Finding Your Strengths

Blog Author: Karen Kendig

The acid test of a strength? The ability is a strength only if you can fathom yourself doing it repeatedly, happily, and successfully.”

― Donald O. Clifton

Each step through the reinvent-urer's process requires a different set of tools, mindsets, and

skills to move us through the transition. The Gallup Clifton/Strengths assessment is a beneficial tool to use during the third step of the process—Spring/Cultivation. That’s the step when it’s time to get out of your funk and make solid plans for life beyond the Fall/Disruption that started the transition process in the first place.

When cultivating, you are trying to prepare for, acquire, and develop a new way of being and doing. This requires a deep understanding of the behaviors, skills and characteristics of the reinvent-urer that served her well in the past and will continue to serve her well in this new future she intends to create. As we grow into the new person we want to become, very few of us want ourselves to be unrecognizable. We want to keep what we wear well and leave the rest behind. Transitions often involve looking for a new job or vocation, starting new relationships, or relocating. When making these decisions, it is important to understand ourselves, how we live, what effects our decision making, our values, and skill sets.

The Gallup Clifton/Strengths Assessment, which identifies 34 strengths within four themes:

1. Strategic Thinking

2. Relationship Building

3. Influencing

4. Executing

might be just what you’re looking for. As you can see, these are not the themes we generally think of as strengths when looking for a new job, partner, or location. Such themes are usually more concrete like communication, business, innovation, research, culinary skills, etc. but the Clifton strengths make you look at your personal assets from a completely different perspective.

We often think of our strengths in terms of hard skills such as Microsoft certified, fast and accurate keyboarding, marketing strategist, organized, timely, and deadline focused. Those skills and accomplishments are important, but today employers are also very interested in what might be referred to as soft skills. Those are more characteristics, mindsets, ethics/value oriented such as achiever, developer, learner, and responsibility to name a few from the list of Clifton strengths and they make us take a deeper look into the strengths that make us tick, how these assets inform our decision making, and how they play out in our lives. This gives us the chance to consider what’s really important in building relationships, in finding a new place to live or securing a job that provides purpose and satisfaction as well as paying the bills.

Before you spend the money to take the test online, you might want to read the book Strengthsfinder 2.0: A New and Upgraded Edition of the Online Test from Gallup's Now Discover Your Strengths by Tom Rath. The author provides a brief history of the assessment, examples, and descriptions of each strength, along with strategies for building your top five strengths. I used the book to determine which strengths sounded like me and which didn’t and then chose what I considered to be my top five strengths. Not very scientific, but mind opening non the less.

If you choose to go the less expensive and scientific route, I suggest you don’t just think in terms of how you work with other people, but how you live with other people. Consider the soft skills you practice daily as a mother, wife, sister, daughter, neighbor, friend, and colleague. Otherwise, you will most certainly sell yourself and your strengths short by limiting them to your “professional” side only.

Daily Meditation

Use this meditation this week to help you open yourself to the changes around and within you.

I focus on the strengths I have been given and the talents I posses to live the life I am meant to live.