Presidents Day and Strengths

4 Ways To Be A Great President

How many ways are there to be really effective at your job? Probably a lot more than you think. In my work as a manager, I have observed sales people reach the pinnacle of success with quite different strengths and ways of going about their job. This is possible with most jobs including the job of running the country. Let’s consider our first four presidents. Did they have similar strengths that led to similar ways of operating in office? Not at all.

George Washington was the military strategist who projected an image of consistency and stability while serving as a great unifier. He had no great gift as a visionary but his cool even temperament served us well as he united a young country.

The second president, John Adams was a phenomenal orator and skilled debater. It was said that he could hold Congress in rapt attention for hours as he waxed on eloquently about his positions on Britain, France and so on. He was at his best when voicing his opposition to a real or perceived foe.

Thomas Jefferson was completely different than either. Unlike the orator Adams, Jefferson hated public speaking. In fact, he hated it so much that he refused to give the traditional State of the Union message to Congress each year. He was a grand strategist that loved sitting at his desk, thinking and writing. He wrote out the State of the Union speech and had his assistant read it.

James Madison was different still. He was a very precise thinker and the consummate networker. He loved roaming the floors of Congress, meeting one on one, collaborating and building alliances to accomplish his goals for the country.

All four could rightly be held up as examples of great presidents. But each understood their strengths and weaknesses proceeding to shape the job around who they were. List any other four great presidents in history and you’ll see much of the same principle at work. Lincoln, the melancholy who suffered great bouts of depression worked quite different than the energetic Theodore Roosevelt. Jimmy Carter who is arguably the most effective former president in history worked long days while occupying the White House. His successor, Ronald Reagan worked much shorter days while joking, “I know hard work never killed anybody, but why take the risk”. Reagan was arguably more effective during his years in the White House.

Joan Biskupic wrote a very similar synopsis of the U.S. Supreme court justices for USA Today. They are all very different in more than just politics and values. Their personalities, talents and approaches to the job are vastly different.

What about military commanders? Surely they have similar talents and approaches. Not so. If you look at Jonathan W. Jordan’s mosaic of Generals Eisenhower, Patton, and Bradley, you couldn’t find four different men with vastly different approaches and natural talent. What about MacArthur? He was perhaps more different yet.

And so it is with your profession.

Definitions - What's a Strength? "SUMMARY"

Let's sum up!

First, it's so important that you pull apart what comes naturally from what you must add through development. It's important because you will only fulfill your full potential when you build on your "Authentic Advantage".

As Marcus Buckingham says, "STOP TRYING TO ADD IN WHAT GOD LEFT OUT. FOCUS ON TRYING TO PULL OUT WHAT GOD LEFT IN!"

You are unique! You have a "Success Print" or a "Strengths Print" as unique as you finger print. That's what we call the first two components of a strength. That's your Talent and your Passion.

Identify those two ingredients. Then start building on that core center and foundation. Add Skills and Knowledge. Make sure you focus on adding Skills and Knowledge that compliment, support, and accelerate your Talent and Passion. Strive to be "Pointy". Be on guard that you don't become a "Jack of All Trades and Master of None".

Invest in your talent and passion heavily with development. I haven't said a lot about hard work because I believe when you begin to work form your talent and passion it won't seem like hard work. It will seem like going to the playground everyday. But you will have to put in a lot of long hours to realize your potential. Like Star Wars creator George Lucas said, "You'll start at 7am, start to feel hungry, and realize it's 7pm."

This is hard work, but it's hard work you will Yearn to get up and do tomorrow and the day after that. The work will Energize you. And you'll have a deep sense of Satisfaction when you're finished.

Definitions - What's a Strength? "Knowledge"

The last component of a strength is knowledge. Like with skill, you want to focus on adding most of your knowledge in areas that compliment your natural talents. And it's worth repeating, rapid learning or rapid knowledge acquisition is a very strong sign that a natural talent is in play.

In my workshops, I usually talk about two different kinds of knowledge. The first is book knowledge or classroom knowledge. And there are ever increasing ways to add book knowledge and classroom knowledge with the advent of the internet. Many are free. Here is a short list of ways to add classroom or book knowledge:

Books
Used Books
Industry Specific Magazines and Newspapers
On Line Books (Free)
Down loadable books on Ipads, Kindles, and other similar devices
Apps
College Classes (Audited classes can be free or low expense)
On Line College Classes (Top Universities Offer Classes for Free including Harvard, Stanford, and MIT)
Adult School

The second type of knowledge is experiential. There are some things you just can’t learn out of a book, from a class, or an instructor no matter how gifted. You have to get your hands dirty and do something to learn about it. This is why 10th grade biology has you dissect a frog. This is why medical school students work on a cadaver before you go rummaging around in a live body. Here is a short list of ways to get experiential knowledge:

Internships
Job Shadowing
Volunteering
Working for Free
“Hanging Around”
“Parallel Work”

Let me elaborate on “Hanging Around”. Let’s say you want to be a songwriter or audio guy that runs sound. You’ve confirmed that you actually have a good amount of talent. Next, you need to hang around with musicians. You need to hang around the music business. That might mean getting a job a The Guitar Center. That might mean you get a job loading or setting up music equipment. Your not working in your ideal position yet but you are in the right ballpark for opportunities to show up.

