My Strengths

What are you good at?  Where does your greatest strength lie?  Knowing this may better help you find where you should invest your time.

Think on this for a moment: your child comes home with a report card.  On it are one A, three B's, two C's, and a D.  What do you focus on?  If you're like any normal parent, you'll say the D.  But what subject was the A in?  Let's say it was Science and he got a D in music, the last thing you want to push them into is a career in music.  Or, let's say the D was in science.  I don't think your kid will be going to MIT or being a doctor.

And that's okay.  Each and every one of us has certain strengths.  Authors Tom Rath and Barry Conchie put together a book called Strengths Based Leadership, which is about finding your strength and using it to maximize your skills.  Through their research, they have an online tool called Strengthsfinder which is a series of questions one answers to find out what those strengths are, and have categorized them into 34 separate themes.  I took this test last year, and discovered I have the following strengths:

1) Futuristic

2) Ideation

3) Focus

4) Strategic

5) Achiever

Author, blogger, and former CEO of Thomas Nelson Michael Hyatt recently had a podcast featuring this very same subject.  I encourage everyone to also check it out--oddly enough, Michael and I share a few similar strengths.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be sharing in-depth how these individual strengths work for me in order to maximize my skills in the best way.  Some of the results didn't surprise me, like futuristic and ideation, as I usually am full of ideas and always looking towards the future.

Have you taken the Strengthsfinder test?  What results have you seen since taking it?