Great leaders know their strengths.
Discovering your strengths might come to you suddenly after a little thought and effort, or they might start to slowly be revealed to you over a long period of time. The process will be different for everyone.
In my book I share that I four strengths:
- Visioning – Seeing the future of what God wants me to create and do to further His kingdom.
- Thinking – Generating ideas and concepts that will help that vision to become real.
- Communicating – Communicating that vision and ideas to a group of people either in writing or speaking.
- Creating – Make daily progress on that vision to create new things and new services to help people.
While you go through your own strengths to discover them you might not end up with four. That just happened to be the ones I ended up with. You might have six, ten or two. However many you feel you have is fine because there is no right or wrong amount of how many strengths you have.
When discovering your strengths, focus on qualities and characteristics, not on tasks and activities. This is important because a task and activity can often be part of a quality or characteristic. But a quality or characteristic isn’t going to be part of an activity or task. Notice that my four strengths are primarily qualities I possess. I have great vision, I’m a good thinker, I’m a good communicator, and have the ability to create things.
An example is that I’m a good communicator in many ways. I’m a good communicator when it comes to being diplomatic and helping to find common grown with people. I’m also pretty good at connecting with a person when we’re talking one to one and I’m able to build some rapport to where we feel that we understand each other. And I’m decent at communicating to a group of people. I know how to prepare to speak, I understand how what I say will be perceived, and I know how to use my body language and tone of voice to communicate what my words mean. As you can see, being a good communicator is a quality that I possess. But it’s not an activity.
There are many activities that can take place within that one quality so do your best to find your strengths that are qualities, not just tasks.
Question: What are your strengths?