Another is “Parallel Work”. Susy and I have family member by marriage that finished his college degree and was contemplating medical school. He was Science and Math smart so that wasn’t an issue. He just didn’t know if he was cut out to handle the blood. Instead of rushing head first into medical school only to come out the other end $100,000 poorer and then finding out he didn’t like the blood, he took some “Parallel Work”. He became an “EMT” or an Emergency Medical Technician or Paramedic first. This gave him the opportunity to see how he did with the blood. As it happened he handled it fine and was off to med school.

You can probably figure out your own version of parallel work.

Let me make one more distinction about knowledge. In some ways I alluded to it my list of ways to get book knowledge but let me define it a little more clearly. Some people are best suited for very structured formalized education with a degree or some type of certification at the end. And some types of work demand this. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t care to have a surgeon work on me that hadn’t even bothered to graduate from medical school.

But some work really lends itself to independent study and frankly a degree isn’t very helpful. And the lines aren’t always that clear. Our favorite U.S. President Abraham Lincoln was a self-taught lawyer. Harry Truman didn’t graduate from college either.

If you gravitate toward independent study, I recommend you pick up a copy of “Secrets of a Buccaneer Scholar: How Self-Education and the Pursuit of Passion Can Lead to a Lifetime of Success”. It’s written by James Marcus Bach. James dropped out of school at age 16 and a few years later was leading a team at Apple Computer. Today he is an expert in the field of computer software testing. He has taught this around the world at places like Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

If you want to be successful, education is not an option. You have to get education and keep getting it. Life-Long Learning is the only path that leads to sustained world-class performance. Most people should finish high school and even a couple of years of college. But some people just do better with off-road versions of education.

Bottom Line: Discover your natural talents and spend the majority of your development efforts adding knowledge that supports those talents.

Definitions - What's a Strength? "Skill"

Skill is the 3rd component of our strengths package.

It’s so critical that you pull apart your natural talents and passion from the development of those talents and passions. There are two primary ways we develop our talents and passion. One is skill and the other is knowledge. And you need to tailor your choice of skills and knowledge to compliment and support your talent and passion. Many add skills and knowledge going off in all directions. Strive to be “Pointy”. An enormous synergy is created when you add skill and knowledge that is complimentary to your innate talent.

Our education system has been designed to turn out well-rounded graduates. But “Pointy” people become world class at something. World Class is where all the fun is and it’s where all the money is. I’m not saying don’t try new and different things. You should. You’ll uncover dormant or unknown talents. But spend 80% of your development investment on what you already know you are naturally good at. This is simply an expounding on the phrase, “Jack of All Trades, Master of None”.

Skills come in at least two kinds. One is generalized skill and the other is specialized skill. The distinction between the two is a moving target on the time line. An example of a generalized talent today is driving. Being able to drive to work is a general requirement for most jobs. This is especially true in car crazy California. If you live in New York City, many don’t own cars and take the subway. An example of a specialized skill is being able to drive a tractor-trailer rig. It requires additional skills that get certified with a special drivers license.

100 years ago driving wasn’t a generalized skill. Maybe horseback riding was. Horse shoeing was more of a specialized skill.

Computer Keyboarding has become more of a generalized skill required for all kinds of work. Writing computer code on the other hand is a specialized skill.

All of these skills, generalized or specialized have underlying natural talents. Some people have natural gifts in vision, hand and foot coordination, anticipation, and even caution that makes them safer drivers. Gallup has even verified this with there exhaustive work around talent identification.

Skills usually involve methods, models, and steps. These methods, models, and steps are developed by training, coaching, and hours of practice. It’s generally accepted that 10,000 hours of practice is a baseline requirement to master a skill. This often works out to about 5 years.

Just any kind of practice won’t do. There is sloppy practice and deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is very focused and intentional. It’s much more than just showing up and going along for the ride. Deliberate practice is very disciplined with the minute-by-minute intention of getting better. Deliberate practice is goal focused and very segmented and incremental in nature. Often it involves breaking a skill down into component parts and practicing each in isolation. Then deliberate practice might involve putting the pieces back together with concentration on segues (connections) or the whole.

Should you ever develop skills where you have very little underlying talent? Some generalized skills, yes. You should probably learn to drive even if you don’t have the underlying talent to be a world-class truck driver doing cross-country halls. But it would probably be a waste of time to get your class “A” license if all or most of your talent involved working with people.

I’ve made a big deal of the fact that 80% of your skills should be complimentary to your known talents. 20% of your time can be spent on new areas. One of the best ways to uncover a dormant or unknown talent is to try new things. Try to add a new skill now and then. See how rapidly you pick it up.

