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Monthly Archives: March 2008

StrengthsFinder Part 1 of 6 Introduction

Updated 5/10/08: This is part 1 of my 6-part series on my StrengthsFinder 2.0 results. I’ll update this post as I complete the other parts of the series.

  1. Introduction
  2. Intellection
  3. Adaptability
  4. Learner
  5. Analytical
  6. Connectedness

I listed my StrengthsFinder 2.0 results in an earlier post, with no commentary about the ideas in the book or the details behind each talent theme. Maybe you have heard of it. Here is a little background.

sundial
Photo by Wally Gobetz

The Gallup organization has been studying human strengths for 40 years, and they developed the Clifton StrengthsFinder assessment to help people discover and develop their talents. It’s a quick online tool that will report to you your top five dominant talent themes, along with a customized detailed guide and action planner.

Talents are your natural ways of thinking, feeling, or behaving. Strength is the ability to provide consistent near-perfect performance. Talents, knowledge, skills, and practice combine to create your strengths. To build your strength, you must invest in your innate talent with time spent practicing, developing skills, and building knowledge.

The StrengthsFinder assessment differs from the Myers-Briggs profile test, in that it focuses on finding and developing your dominant talents as opposed to providing a general description of your personality profile.

The Gallup people found lots of talents and were able to group them into 34 unique talent themes. Discovering your talents is only the beginning, because then it is up to you to take action, to invest in yourself, in order to develop your strengths. Why is it important to understand what your natural talents are? Because a talent is a multiplier of investment. You can study something a whole lot, practice long hard hours, and it will never become one of your strengths if you don’t have a talent to multiply all that studying and practice.

We are more engaged and happy when working in our strengths than when working at something for which we have no talent. The Gallup studies discovered that people have several times more potential for growth when they invest energy in developing their strengths instead of correcting their deficiencies. The book challenges the traditional “find your weaknesses and work on improving them” idea, calling such activity “the path of most resistance.” Their bottom line: “You cannot be anything you want to be – but you can be a lot more of who you are already are.”

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I first heard about StrengthsFinder in its first incarnation, when I heard about the book Now, Discover Your Strengths. Then someone on my team at work had gotten into StrengthsFinder 2.0, then got our manager involved, and she financed everyone’s purchase of the book because she believed in it so much. I’m glad she did, because I’ve found it all very beneficial.

I will write a detailed post for each of my top five talent themes. I’ll write how I initially reacted to the report and the theme description , and I’ll relate what I learned and where I went from there. To recap, here are my Top 5, in descending order:

  1. Intellection – “People who are especially talented in the Intellection theme are characterized by their intellectual activity. They are introspective and appreciate intellectual discussions”
  2. Adaptability – “People who are especially talented in the Adaptability theme prefer to ‘go with the flow.’ They tend to be ‘now’ people who take things as they come and discover the future one day at a time.”
  3. Learner – “People who are especially talented in the Learner theme have a great desire to learn and want to continuously improve. In particular, the process of learning, rather than the outcome, excites them.”
  4. Analytical – “People who are especially talented in the Analytical theme search for reasons and causes. They have the ability to think about all the factors that might affect a situation.”
  5. Connectedness – “People who are especially talented in the Connectedness theme have faith in the links between all things. They believe there are few coincidences and that almost every event has a reason.”

Every Week

I’ve started a creative photography project with one of my best friends in the whole world, Melinda Miller. Over the years, we’ve encouraged each other’s artistic pursuits—writing, drawing, painting, shooting photos, etc.

I started an art journal swap with her over a year ago. We draw or paint something in one of two Moleskines—a small sketchbook and a Japanese book—and get togther periodically to swap them and create the next work. And so on, and so on. That project hasn’t moved as fast as either of us woud have liked, I think, but to our credit we haven’t stopped and are going to make it to the ends of the journals. At some point I want to scan the pages and display them in a section of this web site.

The new project is our first photography collaboration. I was inspired by another site where two friends, thousands of miles apart, posted pictures every day to a common site, and I figured we could do that, too. Not only were the shots really good, but also the project as a whole was impressive. Melinda and I knew we couldn’t realistically commit to shooting and posting a photo every day. But we decided we could shoot and post one photo every seven days. We first talked about it a year ago or more, but we finally started a month ago. We post one photo each to our site, Every Week, on Sundays. We just posted the shots for Week 4.

We decided the first week would be portraits of each other, shot after a lunch at Panera. The second week would be self-portraits. After that, it would be a free-for-all. Melinda is a great photographer. Go see for yourself.

One of the reasons why I wanted to get this project off the ground was to force both of us to shoot more photos, to create more, and in the process I hoped we would be thinking and seeing more artistically all the time. I struggled to find my rhythm in the third week, but last week I started to hit my stride, shooting more and looking for more opportunities. The project has had the same effect on Melinda—she told me that she’s been shooting a lot this week and even had a hard time choosing just one photo to post for Week 4. I’m really excited about it, because I can see that what I had hoped would happen is actually happening.

So watch and see what the upcoming year looks like through our lenses. I will still be posting occasional photos over in my Flickr photostream, but the majority of the best of my new and old shots will go into my new photo gallery here, which is just getting underway.

Hooked on chart junk

I found the Song Chart group on Flickr by accident the other day. What you do is pick a song, create a chart or graph that illustrates the song, and post it to the Flickr group. The cheesier you can make the chart, the drier the humor, the more ridiculous the graphic effects, the better. And it’s best if you make it a good puzzle, and don’t list the song name or even the artist in the chart or title. I love stuff like this. It’s right up my alley. When the group was first formed, there were something around 140 pictures in it. I raced through them all. Most of them are very clever, and some of them are brilliant. I was instantly hooked.

Right away, a handful of charting opportunities came to my mind. In just a few minutes, I made this one and posted it (click to enlarge):

Song Chart 03

The response was phenomenal. It rapidly shot up over the next 24 hours to enter into my top 10 most-viewed pictures ever. I’ve got photos that had been there in my Flickr photostream for years whose position at the top were being threatened by this little thing that had only been alive for one day. Now I was finally getting to experience what it was like to be part of a hot Flickr fad. The first three charts I had posted all at once were proving to be among the more popular ones in the Song Chart group, especially that one about levees. More and more ideas occurred to me, I took a few minutes and created a couple more, and they also took off.

Then I took a concept-mapping view to a popular song by Barenaked Ladies, “The Old Apartment” (click to enlarge):

Song Chart 06

Not only did this fulfill all the nerdy promises of the Song Chart group, what with its cold examination of a loudly emotional song, but also I made the physical shape of the map resemble a crooked house. The popularity streak of this one diagram was, in a word, meteoric. Before this chart, my most popular photo, by number of views, was a black-and-white shot of a pencil and some notebooks. That one had been in my Flickr photostream for just over two years and had a respectable 1,700+ views and had been marked as a favorite by 14 other Flickr users. This one song chart racked up over 2,200 views, six faves, and six comments in less than 48 hours.

So far I’ve posted nine charts to the pool. Making these is a lot of fun, and a stimulating mental diversion for the end of a day. They don’t take much time to think up, but the more clever I can execute the ideas, the more rewarding the feedback is when someone gets the joke. I think I will keep making song charts, but I’ll stop posting them to Flickr. I don’t want them to take over my photostream any more than they already have. I’ll still post the really good ones.