What are Your Strengths?

Do you know what strengths you possess? Well if not that is quite okay! This book will definitely bring you the answers. Over a year ago, one of my co-workers, Baldwin Smith, had our staff team purchase this book and take the test. Of course, I immediately thought it was just another one of those books. Basically the principle is that if you focus on your weaknesses and try to fix them, you can only improve so much. But, if you focus on your strengths, you will continue to improve and excel. "When we're able to put most of our energy into developing our natural talents, extraordinary room for growth exists."

I quickly realized this book was different. It seems my entire life I was always taught to try to improve my weaknesses, and this book was teaching something completely different. Upon taking the test, the results reveal your top 5 strengths. This test nailed me to a tee! The book also gives you a description of each strength, a list of ideas for taking action, and how to work with others who have the same strength. This book is awesome! I not only learned more about my strengths and how to improve them, but I also learned more about my team mates and how to tap in to their strengths. I highly recommend taking this test!

Just for fun I will share my top 5:

1. Achiever: a constant need for achievement. Each day starts at zero, and by the end of the day you must achieve something tangible in order to feel good about yourself.

2. Responsibility: utterly dependable. You take psychological ownership for anything you commit to, and whether large or small, you feel emotionally bound to follow it through to completion.

3. Communication: You like to explain, to describe, to host, to speak in public, and to write. Ideas are a dry beginning. Events are static. You feel a need to bring them to life, to energize them, to make them exciting and vivid.

4. Discipline: Your world needs to be predictable. It needs to be ordered and planned. So you instinctively impose structure on your world. You set up routines. You focus on timelines and deadlines.

5. Activator: "When can we start?" This is a recurring question in your life. You are impatient for action. Only action can make things happen. Only action leads to performance. Once a decision is made, you cannot not act.

Sounds just like me, does it not?!?