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.