StrengthsFinder, and a big 'aha' moment

Earlier this year at a staff inservice day, we set up all the training modules to be facilitated by our clients - a nice twist to have the parents invest their professional expertise in us. We had sectionals on body mechanics and injury prevention, fire safety and evacuation planning, and even lunch was from a client who owns a great bistro downtown.

Most valuable and mind-changing for me - and that I have used every day since - was the main presentation based on the Gallup tool StrengthsFinder 2.0, a followup to the books Now, Discover Your Strengths and Strengths-Based Leadership by Tom Rath. I've been working most of my life in fields that employ various personal assessment tools. Many of them yield useful results but can be clunky to interpret. Even something as valuable as the ubiquitous Myers-Briggs can be difficult to apply in normal conversation without just sounding jargonesque, and certainly not intuitive to anyone who hasn't already taken that test. The StrengthsFinder approach is totally refreshing for me. As was our speaker (Dog Tired parent and good buddy Desiree), who encouraged us to abandon the whole idea of fixing our deficiencies and to just run with our strengths. So direct and freeing and obvious when you think about it.

The strengths test produces a simple list of five qualities that make up our top strengths, and seeing the relationships among those qualities in ourselves and others is where the discoveries are made. You can go deeply into the concepts, but you can also apply the surface descriptions in immediately useful ways.

We all had some preconceived ideas of our results, and mine were enough of a surprise in some areas that I was initially skeptical. This test showed me proceeding much more from intellect than from emotion, and I was frankly disappointed to test as more brainy and less heartfelt than I perceive myself. And everyone who knows me predicted that Responsibility would be my #1 by far, it didn't even make my list. My list in alphabetical order was Achiever, Developer, Input, Intellection, and Learner. (My ongoing quibble with this tool is that it offends my word-loving essence not to have parallel descriptors - pick a part of speech and stick with it already!)

The results for me have been nothing short of profound in understanding myself in relationship to other people, and constantly productive in understanding others around me. The descriptors are easy to remember and easy to understand about each other (five adjectives, that's it), and easy to see why we have affinity with some people and why other qualities may lead us into discord.

The overwhelmingly dominant quality for me was Developer - someone who sees the potential in people and loves to draw that out. As someone who has always loved to teach and whose great joy in the work world is in helping others to flourish, it totally makes sense that this area is also where I experience frustration and disappointment in others. Now in those moments, I find myself thinking immediately of that person's top-5 list and I can quickly see what issues are not about what someone does, but who that someone is.

It also led to the biggest 'aha' moment I've ever had in the post mortem years of my failed romantic er love er marital er living with men who didn't give a shit about me er, domestic relationships. As The Wailin' Jennys sing, "I've fallen many times in love, and every time it's been with the wrong man." But this strengths exercise did more for my perspective on this than any of the painful contemplations of the last 30 years. First, no one I've been involved with has been a devolved idiot. (Lying, cheating rat bastards some of them, but always attractive, engaging, intelligent, capable rat bastards.) Second, I have not fallen in love with someone's potential because I thought I'd be the special one to unlock it, but more with a hopeful vision of what that person had at their core that could truly shine. Third, none of them actually chose that potential or chose to keep me either - which seems self-evident and I am all the happier for escaping it, however long my misplaced loyalty kept me trying.

All of this has felt so extremely clarifying for me in understanding how I look at people in work, friendship, and love. Useful every day.

One of the fun things we did in this was to create a pictorial of our strengths. Drawn to words as I am, mine is a word picture. But I pushed myself to complete it very quickly and without thinking - exactly what the StrengthsFinder test itself requires - and because I didn't overthink and let intuition lead, I've since found myself reviewing and rediscovering small things about myself based on the items I chose in that speed-round type of project. A more easily viewable photo of this is on Facebook; if you aren't a member there, you can use this public link to see it.

New to the series is Well-BeingFinder, and I'll be looking forward to trying it.