With children up to the age of 14 you might even reverse it. Give them plenty of room in their younger years to explore their talents by trying to learn new skills. But don’t force it either. Be on the look out for that single activity that just absolutely enamors your child. Encourage them and turn then loose on that.

By age 14 your brain wiring is fairly well set. There is a lot in magazines and newspapers lately about neuroplasticity. This is the idea that the brain remains fairly plastic or pliable into old age. It does remain pliable into old age. You can re-weight neurons and re-wire them with brand new connections. Regeneration is also occurring. That is new neurons or brain cells are being added. But this does not mean you can turn a non-talent into full-blown talent. You can uncover dormant talents. But there is no evidence I’m aware of that you can actually add talent.

Bottom Line: Discover your natural talents and spend the majority of your development efforts adding skills that support those talents.

Definitions - What's a Strength? "Passion" Part 2

Does Everyone Have Passion?

Passion is the 2nd component of 4 in our strengths package. But does everyone have passion? I believe they do but it has been smothered in many. My dad has passion in spades… or maybe in hearts. He may be the most consistently passionate person I know. He also has what Gallup Strengthsfinder would call “Self-Assurance”. It is clearly an innate talent for him. He was so self-assured as a child he didn’t fear death. This actually was a concern for my grandparents.

Here’s the thing. Self-Assurance is an accelerant for passion. What smothers passion? Fear is the number one enemy of passion. Show me a person that appears more or less passionless and I almost guarantee fear has smothered it down to a pilot light size flame. Sometimes fear shows up under other names. Fear may show up as doubt, numbness, procrastination, caution and a bunch of other labels.

But fear doesn’t kill passion, it can’t. It just neutralizes it and renders it impotent. The Christian Scriptures say God’s Calling and Gifts are Irrevocable. They also say that God Gives Us The Desire In Our Heart. He plants them there. They tell us to “Fan the Flame” of our gift and that “Perfect Love Drives Out Fear”.

Go hunt down your pilot light. Fan the Flame. Crank the Oxygen. Perfect your Passion and Drive Out the Fear. The fear may hang around, but the higher you turn the oxygen, the more it’s forced off to the side.

Consider a welding kit. You’ve got a torch to focus the flame. Some struggle with passion because it’s not focused. People with a many interests and talents have to learn to pick something. You’ve got fuel, often acetylene. Your fuel is an interest that’s constantly at the back of you mind. It’s that thing that has to express itself. But many are missing the pure oxygen. Without the oxygen the flame won’t burn hot enough. With the oxygen it will cut hard metal and melt metals together. That’s where the confidence and self-assurance come in. Confidence is the oxygen that makes the flame hot.

How do you get confidence if you don’t have it? You may have to borrow it at first. Get around other people with confidence and it will run off. Maybe you’ll have to buy it. Can you buy confidence? You bet! You can hire someone with confidence. You can hire people with the natural talent of self-assurance. My mom married it. It worked out pretty well to.

If you are not naturally self-assured you have to be more intentional about uncovering your passion, guarding it, and seeing that it's fueled with a steady supply of oxygen. But it’s worth the extra effort. And the beautiful thing is, when you do uncover your passion, it will be in more valuable. You won’t take it for granted. It will also help you spot the passion deficit in others and empower you to reveal theirs.

Definitions - What's a Strength? "Passion"

We pulling apart my 4 component definition of a strength. The first component was talent, the hard-wired natural aptitudes you were born with. I guess it's appropriate that on Valentine's Day we move on to the second component which is passion.

Passion is that inner drive. It’s what you would do, or probably are doing for free. In Marcus Buckingham’s brilliant series of film shorts called “Trombone Player Wanted” he tells the story of Ewan, a middle schooler who plays trombone in the band. But Ewan has a drummer inside that just has to get out. The rest of the story shares the steps he takes to release that inner drummer. You are like Ewan. You have something inside of you that just has to get out. It may have been stopped, stuffed, smothered, and beaten by parents, peers, and even pastors but it has to get out. God put it there.

What makes you say Y.E.S.? I mean that literally, but you see it’s written with periods suggesting there might be more. It’s an acrostic that helps you remember to consider how you feel before, during, and after an activity.

“Y” stands for “YEARNING”. What activities do you look forward to? What are your “I can hardly waits”? What do you long for? That is your first clue to passion.

“E” stands for “ENERGY”. What activities give you energy? What can you do for long periods of time without getting really tired. Star Wars creator George Lucas was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey recently on her new network called OWN. They started talking about passion and it’s relationship to success. Lucas said, “if you want to know what your passion is, ask yourself what do you start at 7 in the morning and when you start to get a little hungry, you look up and realize it’s 7 at night?”

Personally I haven’t found any 12 hour activities but I do know exactly what he’s talking about. I can often write for 2-4 hours and it feels like 30 minutes. Time just flies by. Another word for this sensation is “Engagement”. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about this phenomenon in his book called “Flow”.

