5 Steps to Discovering Your Encodings

Discovering your encodings (your innate characteristics, capabilities, and deepest capacities) continues throughout your lifetime. Sometimes new encodings emerge due to life experiences and events even later in life.

Here are some tips to help you begin identifying the unique way God has “wired” you.

1. Understand that you’re looking for capacities, not competencies.
Begin by reframing your thinking. Stop asking what you’re good at and start asking what you’re encoded for. Encodings are capacities we have that are only discovered through the intrinsic experiences of life. They cannot be trained. An encoding is not a learned skill but is an emerging reality and passion. An example would be the ability to play an instrument, paint, sing, or write with little or no education or training…the pianist who “plays by ear,” the painter who picks up a brush and creates something surprisingly beautiful, or singer whose untrained voice brings you to tears.

2. Look carefully at cliff and crisis moments because these expose encodings unrealized.
Disruption, or “pattern interrupt” as Tony Robbins calls it, is often the mechanism of discovery, not its enemy. Collins found that cliff events expose encodings you never realized you had, and as much as we try to avoid cliffs, they can be the catalyst for bringing our lives into clarity. An example would be a friend who lost her child to cancer and suddenly had the burden, passion, and amazing ability to create a non-profit organization for the families of children with cancer.

3. Move in small, simple steps and notice what emerges along the way.
Encodings are not discovered by sitting and reflecting in the abstract. They are discovered through action. Coming out of the fog after experiencing a cliff is a process of making a series of little steps over time, and during this process you may discover new encodings you never knew existed before. Motion itself causes these encodings to surface while small steps get you moving. This movement creates energy that fuels more movement and more discovery.

4. Watch for moments of total absorption.
Encodings become clear when something so completely fascinates you. You may literally become unaware of time. It can rise in a state of total absorption. Total immersion is one example of an encoding lighting up… like a student who becomes so absorbed in an academic task that, when she reaches the end, she temporarily can’t even remember her own name. Noticing when and what causes you to lose yourself. This is a clue.

5. Once discovered, don’t analyze it, instead trust it.
Discovery is only half the equation. Believing what you find is the harder and more important step. Finding your encoding is important but trusting what you’ve discovered is the most important. And practically, this means resisting the pull to copy someone else’s proven formula but find and trust yours.

Discovering and applying our encodings is an ongoing process. At one time in my life, playing the piano was everything I thought important. I began playing at age 5, practiced daily, was enrolled in a university music school for piano at age 12, and was considered a child prodigy. I played the piano for churches and others throughout most of my life.

Then, as my writing career emerged, I began only playing the piano for personal pleasure. I’ve noticed many authors I’ve known for years now paint more than they write. Encodings are constantly emerging with the ebb and flow of life. So, there is always room for new discoveries.

Don’t miss the opportunity to ask God what He desires for you right here, right now. You might be surprised as it may be something you never imagined but find more meaningful than anything you’ve ever experienced before. And when accomplished for Jesus’ Name’s sake and the advancement of His Kingdom…well, you’ll never find anything better! Trust me!

To learn more, check out yourrefreshedlife.com. Discover Collins book and experience YOUR refreshed life today!