Have you heard the story of the person who says he’s having a bad day because he misplaced his keys and it took him 15 minutes to find them, and ‘just his luck’ they were in the last place he looked? And you’re thinking, “Well of course they were. What type of idiot would continue looking for their keys after they found them?”
Unfortunately, this is what keeps many people from discovering and leveraging their true strengths. Because many of today’s ‘strength’ coaches tell their clients that their “Top 5” talent themes (received from taking the StrengthsFinder online assessment tool) are their “Top 5 Strengths”. But that’s not true. Talent themes are not strengths…they’re…talent themes.
Stay with me, because this is really important for us all to understand.
A strength is “consistent excellent performance in an activity that energizes the individual.” [from Now, Discover Your Strengths]
A talent [theme] is “a recurring pattern of thought, feeling or perception that are at the core of someone’s personality.” [from StrengthsFinder 2.0]
So a strength is an activity…while a talent is part of our personality. Gallup tells us that strengths are made up of talent themes (personality) plus knowledge (what we know) plus skills (what we know how to do). And the critical insight within this formula is that talent themes cannot be learned/taught – they are just part of who we are (hardwired, if you will). While knowledge and skills can be learned/taught.
Now back to the dude with the key hang up. If ‘strength’ coaches tell us that are talent themes are our strengths, then we naturally stop looking for our true strengths – those activities that energize us and we perform excellently. Why would we keep looking for our strengths when the coach tells us we already know them (our talents)? …And we lose the opportunity to learn, develop and leverage our real strengths. This may be why roughly 80% of us never leverage our strengths in the work that we do.
And we are up to 16 times more productive when we leverage our strengths.
So don’t be fooled. To find out more about how you can identify develop and leverage your true strengths, check out the “Activate Your Real World Superpowers” program here.