I don’t know a lot about cars. But I broadly understand the role an alternator plays under the hood. The alternator is there to re-charge the battery while the car is going. If you didn’t have an alternator or your alternator quit working as it has for me on a couple of different cars, your battery would run down and the car would stop. You have some “alternator activities” in your life. These activities re-charge you as you go. They allow you to work longer and harder and better. That is passion.

“S” stands for “Satisfaction”. What activities in your life leave a warm after glow? My mom used to ask me after work occasionally, “But isn’t it a good tired?” No! It was an awful tired! I was working in a family construction business that didn’t have work that played to my strengths. I tried to stir up passion for years. I tried just about every trade known to man. I tried drafting and selling and estimating. All a bad tired. Some left a horrible tired. But when I write this, when I do research for this, when I do training programs designed to help people maximize their potential, when I coach people to help them maximize their potential… It’s a good tired. Aaaaaaaaah, it’s satisfying!

So if you want to find your passion, check out how you feel before, during, and after an activity.

Definitions - What's a Strength? "Talent" Part 2

Now let’s tease apart talent a little bit more. When you think about your natural abilities I have found that it’s useful to break them apart a bit into separate categories or “Talent Types”.

The first talent type I often is share is your “ Strengthpath Strategy”. Whether you realize it or not you have fairly predictable consistent ways approaching everything you do. These are your Strengthpath Strategies. These strategies show up with out regard to your profession or career choice. Some of them are more effective or more helpful in some careers than others but they show regardless of your job. Actually they show up at home, at church, everywhere. They are the ways you most naturally and consistently think, behave, and feel. Each can be productively applied in a very wide variety of contexts. The Gallup Organization has developed a terrific Strengthspath Strategy indicator with regard to these talents called Strengthsfinder. You can find it online and it has a link in my blog toward the top of my assessment list. Another good assessment that measures these strategies is one called Realise 2.

The Strengthsfinder assessment will help you identify your unique mix of strategies like Woo, Activator, Ideation, Consistency, and Harmony. There are 34 unique Strengthspath Strategies in the assessment but it actually packages threads of talent in ways they usually show up in people. If you looked at all the threads it would add up to several hundred.

The second talent type is “Strengthspath Temperament”. It can also be thought of as your personality. All of these talent types have some overlap but they are distinct in some ways as well. When I speak of temperament I’m talking about things like your interpersonal style: warmer or cooler. I’m talking about your pacing: fast or slow. I’m talking about how you like information chunked: brief or detailed. I’m talking about your orientation: results or process. Are you an introvert, extrovert, or ambivert? Are you more a thinker or a feeler?

My favorite temperament talent assessments are Myers-Briggs and D.I.S.C. with it’s many variations. They will each give you a helpful window on your unique talents, especially your outlook on life. Each of these tools are also immensely helpful in helping you understand and relate well to others. If you a manager they will help you get the most out of your employees.

The third talent type is “Strengthspath Activities”. You are hard-wired to do some activities very well and others not so much. This is also true for passion, which we will talk about later. The possible activities and combination of activities list is almost infinite or endless. For that reason, there is no official assessment for activities but Marcus Buckingham has developed a very good exercise designed to help you identify your activity talents. He has a terrific little booklet specifically designed to help you do it but you can do the same thing with colored 3x5 cards. If you can, get some green cards and some that are some shade of red. You could do it with all white cards and just sort them as well.

Marcus recommends doing this for a week but depending on your work you might want to do it for a month if you have a wide variety of tasks that aren’t repeated on a weekly basis. As you go through your days write down each task on a separate card. Make sure there is only one task on each card. At the end of the week or month simply sit down and separate the cards activities that make you feel strong, that energize you, from the cards with activities that make you feel weak because the activity drains and depletes you quickly.

Another way to do it is walk through you calendar or day planner and mark each activity with an “S” for Strengthens Me or a “W” for Weakens Me. The cards work better for some people because all activities don’t always end up on our day planner or calendar.

A third way is to make a list of all your work related activities. Use the “S” and “W” beside each item on the list. This is as good of way I know to begin identifying your “Strengthspath Activities”.

The fourth talent type is what I call your “Strengthspath Roles”. Roles are also sometimes called archetypes. Universal Archetypes include “Father”, “Mother”, and “Child”. In Archetype think you can play a role like Father or Mother regardless of gender. You can play the role of child regardless of age. For example, in our family my Dad played the child role most often and most naturally. He is one of the most playful fun-loving energetic people I know. He is forever young at heart. Conversely, even as a young child I was very serious. My first grade teacher commented on it, my wife commented on it on our first date, and I’ve had a manager comment on it during a job review. In Mythology, Story-Telling, and Movie-Making we find roles like “damsel in distress”, “the hero”, “the scape-goat”, “the outcast” and so forth.

