In his book Soar With Your Strengths, Dr. Clifton shared a little passage that seemed so casual that at first I almost missed its significance. In chapter 8 on the topic of celebrating strengths, Dr. Clifton suggests ways to acknowledge people’s strengths. One way is to simply watch people. “As you watch, you take a mental photograph of what a person does. Like listening, watching is a form of recognition and appreciation. We see this in children begging ‘Watch me, watch me’ as they play soccer, dress dolls, stack blocks, play Little League, or dive off a diving board.”

The next sentence caused me to rethink how I relate to other people, “That longing doesn’t disappear with the years.”

It’s true! We haven’t lost our need to be watched. We haven’t lost our need to be recognized and appreciated. What is more natural than to want others to see us when we feel at our best? Isn’t that when children ask to be watched,...

You may see that our business name is Talent to Strength, because that describes the essence of what we do. We provide people with the tools, knowledge and resources to learn and understand their talents and apply them to become a strength. Now, why didn't Dr. Clifton just create an instrument that could tell you what your strengths were? As I mentioned in the last issue, there's an infinite number of activities and there's various performance levels among them, so it would be impossible to create an assessment to identify your unique strengths. So instead, he focused on helping people to identify talents, because Dr. Clifton came to realize that in order to perform something consistently and near perfectly, in other words a strength, we needed to harness our talents.

It's our talents that really energize you and cause you to engage in certain activities in such a way that you find them enjoyable, you want to learn more about that activity, you enjoy it while you are doing it, you...

One of the things that I think throws people through a loop is that it's called StrengthsFinder and yet, as I outlined in the last issue, the results of your StrengthsFinder assessment are not strengths, but your themes of talent. Let’s talk about what a strength is and why StrengthsFinder does not tell you your strengths.

Dr. Clifton's research led him to the conclusion that a strength is an activity in which you exhibit consistent near perfect performance, and that definition is important. It really looks at three things. 1. an activity. What do we mean by activity? There's an infinite number of possible activities. Throughout your day, so far today, you’ve engaged in quite a few activities such as making breakfast, exercising, responding to emails, listening to a friend, or writing a report. In some of those activities you performed remarkably well. Maybe your performance was perfect, or near perfect. And maybe in that activity you consistently, every time you engage...

Once you've completed the StrengthsFinder assessment, you will be given your results. It is important to understand that a talent is a building block to a strength. With that foundational understanding, I'd like to talk to you a little bit about where to begin as we go through your StrengthsFinder journey, or your journey from talent to strength.

A great place to start: read a report called the Signature Themes report that Gallup produces for anyone that's taken StrengthsFinder. It might have been emailed to you once you finished the StrengthsFinder, or you can log into GallupStrengthsCenter.com and access that report. It'll be one of three or four reports, depending on which version of StrengthsFinder you take.

I start people with the Signature Themes report, because that report gives you Gallup's standard description of a given theme. Read through that report, maybe even print it off, and have a pen handy so that you can underline key words and phrases that resonate for you. Make...

My name is Adam Seaman, and I'm going to be sharing with you information to help you live a strength-based life. We, at Talent2sstrength have our own methodology and use a variety of tools to accomplish this goal and we will be talking them over in the blog. 

One of the tools I use is called the Clifton StrengthsFinder. It's very important to me that you get the most value out of this tool possible, and I want to help make the application as easy as possible.

I want to take you back in time. The year was 1996. I was driving down a local highway listening to a radio program, and the person being interviewed, Donald Clifton, was so fascinating that I had to pull over to take notes. I've never done that before or since.

Clifton described the research he had done with successful people. He had studied over two million people who were considered effective in their pursuits such as teachers and business people. He found that the quality they all held in common was that they played to...