Do you cry at work? Are you easily excitable? Do you transfer other people's feelings to your own outlook and attitude? Or are you cool under pressure? Do you maintain a steady pace, even if there are setbacks (or even catastrophes)? When co-workers, clients, or customers are emoting at you --- how much or how little does that affect your task at hand?

"Work Your Strengths" by Chuck Martin, Richard Guare, and Peg Dawson (Chuck Martin on Facebook: view his profile) helps you identify the best type of industry and position to "fit" your needs if you have (or don't have!) emotional control.

The book is an excellent study on identifying twelve main skills that appear across industries and across job positions, including: response inhibition, working memory, emotional control, sustained attention, task initiation, planning and prioritization, organization, time management, goal-directed persistence, flexibility, metacognition, and stress tolerance.

The authors help managers figure out why certain people may not be performing at their topmost level within a certain job position, based on their skills. By surveying approximately 2500 people, the authors have found which types of individuals are the topmost performers within specific industries, based on their unique skills.

For example, if you are sensitive, easily rattled by, or more impacted by other people's drama -- and if your internal emotional state easily spills over into your work life -- you probably want to steer clear of finding a job in education, manufacturing, or marketing. Your emotional control level is too low to cope with a job in those sectors.

If you are a manager or employer, place people with higher emotional control in these departments: research and development, human resources, or finance. By creating a good work situation that "fits" the skills of the people doing that work, you have a better functioning, more harmonious, and ultimately, more profitable team. Create the right hire and assign the correct promotion --- someone whose skills may be high in one situation will not cope in quite the same way in a different situation.

The book encourages us to identify our own strengths and weaknesses, as well as those of people around us --- by knowing our own and each other's unique skills, we better understand how to "right-seat" people in the correct position for their hard-wired skills.

Find "Work Your Strengths" on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Work-Your-Strengths-Scientific-Identify/dp/0814414...