These roles are actually quite useful in identifying your “Strengthspath”. Some people are just natural for certain roles. At our Job Search Non-Profit Road 2 Jobs Donna plays the mother role very naturally and some of our clients actually call her mom. My dad plays a father role to some and they see him that way. Some of what we do is actually re-parenting.

In Nicholas Lore’s book The Pathfinder (only in the 2011 revision), he identifies and describes about 60 different roles that often show up in the work place. He offers an inquiry or exercise to help you identify your most natural roles. In 2012, Marcus Buckingham took this idea a step further and narrowed it down to 9 roles that allow you to identify your most natural way of delivering your contributive advantage at work. At the time of this writing I am one 3 people in the United States certified to deliver his program called StandOut as an independent trainer.

StandOut is a wonderful introduction in helping you begin to get on your “Strengthspath”. There is an assessment, a book, and a workbook, along with management tools to enhance the program. It dovetails nicely with the Strengthsfinder Assessment Buckingham co-built while he was at Gallup. What makes StandOut ideal as a gateway to strengths is that it takes most of the 34 strategies found in Strengthsfinder and packages them in to a much easier to grasp and remember 9 roles. It is also designed to be a bit more prescriptive than descriptive.

The fifth talent type is what I call your “Strengthspath Specialized Abilities”. These include talents like music pitch, structural visualization, finger dexterity, and number memory. There are around 19 in all. This work was pioneered by the Johnson O’Conner foundation which actually began in a G.E. plant in Lynn, Massachusetts. O’Conner started out with an associate to identify innate abilities that would help select employees and match them with jobs that fit them well, and increase success and satisfaction. They were so successful O’Conner started a foundation and opened up testing centers around the country. They still exist in most major U.S. Cities today.

Everything I have described so far I describe as an “Indicator”. They range around 70% to 80% accuracy. The Johnson O’Conner indicator I actually call a “Test”. They are done with work samples that are objectively validated. There really is no way to game the Johnson O’Conner Test.
There is an online version of Johnson O’Conner promoted by an organization called Highlands. I am working toward certification in this program this year. If you have children in their late teens I highly recommend either Johnson O’Conner or Highlands before they start college and enter the work place. You could be saving them decades of frustration and even misery at work. And don’t confuse this work sample test with the career tests offered by most high schools and colleges. These career direction tests aren’t in the same class.

If you want to excel at work, you absolutely must identify your natural talents including your Strengthspath Strategies, Temperament, Activities, Roles, and Specialized Abilities. To help you remember all this it spells S.T.A.R.S. And Stars are what people become when they discover develop and deliver their talents at work.

Before I move on, let me briefly mention 1 more talent type. It is based on Harvard Professor Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligence Concept. Multiple Intelligence is rooted in very well documented research with brain damage, savants, symbol systems and other brain region isolation findings. It has limited but very successful integration in schools both public and private. It runs counter to our current cultural madness trying to convince us that everyone has to be great at math and science. Gardner’s finding actually integrate very nicely with the Johnson O’Conner research but I separate them because Gardner’s work has been utilized mostly in education while Johnson O’Conner’s was born and implemented for the work place.

Gardner’s major insight is that we have been asking the wrong question for the last 100 years. That wrong question is “How Smart Are You”. This question he believes is rooted in erroneous conclusions of generalized intelligence driven by the Stanford-Binet IQ Test and supported by the SAT. Gardner believes that we need to rapidly move from an education system enamored by the “How Smart Are You?” question to an education system enamored by a much different question, “How Are You Smart?” It’s only a re-sequencing of 4 words but I believe it’s a revolutionary concept whose time has come.

Gardner initially identified 7 Kinds of Smart that were supported by brain region analysis. They included what he calls the Math/Logic and Linguistic Intelligence’s glorified by today’s educational system. Gardner goes further to identify Body-Kinesthetic Intelligence, Intra-Personal or Self Knowledge Intelligence, Inter-Personal Intelligence or Social Intelligence, Musical Intelligence, and Spatial Intelligence. More recently he has identified Naturalistic Intelligence and Existential Intelligence for a total of 9.

Definitions - What's a Strength? Part 3 "Talent"

This clip from the television series Dilbert helps me communicate what I mean by talent.

Synonyms are Natural Abilities, Natural Aptitude, Natural Gifting or simply "A Knack". Most would agree that “Natural” is implied so we might just use the terms ability, aptitude, or gifting and mean the same thing. Gallup adds a useful distinction when they conclude, “you can’t acquire talent. Talent is innate and enduring. It is like Lady Gaga says, “Baby You We’re Born This Way”.

Gallup’s actual definition of talent is “the natural recurring patterns of thought, feelings, and behavior that can be productively applied”. When you tear it apart and work with it the definition is very useful. I would tend to add characteristics or traits to the thought, feeling, and behavior part. I believe things like height or bulk could be considered a part of talent but I understand that can be argued both ways.

It is critical to understand that a talent is only a potential strength. A talent becomes a strength when skill and knowledge are added over time. Usually it takes passion to drive that.

