Core talents

This assessment gauges your natural talent, intrinsic motivation, and development potential based on how you liked to play as a child.

ASSESSMENTS

10/2/20234 min read

Introduction

The assessment of Core Talents identifies your true potential, inherent strengths, limitations, and talents based on your childhood interests and activities. By understanding your Core Talents, you can make informed decisions about your career paths, find your dream job, and live a more content life by focusing on your strengths and working in the flow.

A child's play reveals much

What did you like to play (with) when you were a child?

The assessment of Core Talents involves two main steps.

  1. The first step is completing an online questionnaire, which triggers childhood memories and helps you recall their favorite activities and toys from ages 4 to 12.

  2. The second step is an in-depth interview with a Core Talents analyst. During this interview, childhood memories are further explored, and the analyst helps connect these memories to your true potential and talents. Combining the questionnaire and the interview allows for a comprehensive analysis of your Core Talents.

The activities and toys I enjoyed as a child reflect my Core Talents. For example, my childhood love for playing board games demonstrates my Core Talent for strategy and competitiveness. Through playing board games, I developed skills in strategic planning, problem-solving, and working towards goals. Similarly, my passion for building treehouses and constructing miniature boats and airplanes showcases my Core Talent for structure and organization. These activities required attention to detail, spatial thinking, and the ability to create order. Connecting my childhood interests to my current strengths clarifies how Core Talents can shape an individual's skills and preferences.

Now, it gets interesting.

23 Core Talents

Core Talents combine an individual's character, potential, and intrinsic motivation. A Core Talent is the combination of three building blocks:

1. Your character, or who you are, is your nature. It is a feature of your personality.

2. Your potential is what you can accomplish if you have the required physical and mental abilities, the appropriate training, and enough practice.

3. Your desire, need, and what you genuinely like and love doing are all examples of your intrinsic motivation.

The exercise reveals a unique combination of 23 Core Talents:

  • Six around emotional talents on an individual level and a group level

  • Two around rationality

  • Three around commerciality

  • Three around putting yourself in the spotlight, etc.

They are clustered into strategy, competitiveness, empathy, structure, organization, etc., and are labeled strong, moderate, or weak.

Ninety-four billion different combinations of Core Talents are possible. Every person is thus unique and cannot be summed up in a type or a box, and the Core Talents analysis recognizes this.

Core Talents
Core Talents

Your child's play is your guide to flow.

In the second interview with Core Talents analyst Megan, we extensively discussed my life choices, studies, work history, hobbies, and current tasks and responsibilities.

Flow has been my middle name these past years. I focus on what I like to do and can do very well. Troubleshooting, problem-solving, strategic planning, taking initiative, entrepreneurship, creating order, generating a vision, working with a team toward goals, and gaining broad and deep knowledge are some of my Core Talents. I get more energy, better results, and increased self-development using these. Energy drainers (= what I dislike and cannot do well), such as knowledge transfer, are easily identified and mitigated.

This is now; it used to be different.

Getting into this current flow state was a long and instinctual process. Gradually, I learned to lean more into what I loved doing and eliminated the energy drainers, but this took many, many years. I was bored out of my skull at work, sometimes frustrated, impatient, self-demanding, and eager because I was doing stuff I didn't like or could not do well. I wish I had known about my Core Talents a few decades ago.

The origin and validity of the Core Talents assessment

In the 1990s, Belgian Danielle Krekels noticed in in-depth interviews with engineers and scientists that most of them liked to play with Lego or Meccano when they were little. Daniëlle interviewed 12,000 engineers and researchers and established the correlation between a child's play and their talents.

In 2015, the questionnaire had a high-reliability index of 84, outperforming the MBTI and comparable to the Big Five personality test. This indicates that the assessment consistently measures Core Talents accurately.

What makes this a unique assessment?

  • It is not a self-evaluation. "What do you like to do?" or "What are you excellent at?" but starts with your natural interests.

  • The time frame during which the Core Talents are identified (between the ages of 4 and approximately 12 years) is much longer. The findings are not based on a random moment of observation.

  • The system is language-, culture-, and environment-independent.

  • It's not about what you want to accomplish but about what you did in a period uncolored by ambitions, circumstances, and parental wishes.

  • All the strong Core Talents rise to the top, as do the long-standing but somewhat undeveloped Core Talents.

  • Each Core Talent profile is valuable and offers unique opportunities.

  • The questionnaire stimulates the prefrontal brain, providing wonder, understanding, and a desire for constructive action.

  • It is beneficial for a lifetime and daily (work, private, relationships, growth, and development)

Why do you need this?

What if you could use your insights into your strong Core Talents to discover your dream job? Consider how you may live a more content life by focusing on your strengths and spending more time working in the flow, leaving you with more energy at the end of the day.

Understanding your Core Talents can positively guide your life's major decisions and developmental moments.

What are you waiting for to find out what makes you tick? Choose your Core Talents-certified analyst here.