ability to determine their vocation and life direction. What good would such an exercise be for a person who has always had to work a subsistence farm to feed her family?

Bock: Let me go to another question that strikes me as we talk, and that is it’s all nice and good to be able to walk into an office and ask someone to help me find my giftedness. But that seems to be aimed at a certain kind of person and a certain kind of society that has a certain kind of freedom and opportunity to do something. What about the average guy out there and particularly the people who don’t live in a world as full of choice as some societies have?

Hendricks: I get asked that question a lot. I think it’s basically the question, “Bill, is giftedness just a luxury?” And my answer is, “It’s not a luxury; it’s a reality.” In other words, this is built into the nature of what it means to be a human being. The giftedness is there regardless of whether the environment favors its expression or not. So take the rice farmer in North Korea. That person has had no education probably, they’re working a fairly menial job, they may be starving; they still have a giftedness. It’s in there; nobody’s bothered to check out what it is. But what’s fascinating is that giftedness is irrepressible. You can’t keep it down.

It’s like in a swimming pool with a bunch of Ping-Pong balls; you can try to keep them underwater, but sooner or later they’re going to pop up, and giftedness is like that. Even in oppressive situations giftedness will out itself, and so I think about tribes out in the jungle or nomadic groups in the desert. Over time people start to realize this person’s exceptionally good at farming; their crops always seem to yield more. Meanwhile, this person over here is great at telling stories, and this lady over here is fantastic at cooking. This person here seems to have a knack for helping you process the questions you’re asking and is just wise. So people will slowly, but surely, figure out what some of people’s gifts are.

Now, having said that, I’d also point out that in our Declaration of Independence, the founders said that there are three inalienable rights, which means they’re rights given by the creator. You can’t just do away with them, and they are obviously life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What they meant by the pursuit of happiness was to do life, to pursue life in the paths that you felt God was leading you to. It’s inherent in order to pursue that you have freedom, and you will notice around the world throughout history where people have been given freedom to educate and then to exercise their gifts, you have flourishing. Where those freedoms are not present, you tend to end up with automatons and people that in many ways are becoming less human.

Bock: Yeah, a less humane environment really.

Hendricks: Absolutely. So not to get political about it, but I very much believe that wherever we can in this world, we ought to be praying for and we ought to be working for people’s freedom. I guess one other factor on this, Darrell, is that until about seventy-five years ago there really wasn’t a need in the world to figure out people’s giftedness. Because prior to that, virtually all the work of the world was done on farms and factories, and in those economies one strong back is as good as another. You can just plug and play people. But with the rise of knowledge work, you now discover that everybody adds value differently. Knowledge work is great because it accesses more of our personhood, and it gives more expression or possibilities for expression of that giftedness.

Now, we’re still, as I say, only seventy-five years into what amounts to a grand experiment. We still don’t know very much about how to educate knowledge workers, how to position them for effectiveness, how to organize them and manage them, how to incentivize them. We’ve just had endless experiments trying to figure this out as we go, and I think we’re making a little bit of progress. But it’s still very early in that transition—that the nature of work fundamentally changed back there. The locus of work moved from the land to the mind, and that effects the giftedness piece.

Bock: Another way to articulate this (I’m interested to hear your reaction to this) is to say you had your core agriculture and survival skills—the core things of life that people used to do—what we would perhaps refer to today technically as manufacturing kinds of jobs and that kind of thing. Now you have whole other areas; you said knowledge work. But I’m immediately left also with the whole group of services that people provide that aren’t manufacturing. They aren’t knowledge work, but they’re service work.

That’s different; there’s the whole realm, and certainly this has become big in our time, the whole realm of entertainment that is where a lot of people reside and where the arts tend to get expressed for example. Arts aren’t technically speaking manufacturing, they’re not services in one sense, and so part of what I think you’re suggesting is that when you move from a basic subsistence level of life with—where you either are growing things or designing things, manufacturing things . . . all these other characteristics and possibilities . . . open up the field for how giftedness can express itself.

Hendricks: Absolutely, and this all goes back to Genesis 1. God wants the world to flourish. The world on its own just gives us natural resources. Humans have to do something to transform those resources into something valuable. But it’s a big world, and every day we start to see just how much more God has built into the potential of this world to make it flourish.

Discovering An Individual’s Giftedness

This “set of unique core strengths and natural motivations” that makes up each person’s individual giftedness may not seem readily apparent. Yet Hendricks suggests it is much closer than it may seem. There is no need for inventories, a system of numbers, or personal retreats. Each person’s giftedness lies directly in their own life story.

Bock: So tell us a little bit about what the search for giftedness might involve. Let’s assume—put on your imaginary hat—I have walked in, and I’m twenty-five; so we’ve gone into the time machine, and I say to you, “I have no idea what I want to do with my life.” What happens from that moment? How do you help the person find themselves?