I believe God has given you a tremendous "HEAD START" to take part in some important mission. It's a mix of tasks you do naturally, do extremely well, and it's unique to you. To help you stay on mission He has also given you some tremendous "HANDICAPS". We all have some disabilities. We all have some things we struggle with, some things that we sit down to do and it just makes our hair hurt. Instead of viewing these disabilities as protective rail to keep us on our Strengthspath, some of us see them as challenges. I read recently of a man that took a higher math class through all 5 years of college even though he didn't really like math and wasn't very good at it. And today he says, "I still can't do math" very well".

Even if you are not extremely motivated by money you should understand this truth: "You get paid top dollar based on what you can do very well not on what you can't do". In my workshops, I sometimes ask, "How many of you can sing really well?" The ones that can't or don't I ask, "Is that a weakness?" Most of them immediately understand that it's a weakness only if you are trying to become a professional singer. If you are a gifted accountant, it doesn't matter that you can't sing. What's not as obvious because of our current education driven cultural biases, the reverse is also true. If you are a gifted singer, it doesn't matter that you struggle with accounting, math, or science.

It's hard to pick up a news magazine or paper these days without reading about new findings on neurological plasticity. In short, this is the idea that the brain has tremendous lifelong potential for re-weighting and re-wiring. If you read the headlines and first few paragraphs of these articles, they suggest anyone can do anything if they just practice long enough. If you read the fine print or read all the way to the end of the article, you find that we can all get better at anything. That's usually about 2 or 3 points improvement on a 10 point scale. Then we hit a wall or a race track based on our talent. Yes you can start with no musical background and learn to play the guitar with some competence. Do you really want to live your life with a box full of competencies? How about crazy good? Why not insanely great? I want to be wildly successful!

Marcus Buckingham says it so well: "Stop trying to put in what God left out and start trying to pull out what God left in".

Definitions - What's a Strength? Part 2

If you look to the various available dictionaries you might easily find over a dozen nuances or definitions of the word strength. I want to zero in on a couple that suit our purposes, offer some thoughts from other top strengths practitioners, and then offer up my own definition.

Webster’s Dictionary has defined strength as “That quality which tends to secure results.” Also, “An asset of special worth” and “physical energy or intensity”. Webster lists related words as ability, aptitude, effectiveness, energy, gift, greatness, potential, potency, power, productiveness, and talent.

The Microsoft Encarta College dictionary says, “An extremely valuable or useful ability, asset, or quality.”

We would agree with all of that. Now lets move into the definitions from some of the top strengths practitioners.

Marcus Buckingham has evolved to describing strength as “an activity that makes you feel strong”. His emphasis is on naturally occurring feelings, emotions, energy, excitement, enthusiasm, passion, appetite, and affinity. He encourages us to pay particular attention to our feelings before, during, and after an activity. Buckingham has not eliminated results, success, and performance in any way but he is now placing a larger emphasis on the emotional response aspect of an activity as a key indicator. With the release of his next generation assessment, Stand Out he is beginning to talk more about natural roles that each of us work from.

Marcus came from the Gallup Organization where he developed under his mentor Don O. Clifton. Together they wrote books and created the original version of the Strengthsfinder Assessment. The Gallup definition of strength is a “consistent pattern of near perfect performance”.

Gallup also uses the following formula’s to define a strength:

Strength = (Talent + Skill + Knowledge) x Investment

In Gallup’s book written by Tom Rath titled Strengthsfinder he simplifies this Strengths Path further:

Strength = Talent x Investment

United Kingdom Strengths Practitioner Alex Linley says “Our strengths are things we are good at that energize us”.

Stephen Covey most famously wrote “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”. Covey is not purely a strengths practitioner but his most recent writing reflects a broad understanding. In his book the 8th Habit he talks about Greatness and what he calls “Voice”. He writes:

“Voice lies at the nexus of talent (your natural gifts and strengths), passion (those things that naturally energize, excite, motivate, inspire you), need (including what the world needs enough to pay you for), and conscience (that still small voice within that assures you of what is right and that prompts you to actually do it)…There is a deep innate, almost inexpressible yearning within each one of us to find our voice in life.”

Now let me share my definition. A strength is a passion infused natural talent that has been developed by adding complimentary skills and knowledge.

Below is a diagram that I often use in my workshops.

Over the next few days we will break down each piece.

Definitions - What's a Strength?

This might seem like a simple topic to write on, but it actually was the hardest. I warn you in advance, your eyes may glaze over a couple of times. Definitions may seem unimportant but it really is very foundational. To begin with, words really don’t have meanings, people do. If you want to understand the strengths most likely to drive your success, it’s critical that you understand what I mean.

On the surface, a word like “strengths” may seem straight forward enough but it may be helpful to draw some distinctions and layout a few definitions. What is a strength, really? Does it differ at all from talent? What about gift, ability, aptitude, intelligence? How does skill fit in? Knowledge and experience are certainly candidates. In some cases a good dictionary definition is not far off, but different dictionaries don’t even define words exactly the same. To make it worse the same dictionary will alter their definitions over time with new editions.

