There is a sixth suitcase, however, that is crucial to effective use of the first five. “When you don’t understand what’s in your sixth suitcase,” John Bradley writes in Discovering Your Natural Talents, “you will almost certainly step into the trap of establishing your ambitions based only on your first five suitcases.” (Bradley and Carty, 1991, page 32) As important as excelling at work and school and understanding one’s values and personality are, without unlocking our sixth suitcase, all those pursuits will end in frustration.

Our sixth suitcase contains the natural gifts and talents we were born with. It is the unique mix of innate strengths each of us possesses that allows us to excel at certain activities. It is the unique ability of the paramedic who, when most people panic at the sound of sirens and the sight of blood, controls the crisis with amazing calm and provides critical care like the whole thing is happening in slow motion. It is the artist who hears the sounds of a musical work—melody, harmony, and rhythm—perfectly composed his head. Writing the complex combination of notes down on paper is almost secondary, and, in some cases, even a bother. But in the end, it is a masterpiece. And it is the business owner who knows deep in her gut that a certain product will dominate the competition and is willing to risk everything to bring it to market. She succeeds because of her unique ability to sense and meet the needs of her customers.

Unlike the other suitcases, the sixth suitcase comes already full and our life’s work is to unlock its potential and unleash its power. In other words, clearly identifying our true talent—that set of natural abilities we possess and use instinctively—and aligning them with what we do every day is a lifelong process. Ironically, we are often so close to these abilities—they are instinctive, after all—that we don’t see them for what they are and tend to spend our life fixing our weaknesses, not leveraging our strengths. The result is unspectacular results, unfulfilling careers, and a life unlived to the fullest. It is, then, one of the highest callings of the professional coach and business leader to help people unlock their sixth suitcase.

I had a coaching client who was struggling in this area. He trudged home from work every day and collapsed on the couch sleeping the evening away in front of the TV. He would then wake up and go to bed, repeating the same process again the next day. He was going to make an appointment with his doctor, which I urged him to do, when we got to talking about how his job had evolved over the years. He first came to the company as a field man, spending a lot of time out of the office. He worked in the agricultural industry, so his days consisted of being outside in the field with farmers. He loved it!

In fact, he loved it so much and did so well, that he was promoted to be—you guessed it—a manager. The management role was much different from the field man’s. It required him to be mostly indoors, in meetings, and away from the growers he loved working with and had a natural talent for. Another significant part of management was the paperwork. His industry has enormous amounts of compliance forms to fill out for the government and the days when these had to be completed were the most taxing to him.

When he came back from the doctor’s with nothing physically wrong, we began to rearrange his work life. He hired an assistant who had a natural talent for paperwork (these people do exist!) and began to teach her how to complete the volumes of government forms that landed on his desk. Meetings were taken out of the office and into the open air with growers and field men working together to solve problems. After a few weeks of this arrangement, this executive began to be revitalized and came into work early for the first time in years excited to start his day. He was amazed when the afternoon rolled around and he hadn’t looked at his watch once. The alignment of talent to task taps a deep reservoir of energy that empowers us in our work.

When agronomists started using precision agriculture, they assumed these advanced techniques would make growers more money by bringing less producing parts of their fields to yield levels that the best-producing parts of their fields had. What actually happened surprised them. Yes, less producing parts of a grower’s field produced more crop by having a customized mixture of chemicals applied, but just a little bit. The greatest increase, however, came in good soils. When they measured the harvest yields of their best soil, they went off the chart.

This lesson must not be lost on those of us in business. We can spend an incredible amount of time and money fixing people’s weaknesses and helping them get a little better at them. But if we develop their strengths, we will get spectacular results. Or, in the words of Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton in Now, Discover Your Strengths, we will experience “consistent, near-perfect performance.” (Buckingham and Clifton, 2001, page 25) What we love to do, we also do well. And when we do something well and invest our time and energy in pursuing it, we have the ability to deliver extraordinary yields time after time.

Is weakness, then, irrelevant? No. Even the poorest producing soils benefit from precision agriculture. But improving weakness is not where we will find our best results. Aligning talent to task means analyzing all that we do and making sure that 80 percent of it is in the area of our true talent. All jobs have aspects about them that are distasteful to us, but when those aspects get beyond 20 percent, we will find ourselves in an unfruitful situation, working more and more for less and less and hating it. The key to sustained individual success is maximizing our strengths and managing around our weaknesses within the 80/20 window.

Nearly 50 years later, McGregor’s observations are as relevant today as in the 1960s. Theory X management represents outdated command-and-control structures that view people as interchangeable parts, not as unique individuals. Companies with this approach to people have staggering employee turnover and worker disengagement. You sense it when you call customer service and an apathetic voice answers at the other end, and you see it in plunging profits. The cost of employee disengagement is estimated to be at $1 trillion per year, almost 10 percent of our nation’s Gross Domestic Product.

Theory Y is not about holding hands and singing Kumbaya, however. It is about empowerment. Rallying around a cause that is owned by all and treating people like individuals. Wise leaders play chess, not checkers. The pieces in a game of checkers all are the same. They follow the same rules and move in exactly the same way. Chess is a different story. Each piece is different with movements that are unique to them. Chess masters, and wise leaders, view each individual as unique and work with that uniqueness to win. Helping people identify their true talent and aligning what they do with it is more than a feel-good workplace philosophy. It is a serious business strategy that elevates both individual and organizational performance to its highest levels.

Beyond this face value observation, though, there is a more complex neurological framework. When we use our true talent, because of how our brain works, our neurons fire along well-developed channels and it feels good. A pleasurable, biochemical reaction takes place in our body. We pump our fist in the air and shout, at least to ourselves, “Yes!” This is as it should be. When we work in the 80/20 window, that feeling is a daily experience, which results in a satisfying, productive career.

Select 10 people who know you well. Make sure these are people you trust and will tell you the truth. Some may be from your professional life and some from your personal life. A mix of both will be best. Send each this letter:

This is an easy letter to send via e-mail, but it would also be wise to follow it up with a phone call or a visit to make it more heartfelt. You are asking these people to take time out of their busy day to give you some thoughtful input. That is a special gift; treat it as such. Having conducted dozens of these letter campaigns, I am always amazed at how people take this charge seriously and offer profound, personal insight. Nevertheless, people are busy and may need a gentle reminder or two to get it done on time.

Look over this list and reflect deeply on it. What common themes emerge? In what ways did you best express yourself, both verbally and nonverbally, in these experiences? What is the unique way in which you built relationships in them? How did you solve problems? If functioning according to your innate strengths causes your brain to fire along neural pathways that make you feel good, a key to discovering your true talent will be in reflecting on enjoyable experiences and their component parts. What are your conclusions? This exercise is best done over two weeks, devoting week one to selecting the top 10 experiences and week two to finding their common themes.

Using your letters, your reflections, and even a dictionary, expand on these top four to six words or phrases with a 25-words-or-less personal definition of each.

Now synthesize your personalized definitions into one 25- to 50-word Sixth Suitcase Statement.

Select three or four people who know you well and whose opinion you trust, perhaps some of those who were part of your 10-letter campaign, and share your Sixth Suitcase Statement with them. Get their input on your statement—additions, subtractions, and deletions—and make any changes needed to it.

Now, Discover Your Strengths offers four strategies:

What are your areas of weaknesses and the workarounds you will use from the strategies mentioned earlier to keep them from undermining the rest of your work? List them here: