Put Your Strengths to Work

Are you unhappy in your job? You're not alone. Four out of five people quizzed in a CareerBuilder.com survey are unhappy at work—that's 84 percent of the nation's workforce!

Business expert and best-selling author Marcus Buckingham has helped millions of people reach new levels of success and happiness at work—including employees at Coca-Cola, Gap and Microsoft—with his radical "strengths training" approach. His key to success is simple: Stop spending so much time trying to fix your weaknesses. Instead, focus on what makes you special and unique. "A strength is an activity that makes you feel strong," he says. "If you want to know what your strength is, you've got to pay attention to how you feel. It feels like focus. It feels like concentration. You feel invigorated. Energized."

Another way to think of strengths training is to look at it as a report card. When a child comes home with a report card, Marcus says most parents would focus more on an F than an A. Really, they should give more attention to the A. "You grow the most in the area where you already show some natural advantage, some natural area of talent or strength or passion. That's where you start," Marcus says.

Marcus says being dissatisfied with work can filter into other areas of your life. "Your family [and] people that are the most important to you in your life are the ones that hurt," he says. "If you're going to win at life—if any of you or any of us are going to win at life—we've got to flip that switch."