What do you want? Most people are asked that when they want to achieve a goal. But I think the most important question to ask is "What do you have in you"? The quote above is a perfect example of the thinking most folks have when it comes to getting their dreams. The second half of the quote is more true. So I ask YOU, are you ready to work your ass off and never give up? Then you will not only be able to set a goal but actually achieve it. Bravo. 

I just unveiled a new part of my website that is focused on the work that I do with Strengths Based Coaching focused on Clifton's StrengthsFinder assessment. I am a “Strength Strategist.” I help companies and individuals identify their strengths and devise the right strategies to put these strengths to work. Each person is born different. You must do everything in your power to help them capitalize on this difference. The question is, do you know what strengths YOU bring to the table? 

​I have worked with the StrengthsFinder Assessment ever since Lu Setnicka introduced me to it when I was on the Board of the Outdoor Industries Women's Coalition. And it changed my life. I now bring StrengthsFinder to both individuals as well as to teams around the country. And each time, I show them that we need to focus on our strengths and not our weaknesses...as we are not broken, it is more so that we don't truly understand what our conscious strengths actually are. 

As Marcus Buckingham likes to remind us in "Go Put Your Strengths To Work", when you were a child, you knew what your strengths were. You may not have known what they were called but you knew what kept drawing you back, you knew which situations thrilled you. And you sought them out. You knew which kids you wanted to hang out with. You knew not only which subjects interested you, but you knew your yearnings and passions intensely. And then at some point, your childish clarity faded. And you listened to the world more closely than you did to yourself. The world was pervasive and loud and so you resigned yourself to conforming to its demands. You had to get into college and study what “others” advised you to study. You had to get a job and pay the bills. Once you got the job, it came with a job description and a performance appraisal and a career leader and a set of customers and to manage all this for you, a boss. In the midst of all of these expectations, your strengths became, if not irrelevant, then merely a curiosity, to be touched on briefly during your annual review before the serious business of your performance and your development needs and your career were discussed (Buckingham, 2007).

Now, as an adult, most conversations at work do not concern your strengths. Your world at work isn’t much concerned with you and your strengths. A strength is an activity that makes you feel strong. It invigorates you, you look forward to it, sure you may feel nervous about it, but at the end you won’t feel ‘thank goodness that is over’. So then it makes sense to look at weaknesses not so much as things that you aren't good at doing, but more so a weakness is one that robs you of energy or drains you. A strength takes virtually no effort to do. You even use your strengths when you are hungry, angry, stressed, tired, over worked, overwhelmed, etc. because they don't make you more hungry, angry, stressed, tired, over worked, or overwhelmed, they make you less because when we use our true strengths, they lift us up and give us energy. So you are walking around work, completely clueless as to what your true strengths are...no kidding you have the 3pm slump...because you most likely are doing work that is far from your true unconscious strengths. Isn't it time to dive deep and really understand what drives you? 

To start your journey on using your strength, consider what is stopping you. You must consider the possibility that what is stopping you is what you believe; that in effect you are stopping yourself.

Still with me?  Then book a few minutes with me to discuss your strengths as you see them now and let me show you how to uncover your real strengths and help you develop a plan to use them...every day, in every way. And benefit from an action that takes no energy but instead fuels you.