Better Insights, Better Results
"Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing. Use the pain as fuel, as a reminder of your strength.” - August Wilson
As a parting gift at the end of one of my projects, I wanted everybody to walk away with their list of personal strengths. Not just a list that I made up, or their own list, but a list of strengths through the eyes of the team.
This post is an experiment on multiple levels. First, I’m testing how well I can get feedback on content for my book, by sharing content on my blog. Second, I’m testing how well I can share a techniques that’s easy for me to do live, but tough to write down. This is the same exercise I go through with my mentees at Microsoft to have more energy, have more fun, and get more done. It’s about spending more time in your strengths, and less time in your weaknesses.
I like learning the language around a given topic to build precision and depth. When you have a language for something, it helps you think, organize, and share knowledge more effectively. The same is true for strengths. Your strengths are among your greatest assets. Simply put, they help you give your best where you have your best to give. To find, study, and explore your strengths, you should know the language of strengths.
As I’ve been studying strengths and helping people find their super powers, I’ve realized that some of the strengths literature is very specific in describing strengths versus talents. What’s the difference between a strength and a talent? Simply put, a talent is your natural pattern for thinking, feeling or doing. It represents your potential. A strength, on the other hand, represents an ability that you’ve developed into a consistent, near-perfect performance.
In this post, I’ve collected the most significant data points I could find to help answer the question “Why strengths?” Simply put, you might just be the world’s next best, you name it, but we’ll never know. Why? … Because we don’t spend enough time in our strengths. Worse, very few of us even know what our strengths are.
