I am so excited about Marcus Buckingham's newest book and assessment, "Find Your Strongest Life: What the happiest and most successful women do differently." As one of the developers of the StrengthsFinder™ assessment, Buckingham has devoted his life to ". . . helping each person identify her strengths, take them seriously, and offer them to the world." (Marcus Buckingham, "Find Your Strongest Life")
I can't wait to share this with you because I've devoted my life to helping people more consistently live and work from their best. A huge part of living and working from our best involves living and working from our strengths: those natural abilities that, when we engage in them, strengthen us!
As an avid fan of StrengthsFinder™ for many years, I am now over the moon about the "Find Your Strongest Life" assessment and book. In this newest body of work, Buckingham gives us the opportunity to discover the role we were born to play.
The "Find Your Strongest Life" assessment revealed my lead role as teacher (my best quality: my faith in others' potential) and supporting role as advisor (my best quality: my ability to find a solution). So confirming and affirming for my role as a life and business coach! I strongly urge you to take the free "Find Your Strongest Life" assessment to discover your natural roles.
If you haven't already taken the StrengthsFinder™ assessment to learn your top five natural strengths, I strongly encourage you to do that as well. No other body of work has so clearly directed my own happiness and fulfillment!
After you've taken both the "Find Your Strongest Life" and StrengthsFinder™ assessments and read the books, if you would like one-on-one support with orienting your life and work around your StrengthsFinder™ strengths and your "Find Your Strongest Life" roles, I would be honored to support you in that hugely meaningful process . . .
One of my favorite aspects of the StrengthsFinder™ assessment
involves receiving full permission to do all the things that feel most natural, most easy, most fun for me. If you haven’t yet taken the assessment to learn your top five natural strengths, I highly recommend it!
The Gallup folks who developed the StrengthsFinder™ assessment define a strength as “near perfect performance in an activity.” While “near perfect performance” seems like a high standard, I have noticed with my own strengths over the years that I do, indeed have near perfect performance and it’s nearly effortless! How cool is that?
I recently had this reinforced in a simple, yet powerful way while getting a birthday card for my brother-in-law. I sometimes find him hard to buy for, but this time I had an idea. He lives near the beach in San Diego and just bought a second home in Maui. He loves the beach and the ocean! I wanted to find him a birthday card about his birthday being a great day at the beach.
One of my top five StregthsFinder™ strengths kicked into gear: Individualization, which involves loving noticing and responding to the specific uniqueness in each person. I can’t always tell what excites my brother-in-law, but in this case I knew my birthday card idea hit the bulls-eye for him. Except that there wasn’t a card in the greeting card store with that message and image!
Now what? Well, I love making torn-paper cards (my own Individualization), but I wasn’t at all sure he would appreciate the hand-made card. I felt excited about the idea, so I decide to proceed. And I loved making the card and the finished product. I mailed it and forgot about it.
Until a few weeks after his birthday, when my sister told me that my brother-in-law loved his card so much that he wanted to frame it! That brought tears to my eyes. I love that me being me, doing what I love to do naturally and easily had impacted him so strongly . . .
What would each of our lives be like if we focused every day on doing more and more of what strengthens us, what we are naturally gifted at, what we love to do?
Yesterday, I overheard at the coffee shop that we have a new ice cream store in the neighborhood called Sweet Action. For some reason, this has stuck with me today. I love the sound, feel and idea of sweet action - for ice cream and for life and work!
As I started my work this morning, I was wondering, "what is my sweet action?" I felt inspired to write a new page about about my newest area of coaching, check it out: StrengthsFinder™ small business mentor.
How 'bout you? Where's your sweet action? What's your sweet action?
While walking in the park today, I thought about my client who's on a snowshoeing trip this weekend with some friends. During our last coaching session, she was excited to learn about the StrengthsFinder™ assessment and share it with her friends so that they could all take it and talk about it over the weekend.
Then I realized that just in the last month, one of my clients and her husband and daughter all took the assessment and talked about each of their strengths. Another of my clients is going to take it with her two business partners so that they can all be more aware of each others' strengths. And yet another client took it and had her two sister's take it so they could support each other around their strength's on their annual birthday trip together. Me and my three sisters gave each other examples of when and in what situations we see the others' strengths clearly on our annual sister's ski trip a few weeks ago.
While walking, I realized that even though I don't tend to be much of a group person, I am facilitating (behind the scenes) lots of conversations around people's strengths. As I realize the impact of more people living and working from their strengths more of the time, I get super excited! What a better place the world becomes as more and more of us contribute to it from our strengths.
When Gallup surveyed millions of people, they found that only one-third felt they had the opportunity to do what they do best every day at work.
I had the displeasure of dealing with several in the other two-thirds this past week. So, I'm on a bit of a mission to get more people living and working from their strengths!
If you haven't taken the assessment yet, I highly recommend that you do. I guarantee you willl thank me!!!
(Don't buy a used book. You need an unused code from the back of the book to go online to take the assessment.)
Here's to that wonderful world in which we all fully utilize our natural strengths and talents . . .
As I have imagined how yet another blog could be useful to small business owners and solo practitioners, I realized I could share processes and ideas that have changed my business and my life.
Who do I love? The Gallup folks who spent 25 years and millions of dollars to identify the most prevalent human strengths. They discovered 34 dominant themes/strengths, defining a strength as consistent near-perfect performance in an activity.
I first learned about the StrengthsFinder™ in 2001 when I read the book, Now Discover Your Strengths. I then used my personal code from the back of the book to take the online StrengthsFinder assessment.
Here are my top 5 strengths from my StrengthsFinder™ assessment:
- Maximizer
- Empathy
- Connectedness
- Activator
- Individualization
The short version of what this means about me: I love transforming strong into superb; I sense the feelings of others; I know that we're all connected and things happen for a reason; I make things happen - turning thought into action; and I love supporting people in their uniqueness and in living from their strengths.
When I first took the StrengthsFinder™ assessment, it made sense, felt right and then I forgot about it. For a few years.
Until I read StrengthsFinder 2.0 a couple of years ago when a lightbulb went on (Connectedness) and I got it that I wanted to orient even more of my work around my strengths. I began having my coaching clients take the StrengthsFinder™ assesment (Individualization) so that I could better support them in putting their strengths into play more consistently (Maximizer and Activator).
So naturally easy for me, so fun, so fulfilling - what could be better?
And, my clients love learning and more fully using their strengths. Gallup has surveyed more than 10 million people worldwide about how positive and productive people are at work and only one-third "strongly agree" with the statement: "At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day."
As a Maximizer, Activator and Individualizationist, that breaks my heart. So I'm doing my part. I am thrilled to have created a business in which I do what I do best every darn day! And, I am honored and excited to support others in creating and developing their businesses so that they do what they do best every day.
Who do I love? StrengthsFinder™!
No accident that this blog's named Strong You, Strong Biz . . .