Strengths Practitioners, those that work with people around identifying talent and developing them into strengths everyday, have dimension, depth and color to add to a definition that is way beyond what a dictionary is designed to provide. But there are several major contemporary families of what might be called “Strengths Practitioners”. And there are off shoots of most of these. They use different language, words and emphasize different things even with in the same families. This can make it difficult to teach, coach, and communicate clearly on a topic so essential to human performance, flourishing and satisfaction.

Strengthspath is a fairly unique organization in that it attempts to pull the best learning from each of the strengths families and synthesize them into something even more useful than they provide individually. But this presents a challenge, starting with language.

So for the next few days I'm going to camp out on definitions. I hope to offer my own synthesis of ideas in the simplest form possible. But I also want to offer up other strength practitioner definitions to provide some background, depth, and an opportunity for you to dig deeper on your own.

Deception #20: Differences (Gender Roles)

Part of our mission is to move the culture to recognize unique differences that we call strengths. I guess it’s ironic that the last deception I will share in this series is the misplaced use of differences. In other words, we sometimes see differences that really don’t exist and we sometimes manufacture differences that are dysfunctional, harmful, and keep those closest to us from realizing their full potential.

I’m treading into dangerous territory on this one but I think it’s important. Much of what I write here may confront deeply held beliefs. Some of it may be rooted in religious belief. If what I write is offensive to you, I simply request that you ponder it.

The home is an ideal place to discover, develop, and lay a foundation for delivering strengths. But it doesn't always work that way.

In Mike Murdock’s book, The Law of Recognition he talks about different factors that blind us to the gifts in others. He suggests that we sometimes get obsessed with others flaws, get self-absorbed with our own goals, and get overloaded with unreasonable schedules. But Murdock tells a personal story that suggests our gender role biases get in the way as well. He begins:

“Several years ago, I went to a friends home. I enjoyed him and loved being around him. Externally, his home was gorgeous. It had wealth written all over it. But, when I entered the home, it was almost like a pigpen. It was dirty, cluttered, disorganized and even the refrigerator had dirty handprints all over it. When he started preparing me a sandwich, I declined. ‘Brother, this is too bad in here. I just can’t eat in this kind of atmosphere. In fact, your house needs cleaning bad.’

He was embarrassed greatly. ‘I know. My wife refuses to keep it clean. I pay for this house, pay the light bill and the water bill and it seems to me that the least she can do is to keep it clean.’ He was exasperated, embarrassed and humiliated by it.

‘How long have you been married?’ I asked.

‘Twenty years.’

‘I have a prophetic word for you, Brother! She is not ever going to clean this house! Ever! If you have been married for 20 years and she still keeps a dirty house, it is not her gift or desire to do so.’

‘But that is her Scriptural responsibility!’ He was fuming.

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘You can stretch that little phrase keeper of the home as long as you want to, but you cannot find Scriptural proof that it is the woman’s responsibility to vacuum her house, make up the beds and clean out toilets. That is cultural expectation, not a Scriptural command,’ I said.

I explained further: ‘You hate housework, She hates housework. There are people who love housework. It is there business. I have two ladies that have been a great blessing to my own life in cleaning my house,’ I explained.

Then I asked him another question. ‘How long does it take you to make $150.00?’ ‘About one-and-one-half hours he answered. He was a salesman.

‘I want to do something for you. I want to pay the two ladies who clean my house to clean your house for three days. It will take at least that long to get it decent. The reason I want to pay to do this is so you will have a memory of how beautiful a home can be when it’s clean and in order. I want you to work an extra one-and-one-half hours each month to make the 150 extra dollars. Take the 150 extra dollars and have your house cleaned.’

I asked him serious questions. “Why did you marry your wife? What did you love most about her? What was your attraction to her?” The dominant attraction determines the longevity of the relationship.

“I love her laughter. She always laughs at my jokes. She is so much fun to be with. I love to take her places, ‘ was his reply.

‘Then, while these two ladies are cleaning your house on one cleaning day every month, take your wife out to eat! Sit her on your lap in the backyard! Hug and kiss her or tell her the jokes that she loves and enjoys. But don’t make her do things that she hates to do when you can provide that for her and free her time to enjoy your presence!’

Some of us have not recognized the uncommon difference and dominant gift in those nearest us. It has cost us dearly. Recognition of the dominant gift in others will multiply the joy you receive from them.”

Mike Murdock was a minister, businessman, and songwriter known for his uncommon wisdom and no-where does he display that more than in this story. Don’t get hung up on the specifics of housework in the story although they may have perfect application to your situation.

My dad was brilliant at this. First, he was a man’s man. But he wasn’t so macho that he didn’t know how to cook, clean, run a vacuum, or do anything else around the house. His dad was the same. Some of my fondest memories were standing next to my grandfather as he washed the dishes for my grandmother. So if you come from some kind of demented culture where you think only women can do housework, get over it.

