There's been a lot of talk over the past decade about strengths, talents and gifts.
In Christian and faith based circles this is probably even more common. A search on Amazon for "spiritual gifts" yielded 2,195 results!
There's tons of different strengths assessments and different tools to help you discover your strengths. Many of them are very good and can help you discover and become more clear on your strengths and what God's placed you here to do.
However, even after doing all the strengths assessments. I've found the single best assessment of my strengths has been to discover them for myself.
As I prayed about my strengths, it was very difficult to find what my strengths were. It's easy to take a test and have someone else tell you what your strengths are, but it's much more difficult to have to discover it on your own.
After much prayer, thought, effort, and dialogue with others, I've established that I have 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
Discovering your strengths, talents and gifts as a leader can work wonders on your leadership. Especially if you're able to develop and deploy your gifts, then teach others in your organization to do the same.
What are your strengths?