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Make Your Career From Your Strengths Not Your Weaknesses

 

DANCE WITH THE ELEPHANT: LIFE'S COSMIC EQUATION

"Because Your Life is Worth it!"

Photo: smarterer.com

***DANCE WITH THE ELEPHANT DID NOT WRITE THE FOLLOWING BLOG - BUT THOUGHT THIS WAS A WONDERFUL STORY!  FOR THE ORIGINAL SOURCE VISIT: http://thechairmansblog.gallup.com/2013/02/build-your-career-around-your-strengths.html****

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Build Your Career Around Your Strengths, Not Your Weaknesses

The best advice I ever received came from my dad, Don Clifton. It was actually a piece of simple, yet profound wisdom that has shaped my life. “Your weaknesses will never develop,” he told me, “while your strengths will develop infinitely.” 

If he hadn’t taught me this, my development and achievements would have stopped at a very early age -- in college, probably.

I couldn’t concentrate in college and flunked or barely passed a lot of easy courses. Later in life, I was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, which made sense, particularly when thinking back to my college classes. Those classes were disorienting -- I just had no idea what the professor or the students were talking about. 

Dad, who taught educational psychology at the University of Nebraska, figured out that my extreme weaknesses in classroom learning would never really develop, and that I would not follow in his footsteps as an educator. But he recognized that my strengths might allow me to succeed in sales, so he pointed me in that direction. Almost immediately, I succeeded at selling western record albums, history tapes of the old West, and advertising for farm and ranch directories.  

Eventually, my best friend and I borrowed $5,000 and started a business selling market-research surveys. This was perfect, because the two things that inspired me most in a job were salesmanship and ideas. (I still love ideas, even bad ones.) Selling a wide variety of polls and surveys, mostly on the subject of customers, was a dream come true. 

My work today has never really changed from that time -- it’s still predominantly about sales and ideas. I am forever indebted to Dad for the best advice I’ve ever received. So are millions of others.

Dr. Donald O. Clifton died a decade ago. He advised people all around the globe to build their work and lives around their strengths, rather than only trying to “fix” their weaknesses. His legacy is his late-life invention, the Clifton StrengthsFinder. This online assessment uncovers users’ top five strengths out of a total of 34 -- such as Achiever, Communication, Learner, Strategic, and others -- allowing users the potential to soar with their strengths. 

Find out more about StrengthsFinder and discover your strengths today.

It’s impossible to go anywhere in the world, from New York to Nairobi to New Delhi, without someone asking me about StrengthsFinder. Many of the world’s most influential leaders and organizations use it for their employees and students. If you haven’t already, I urge you to discover your own strengths and then build your whole personal development plan around them. 

You’ll be in good company. Some of the most successful people I’ve ever known achieved what they did because they built their careers around their strengths, not their weaknesses. 

As an example, our late founder, Dr. George Gallup, knew he’d never become a super-successful businessman. He once told me that he couldn’t even run a popcorn stand, and he was proud of this. But what Dr. Gallup could do was teach, and he focused all of his energies on that. He was so good at it, such a natural, that many leaders around the world who knew him have told me he was the greatest teacher of his time. 

Dr. Gallup taught at the University of Iowa, Northwestern, and Columbia, and he never quit teaching even when he created the Gallup Poll. He taught presidents, world leaders, media elites, thought leaders, and students who would show up at the Gallup building in Princeton. He became one of the most famous people of the 20th century, and his polling changed the world.

Here’s another person who has soared with his strengths: Gen. Colin Powell. When he came to speak to Gallup employees once, he shared with us the observation that all he ever wanted to become was “the best soldier I could be.” He became a pretty good one, too -- not only a highly decorated four-star general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but also U.S. secretary of state and quite simply one of the most influential military people in history.

Colin Powell is a soldier. George Gallup was a teacher. I am a salesman. If Dr. Gallup had tried to be a soldier; Powell, a salesman; and I, a teacher, none of us would’ve succeeded, because we wouldn’t have been doing what we do best. As Dad said, if you want to soar limitlessly, you can’t do so by fixing your weaknesses, but rather by using your God-given strengths. 

Best advice I ever received.

