Finding Your Strengths
Finding your strengths is one of the best ways to improve your energy and effectiveness. If you know your unique combination of strengths, and you play to your strengths instead of focus on your weaknesses, you can dramatically amplify your impact.
One of the key things that can hold you back is spending too much time on your weaknesses and not enough time on your strengths. The better you know your strengths and talents, the better you can pick the right situations or job to leverage your innate abilities.
How do you find your strengths, though? … What are your key strengths? What are your talents that come easy for you, but are difficult for others? Are you fully leveraging your unique combination of strengths?
In Now, Discover Your Strengths, Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton, Ph.D. identify 34 key signature themes of strength, based on years of empirical research.
Key Take Aways
Here’s my key take aways:
- Identify your signature strengths. Don’t just know what you’re good at. Identify what you are great at. This difference makes all the difference in the world.
- Be your best. The key here is to be your personal best. This is why modeling somebody else’s success may not come easy for you. You may not have the same strengths.
- Cultivate your strengths. The key is to focus on your strengths and not your weaknesses. Reducing your weaknesses is not the path to greatness. Improving your key strengths is your personal path to excellence.
- Use the sum of your talents. It’s not about having a single strength, it’s about using the synergy of your strengths.
- Find a fit for your strengths. Leveraging your strengths turns your work into passion. What’s work for somebody else is your play if you find the right way to leverage your unique talents.
- Amplify your results with your network. Once you know your key strengths, you can find the people that complement you in strengths that you lack.
34 Themes of Strengths and Talent
Here are the 34 strengths according to Buckingham and Clifton:
|
Achiever Activator Adaptability Analytical Arranger Belief Command Communication Competition Connectedness Context Deliberative |
Developer Discipline Empathy Fairness Focus Futuristic Harmony Ideation Inclusiveness Individualization Input Intellection |
Learner Maximizer Positivity Relater Responsibility Restorative Self-assurance Significance Strategic Woo
|
34 Strengths Explained
Familiarize yourself with the 34 key themes of strength. If you can identify your top five themes, you can use the information to start cultivating your strengths for personal excellence and stop focusing on weaknesses. Here are the 34 signature themes of strength according to Buckingham and Clifton:
| Strength | Description |
|---|---|
| Achiever | A relentless need for achievement. |
| Activator | "When can we start?" is a recurring question in your life. |
| Adaptability | You live in the moment. |
| Analytical | "Prove it. Show me why what you are claiming is true." |
| Arranger | You are a conductor. |
| Belief | You have certain core values that are enduring. |
| Command | You take charge. |
| Communication | You like to explain, to describe, to host, to speak in public, and to write. |
| Competition | You have a need to outperform your peers. |
| Connectedness | You know that we are all connected. |
| Context | You look back to understand the present. |
| Deliberative | You identify, assess, and reduce risk. |
| Developer | You see the potential in others. |
| Discipline | Your world needs to be ordered and planned. |
| Empathy | You can sense the emotions of those around you. |
| Fairness | Balance is important to you. |
| Focus | Your goals are your compass. |
| Futuristic | "Wouldn’t it be great if …" The future fascinates you. |
| Harmony | You look for areas of agreement. |
| Ideation | You are fascinated by ideas. |
| Inclusiveness | "Stretch the circle wider." You can to include people and make them feel like part of the group. |
| Individualization | You’re intrigued by the unique qualities of each person. |
| Input | You collection information – words, facts, books and quotations. |
| Intellection | You like to think. You like mental activity. |
| Leaner | You love to learn. |
| Maximizer | Excellence, not average, is your measure. |
| Positivity | You are generous with praise, quick with smile, and always on the look out for the positive in the situation. |
| Relater | You derive a great deal of pleasure and strength from being around your close friends. |
| Responsibility | You take psychological ownership for anything you commit to, and you feel emotionally bound to follow it through to completion. |
| Restorative | You love to solve problems. |
| Self-assurance | You have faith in your strengths. |
| Significance | You want to be very significant in the eyes of other people. |
| Strategic | You sort through clutter and find the best route. |
| Woo | You win others over. |
How To Identify Your Strengths
You can go to the authors’ site at StrengthFinder.com – http://strengthsfinder.com/ and take the evaluation. You need a copy of the book, Now, Discover Your Strengths, for an access code to take the evaluation.
You’ll likely recognize a lot of these strengths in yourself. The key isn’t to whittle the list down to your absolute strongest talents. Instead, find the strengths that differentiate you from others and that come easiest for you.
