How to be Competitive as a Scanner

Question: "In a competitive economy, how can a scanner do a project that can hold its own against one made by a focused individual?"

My Take on This:

As a scanner, we can be competitive by being uncompromisingly authentic.

Be Yourself

Our economy is not truly competitive. At an energetic level, we resonate with certain products or service providers, and not with others. We might compare offerings and prices, but in the end we buy things we resonate with from people we resonate with.

By being totally yourself, you will attract people who resonate with you, and they will love you. Then it does not matter how many other people do things that are seemingly similar to what you do.

If you manage to be who you are at your very core, to really own your gifts and express them in the work you do, you will create such a unique product or service that it cannot be compared anymore. It will be outstanding, because you are outstanding.

Be a Scanner

If you are a scanner, be a scanner. Be authentic in that too!

The best way for a scanner to be productive is to respect their scanner nature and to adapt their time-management and project-management strategies to it. If they try to work like specialists, they will procrastinate, suffer and get poor results. But if they embrace their scanner nature and are true to themselves  in that respect, they are just as competent as other people.

How exactly to adapt your project-management to your personality will depend on which kind of scanner you are and which kind of project you have in mind.

Cyclical scanners in particular tend to be slower at completing their projects because of working on many things at the same time. Often this does not matter, though. I'm writing an Introduction to Linux Shell Commands for beginners. I do plenty of other things as well, so of course I am slower than a computer scientist who does nothing else all day. So what? When some day I'll publish it, it can be just as good as what such a computer scientist who does nothing else all day could write. It won't matter how long it took me to write it. And since I am putting my very own loving personality into it, instead of writing it in dry man page style, it will be a truly unique product.

Now if you are working on a project that is time-sensitive, where you need to focus on the same thing for many hours every day, and where your personality matters zero.... are you sure you are doing the right job? As a scanner, you must suffer like hell. Why do you stay there? Being ourselves also means picking a career that fits our personality, not bending ourselves to fit our job. That would be kinda backwards. After all, our job is here to serve us, not the other way around.

Use your Strengths

Being a scanner does not only mean adapting what you do and when you do it to your personality. It also means that your way of thinking is different. Even when working on the same problem as a non-scanner, you will think in a less linear way. Scanners are great at drawing parallels, at connecting the dots, or at integrating knowledge from other life areas or fields of activity. I highly recommend you to actively use these strengths.

Instead of discarding "inappropriate" ideas and trying to focus on one field or one process, welcome seemingly unrelated, intuitive input, and act on it. Often, unrelated stuff ends up not being that unrelated after all. Ask yourself how you could integrate this into your project, how this could serve or inspire you. Connect the dots. This can lead to very interesting results! Your original solutions could be exactly what makes you highly competitive.

Authenticity is Key

To be competitive as scanners, we need to be absolutely authentic. We need to get in touch with ourselves, express our gifts in the most honest way and put our personality into our work. This way we create unique products and services and attract people who resonate with us. We need to adapt our way of working to our scanner nature in order to be productive and have fun. And instead of trying to be what we are not, we need to play on our strengths, especially our non-linear, creative, eclectic way of thinking.

If you want to know more about yourself and learn about the soul-level gifts and strengths that you are bringing into your human experience, or if you feel that there are facets of you that you haven't been able to fully express until now, you can book a reading with me. I'd love to work with you.