Now, Discover Your Strengths

Now, Discover Your Strengths shows you how to find your top five strengths by outlining what strengths are, how you get them, why they’re important to reaching your full potential, and how to discover your own through analyzing the times when your behavior is the most natural or instinctive and why.

From a young age, we’re encouraged to identify what we’re bad at and try to improve. Why is this? If we spent time searching for what we’re good at, we would find much more success.

You might be wondering how exactly you identify a strength. The authors define it as an activity that you can repeatedly do to perfection. Or in other words, if you can do something well over and over again and you enjoy it, it’s probably a strength.

Organizations that allow employees to use their strengths on a daily basis are both more successful and sustainable. The Gallup Organization asked 198,000 workers across many different types of businesses whether they do what they are best at every day.

They found that the 20% of employees who strongly agreed with this question were 50% more likely to work somewhere where there was less employee turnover. They were also 44% more likely to work in a company with higher customer satisfaction and 38% more likely to work in a more productive business.

Despite the data, many organizations insist on having employees work on weaknesses, thus wasting time and money. For example, employees often get sent to special training programs that involve correcting weaknesses rather than growing strengths. Unfortunately, when we spend time doing damage control rather than development, we neglect an employee’s true potential.

That’s not to say damage control isn’t necessary at times, but it shouldn’t be the entire focus of managing employees if you want them to really reach their potential.

We all love doing things we’re good at, right? But have you ever thought about why we are good at certain things? Some people might say it’s all about practice, but that’s not the whole story. You’ve likely built your strengths because you had a natural talent to begin with. A talent is a thought or behavior pattern that makes things easier for you than for your average person. For example, maybe you’re the kind of person that can strike up a conversation with anyone. Or maybe you are good at just about any sport you try. We can develop these dispositions into strengths. Developing a strength requires refining your talent with both skills and knowledge. We can acquire knowledge factually, experientially, or both. For example, learning the piano will mean you have to learn factual things about it, like what time signature is. But…