Many of the strengths resonated for me. I took two passes. On my first pass, I made the following list:: Achiever; Arranger; Competition; Deliberative; Developer; Fairness; Focus; Empathy; Ideation; Individualization; Intellection; Learner; Maximizer; Self-assurance; Significant. On my second, pass, I modified some of my choices and whittled it down to the following five strengths:Achiever; Ideation; Individualization; Maximizer; Self-assurance; Significant
I don’t know that I’ve yet got the precision I need but it’s a start. I plan to ask others for their feedback and to help me find my blind spots. I also plan to take the StrengthsFinder evaluation.
Additional Resources
Photo by irene nobrega.
So what ended up being your strength results? I guessed only 2 out of 5 of my strength themes correctly, and I am very self itrospective.
Ideation, Adaptability, Futuristic, Significance, Connectedness
bc397405@ohio.edu
I haven’t taken the test. I think the following tend to resonate:
Achiever, Learner, Maximizer, Significance, Self-Assurance
Periodically, I revisit to see whether these give me more insight or help me adjust may approach.
Thanks for listing these, helpful as I am updating my CV at the moment. The following resonate for me: Activator, Empathy, Harmony, Intellection, Learner. It was quite difficult to cut the list down to five at first, would be interesting to do the test and compare with results.
Hey Melissa
Great to hear.
One thing I don’t think I’ve nailed yet is how to differentiate between extreme competence from training and years of conditioning versus natural talent that’s baked in. What I also need to figure out is — at that point – does it matter? (and how will I know — which I suspect is based on whether I get energy and feel passionate or whether I get drained, even though I do a good job)
[...] Finding Your Strengths [...]
And if you don’t have any strengths?
@ fossiladon
It’s all relative. Everybody has strengths and weaknesses. Don’t compare yourself to others, compare yourself to you.
[...] Finding Your Key Strengths [...]
[...] Finding Your Strengths [...]
Now that it is nearly 2 years later, how well has this worked for you? I took the 2.0 version of this earlier this week and got the following results:
Learner, Achiever, Responsibility, Intellection and Strategic
While I’m still working through some of what this means in some ways, as I wouldn’t of thought the learner would be my top one yet at times there is that moment where it seems to click that, “Yeah, I do like picking up new things.” Sometimes it seems like some of these can be combined, so being a responsible achiever may make me a useful team player to get things done.
@ JB
Interestingly, I’ve found them to overlap with “values.” I think this lens helps a lot at work, especially when you have to figure out what type of work to avoid, or what type of work to pursuit.
Martin Seligman has a map of 24 character strengths. I plan to rationalize these two strengths maps at some point. Ultimately, I want to boil down to the underlying principles and patterns.
I would also like to take a crack at mapping these to job skills.
Is been one month since i discovered my strenghts which are;INTELLECTION,DISCIPLINE,LEARNER,RESTORATIVE,AND FUTURISTIC.And so far ithink 3 are correct and still working around 2,i even have a homework about all my strenghts and hopefully i will come-up with a good solution
@ Johanna
That’s a sweet set of strengths that should serve you well. The beauty is that it’s those strengths that will serve you no matter what skills or experience you go for.
After reading through the list, I found many qualities that reminded me of myself and appealed to me. I find I can’t whittle these down to five myself. A test would be valuable for that purpose. I feel comfortable with the fact that I found about 14 strengths in myself that I can look towards and develop.
I did find about 4 in which I was borderline though. I found these the most interesting, and they each taught me something about myself. These were Command, Ideation, Learner, and Significance.
Command, because from experience, I know I feel more comfortable following than leading, despite the fact that I am quick to take charge when a problem presents itself.
Ideation, because I am a realist, and quick to turn down ideas that wouldn’t work.
Learner, because I know I am just as happy to apply knowledge as to assimilate it (so I fall exactly on the border of Learner and Achiever, perhaps.)
Significance, because although I can visualize myself as a crowd pleaser/politician type, in practice that has been difficult for me to achieve.
So this makes me aware of the fact that you don’t present the traditional or alternative strengths, such as “Loyalty”, “Realism”, and “Modesty”. I wonder if these are all considered negative strengths in today’s business world?
@ James — If it’s tough to whittle down, see if people you trust can add another perspective. This helped me get some more precision. In fact, it helped me see my blind spots. Another lens is to think in terms of, what are your favorite 3? Then at least you can prioritize those. The beauty is that the value of strengths really depends on the situation and context.
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