Dad’s Last Email to Me, on Strengths-Based Leadership (Unedited)

Another notion about leaders is that each one needs to know his or her strengths as a carpenter knows the tools in his box or as a physician knows the instruments she has available, and a carpenter does not hammer with a saw. So leaders have different tools (strengths) in their armamentarium, but the better she knows how to use them the more effective she is as a leader. It is not so much what strengths they possess as leaders -- it is knowing accurately what a person has as strengths. (A leader may also need to know her weaknesses, so she can manage them.) This means a leader needs to know what his tools are and exactly when to use each of them. 

This explains why nobody comes up with a list of characteristics that describe all leaders. One leader may lead because he has a strength in relating; another may lead because he has a signature strength in competing, or conceptualizing, or courage, or responsibility. What leaders have in common is that each really knows her strengths, has developed her strengths, and can call on the right strength at the right time. 

-- Don Clifton, 1924-2003 

 

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ROCORI Track and Field Alumni Reunion

Were you in Track and Field while attending ROCORI High School?  If so, we are hoping to plan a reunion sometime in June but we need to know if people are wanting to attend!  So, please contact David Rarick at the above email address.  

If we have enough interest we will be locking down a date.  So, look out for more information!  And please let us know if you would like to attend an event like this!

Thanks!

The Path to Personal Integrity

 

DANCE WITH THE ELEPHANT: LIFE'S COSMIC EQUATION

"Because your life is worth it!"

 

Photo: blogs.nature.com

***THIS ARTICLE IS FROM: http://experiencelife.com/article/walking-your-talk-the-path-of-personal-integrity/ WE AT DANCE WITH THE ELEPHANT DID NOT WRITE IT.  WE ARE JUST SHARING IT!***

 

Walking Your Talk: The Path of Personal Integrity

Do you walk your talk? Say what you mean and mean what you say? Or does your language take you down roads you’re not willing to follow? Taking a closer look at how your words and deeds connect – or don’t – can help you see where you really stand.

EXPERIENCELIFE.COM

By Cat Thompson / March 2004

How’s that New Years Resolution coming along? Were you able to stick to it? Are you still putting in the same kind of committed energy that you started with back in January? Or did you get off to a running start and then find yourself petering out six weeks later?

If you’re not where you wanted to be, you may be wondering why. There are lots of reasons why we run afoul of our intentions. Sometimes we make a too-ambitious plan we simply don’t have the skills or energy to execute. Sometimes we find ourselves facing emotional roadblocks that we don’t know how to get through, so we run out of steam. But often, the forward movement comes to a screeching halt because we simply don’t keep our word to ourselves. We make promises (“Tomorrow I’ll get up early and go to the gym”), and then break them (“Awww, it’s raining, I think I’ll stay in bed. I’ll go to the gym on my way home”) – often for reasons we don’t even understand. Which brings me to what might be an uncomfortable question: How good are you to your word?

Words are powerful forces of creation. They take our dreams and goals and put them out there for all the world to witness. Florence Scovel Shinn, a metaphysician of the 1920s, said, “There is always plenty on man’s pathway; but it can only be brought into manifestation through desire, faith or the spoken word.” Every time we speak, we create a road of some sort. The quality of that road, and how far it goes, will be directly related to the integrity of our word.

Speaking With Integrity

What exactly is integrity? According to the dictionary, integrity is “the quality of possessing and steadfastly adhering to high moral principles or professional standards, and the state of being complete, undivided, sound or undamaged.” Integrity, then, is having high principles and keeping those standards consistent throughout all the different parts of the self.

One of the first places integrity issues show up is in our language patterns. When we are “in integrity,” we speak from a place of wholeness. Our words match our actions. As Dr. Seuss put it, “We say what we mean and we mean what we say.” When we break from this pattern and say things we don’t really mean, we move “out of integrity.”

Can you identify someone in your life who uses language carelessly, who agrees to things readily but then never seems to be able to show up for his or her agreements? Do you know individuals who spend a lot of their time speaking about things they have no experience with – who have plenty of opinions but little real, applicable knowledge to back it up? Do you have friends who frequently gossip or who say disempowering things about themselves? These are some of the common ways that people deprive themselves of the potential power of speech.

Language is meant to power our dreams into physical reality. When we “spend” our language on half-baked ideas, or passionate views we may have heard about but have no direct experience with, when we use language destructively or we say things we don’t really mean, we lose personal power. Personal power comes from being in integrity and diminishes whenever our integrity is undermined. Unfortunately, very few of us are taught the skills of using language as an integrity-building force.