Hendricks: We have to start by creating this owner’s manual as I like to call it. If you’re going to work on a sophisticated piece of machinery like a car or a computer, you’d consult the owner’s manual first to find out what this machine is designed to do. What does it do best? What does it take to get it to do that? What are the pieces of equipment it needs around it to be most effective? Of course, there are also warning labels; whatever you do, don’t do this with this piece of equipment. That’s essentially what we create for a person, and the process is interesting. It’s not a test or a personality inventory; it’s an interview. It’s a little bit akin to a coach looking at game film from an athlete’s performance in a sport and looking at the different exercises that he’s doing in these different clips.

If the coach knows what they’re doing, they start to see little idiosyncrasies about how this person does whatever they do. In our case we go back in your life, and we ask you to come up with activities that you’ve done that you’ve enjoyed doing and done well. Remember, enjoyment is the tell-tale sign that your giftedness is involved, and these are often very simple and mundane things, like “I learned to ride a bike,” or “my brother and I built a treehouse in the backyard when I was seven,” or “I took a history exam in eighth grade and I just really got into it.”

Bock: Now that’s a strange person.

Hendricks: [Laughter] It takes all kinds to make a world.

Bock: That’s exactly right.

Hendricks: I get the person then to tell me how did you go about doing this? Give me all the rich detail, and it’s that detail that provides a lot of data to analyze. You discover that there’s actually all these dots that connect among the stories, and they form a pattern of behavior that this person comes back to again and again and again. That pattern’s very predictive in terms of career success and satisfaction. So armed with that owner’s manual, I’m in a position to say if this is what you’re wired to do, if this is what you’re born to do where out in the wide world of work are they paying people to do what you instinctively and naturally do, and frankly you’re going to do anyway. Why not get paid to do that if possible? That begins to suggest options that they can go and begin to explore.

Implications For The Church

While this process may be helpful for someone needing life or career coaching, it also has distinct implications for a Christian community’s health and service. Every group of people is a coalescence of a variety of different gifts (and dark sides to those gifts). Recognizing the phenomenon of giftedness at play allows communities to value individuals more deeply and enlightens them regarding the group’s interpersonal dynamics. Giftedness can also prove invaluable in parenting and the health of the home. Those parents who take note of their children’s motivations and abilities are better able to guide them through the difficult journey of determining their vocation as well as to avoid the pitfall of potentially shaming the child for the very thing they were gifted by God to do.

Beyond community health, giftedness also equips the church for more effective service. People become familiar with the certain abilities with which their specific community is equipped, and service becomes more effective because they can focus on their area of strengths and satisfaction rather than on “what is supposed to be done.” Even more, the community comes to see each person as the gift. They are better able to label work done outside the four walls of the church as true Christian service, for they recognize that God has gifted people in many ways, and they can celebrate the righ-teous ways their community members exercise those gifts. Finally, the area of giftedness discovery is itself a distinct field of need in which Christians could position themselves to harvest.

Hendricks: This whole issue of calling and giftedness is a tremendous opportunity for outreach. I say that because most people in the workplace are not in jobs that fit them, and we have all the statistics on this from Gallup, who since 2000 have been keeping track of what they call “employee engagement,” which means the extent to which somebody enjoys their job and feels an emotional connection to their job. The most recent statistics for 2012 were that 30 percent of people feel engaged in their work, but that means 70 percent don’t feel engaged. Fifty-two percent are what they called “unengaged,” which means, yeah, they go to work, but it’s just a job. Their heart’s not in it.

Bock: They’re earning money to do something else.

Hendricks: Yeah, but then 18 percent are what they call “actively disengaged,” which means they’re mad about it. They hate their job, and they actually undermine and sabotage the work that the engaged workers are doing. Now if that’s the case, it means that a lot of people who are already in churches and are already believers are probably in jobs that don’t fit them. It means that a lot of their friends and neighbors and coworkers are in that same boat. It’s never dawned on them that there’s some truth from Scripture that speaks into use of a person, why you’re here, what you should be doing for work and with your life. And we have this tremendous opportunity to speak into a known and felt need on behalf of people, because if you’re in a bad job fit, like you’re hating life, you may not even know that that’s the source of your stress or that it is the source of your conflict when you come home because you bring this distaste about your job into your family. It poisons your relationships, and you’re giving your kids a negative view of work as they watch you slug through every day. This is a tremendous opportunity for the church.

For Bill, the spiritually-gifted phenomenon of giftedness—being each person’s unique set of motivations and abilities—has great potential to change how believers view their own purpose and identity as well as provide wisdom for interacting with their children, their fellow congregation members, and their coworkers. If that is the case, an individual’s giftedness discovery is not simply a luxury. It can transform self-perception and communal health, regardless of choice in one’s job, and provides a unique (and opportune) contribution to our society.