Second, when my dad started earning good money, he hired people who were very good at cleaning the house. My mom worked as a bookkeeper, something she was very good at and enjoyed. This freed up time for them to be together doing things they both enjoyed.

And this one goes both ways. There are ever increasing number of situations where wives work at jobs where they make great money, more than their husbands. I know this is a cultural adjustment for some. Well, make the adjustment. Let’s free both genders to work in roles that they both enjoy and are good at.

It is not my intention to teach here that there aren’t roles and tasks that one gender is more suited for than the other. That silliness is out there too. Men and women are often different. But from where I sit, individual differences often trump stereotypical gender differences.

Murdock’s wisdom, while rooted in the home, surely has plenty of applications in the workplace. I believe there are still plenty of roles where women just need not apply regardless of how much talent they have for a particular set of tasks. As a culture we have made dramatic improvements in my lifetime. But we still have a ways to go.

Your Moment of Truth: Your gender doesn’t define your strengths, your fully developed individual talent and passion define your strengths.

Ground Hog Day

Groundhog Day is a holiday celebrated on February 2 in the United States and Canada. According to folklore, if it is cloudy when a groundhog emerges from its burrow on this day then spring will come early. If it is sunny, the groundhog will supposedly see its shadow and retreat back into its burrow, and the winter weather will continue for six more weeks.

In the classic film version celebration of this day, a self-centered TV meteorologist Phil Conners played by Bill Murray keeps waking up to find that he is reliving February 2nd over and over again. Each subsequent day is the exact same loop played over and over. Phil is the only one aware of the time loop and the reoccurring day. If you watched the above clip you can see Phil's frustration mounting as he wakes up day after day to his radio alarm and the Sonny and Cher tune, "I've Got You, Babe".

If we aren't careful, all of us, individually or corporately, can easily get stuck in our movie version of Ground Hog Day reliving yesterday today, tomorrow, and forever. We can get stuck in a rut of sameness.

In 2001 I was installed as the new manager of a west coast district. After the meeting was over, Dennis (one of our top reps) came up to me and said, "It's not Ground Hog day anymore". Unsure of his meaning I questioned him further. He went on to say that the ideas and procedures I introduced were a radical shift from anything he had experienced with that company. Referring to the movie, he explained, "We're not doing the same thing over and over anymore." Dennis repeated the phrase after other meetings.

I have been writing about many of the traps we face: personal, familial, organizational, and cultural. These deceptions keep us stuck, from our highest strengths, and keep us from realizing our full blown potential.

Today is the day to break out of your personal Ground Hog Day. You can start small but start. Identify a personal talent. Make sure it's a talent that makes you feel strong before, during, and after it's use. Deliver it somehow. Serve someone with the talent. Help someone with the talent. Make some kind of contribution however small.

Make a commitment to develop the talent into a full blown strength. Add skills and knowledge that compliment this innate gift.

Then pick another talent and do the same. Most of us have 3-5 categories of activity that we are crazy good at naturally and could be insanely great if we developed them.

Your Moment of Truth: It's not Ground Hog Day anymore!

Deception #19: Disease Models, Diagnostics and the DSM IV

What’s keeping us stuck? Why are we so weakness focused? We have a culture that is focused on what’s wrong and much of that can be attributed to psychiatric and medical models being introduced into education and the workplace.

Many 10 year olds could give you reasonable working definitions of “Attention Deficit Disorder” (A.D.D.), Attention Deficit Hyper-Active Disorder (A.D.H.D.), and some even Bi-Polar Disorder. Yet, how many of them could describe their own talents, innate abilities, and gifts? We are a culture that is focused on what’s wrong with us.

There is a long history on this. Much of it has been reinforced by Freudian Psychiatry and has led up to a mental health “bible” that is completely focused on mental illness. Listing over 250 mental health issues and illnesses, the Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM IV) is now in it’s 4th edition with a 5th one coming.

Medicine is similarly focused. Doctors have historically been oriented toward fixing what’s wrong with you. This focus is often without regard to additional problems brought on by the cure. Diagnostics in both mental and physical health are often driven by pharmaceutical companies hoping to cash in on the treatment.

All of this can be directly traced into both education and the workplace with all the focus on fixing weakness. Report Cards and Performance Reviews have been designed to access what’s wrong and fix it. Skill development and knowledge acquisition are often recommended without regard to complementary natural talent.

Some of this is changing. Positive psychology is infusing a strengths focus in social work designed to amplify what’s well with a patient. Alternative medicine is doing the same with the body. The 800 page Character Strengths and Virtues was published in 2004 as balancing point to the DSM IV. Harvard educator Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligence concepts are seeping into the classroom.

The strengths philosophy, which began trickling into the workplace decades ago is now forming a few significant streams, and will certainly become a roaring river. Get ready for a great ride!

Your Moment of Truth: Success comes from amplifying what you can do, not eliminating what you can’t do.