Where Does Innovation Come From?

DANCE WITH THE ELEPHANT: LIFE'S COSMIC EQUATION

"Because your life is worth it!"

Photo: c21u.gatech.edu

***THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE COMES FROM http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505125_162-28248286/where-does-innovation-come-from/ AND WAS NOT ORIGINALLY WRITTEN BY THE DANCE WITH THE ELEPHANT TEAM - WE JUST WANTED TO SHARE IT WITH YOU!***

Where Does Innovation Come From?

By 

STEVE TOBAK / 

MONEYWATCH/ August 29, 2011, 9:00 AM

Innovation is definitely a hot topic these days, but the one thing that's fuzzy for most people is where does it actually come from?

I mean, what makes one guy innovative and another, well, just a regular guy? Before we get into that, let me explain a few things about innovation.

For one thing, it's not the same as invention, although folks often confuse the two. Invention is a unique discovery or finding; innovation is introducing something new.

That may sound like semantics, and maybe it is, but at least in my mind, there's one big difference: innovation can be an application of someone else's invention in a new and practical way.

In Innovators Don't See Different Things - They See Things Differently, we talked about whatMalcolm Gladwell calls the Creation Myth: that an innovator may not be the guy who comes up with the idea but the guy who turns that idea into something people can use.

Indeed, innovation isn't a supernatural event, a preordained occurrence that only happens to certain people. And great innovators don't go from zero-to-great in a heartbeat. More often than not, they stand on the shoulders of giants, see things a little bit differently, or benefit from timing, opportunity, or luck.

For example:

• Steve Jobs didn't invent the GUI or the computer mouse, but when he saw them demonstrated, his mind was probably racing with practical applications.
• Howard Schultz didn't invent coffee, espresso, or cappuccino, but he has certainly been an innovator in bringing all that to the masses through Starbucks.
• McDonald's was the fast-food innovator, but I seriously doubt there are any real inventions under the golden arches.
• Bill Gates didn't invent the PC operating system and he certainly didn't come up with the idea of licensing technology, but his business model - combining the two - made Microsoft one of the most valuable and powerful companies in the world.

Having spent my entire career working with entrepreneurs and innovators in the high-tech industry, these are the 10 characteristics and methodologies that I think define innovative people:

Where Does Innovation Come From?

1. Standing on the shoulders of giants. Contrary to popular belief, innovation is often far more evolutionary than revolution, more practical and crafty than breakthrough invention. Most of the time you're repurposing somebody else's idea.
2. Left brain - right brain balance. The whole left brain - right brain thing is a myth, but metaphorically speaking, I think innovation often springs from a combination of inspirational thought (right brain) and practical need (left brain). They say necessity is the mother of invention; it's probably more true of innovation.
3. Belief that you're special. Many, if not most, innovative people have this sort of childish belief that they're special, destined for great things. The thought of doing something new and different - changing the world, as it were - can be daunting. Unless you truly believe it's your destiny, you'll probably be too scared to even try.
4. Questioning conventional wisdom, the status quo. If you even mention how things are doneor should be done to a true-blue entrepreneur or innovator, it's like nails screeching on a chalkboard.
5. Vision. Oftentimes, people just have a vision of how they think something should be. It's really that simple. But they're also driven to see it through, as in the next bullet ...
6. Driven by the need to prove something. Innovative people are definitely on a mission to prove something to somebody and half the time I don't even think they know who.
7. Problem solving. If you're not a problem solver, you're probably not going to come up with anything that anybody will find useful. Control freaks are natural problem solvers - they can barely walk down the street without seeing all sorts of things that can be done better.
8. Passion. Without passion and genuinely loving and caring about what you do, you simply won't have the resilience and stickwithitness to see innovation of any magnitude through. It's never just an idea - you have to actually do stuff with it.
9. Focused brainpower. Athletes will tell you success is all about focus: you can't hit a 100 mph fastball or catch a 30 yard pass with defenders all up in your face without it. It's the same with innovation. Ironically, people who appear to be all over the map with ADD-like symptoms can have rare moments of clarity when it all comes together.
10. Work stamina. There's loads of talk these days about working smarter, not harder, taking more breaks, etc. While I'm a big believer in not killing yourself with work, if you don't enjoy working and work stamina isn't in your blood, you're not likely to innovate a thing.

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