There Are No Magic Seeds

You never know where wisdom is going to come from! Just as I was about to switch off the television to avoid watching a gardening show, I heard the interviewer ask the guest gardener a very intriguing question. He said, “Other people’s flowers last a couple of months at best, but your garden seems to last forever.  How do you manage to have flowers that are always in bloom?” Without missing a beat, the master gardener replied, “Oh, that’s easy. I plant new seeds every two weeks.” I laughed out loud at the simple wisdom of her answer. But, of course! The secret was not in any magic or genetically-modified super-seeds, but rather in the application of consistent and persistent human effort.

Just like the wise gardener, if we want our strengths and talents to continually flower and grow, we too must continually plant new seeds. In the world of strengths development, planting new seeds means regularly taking actions such as talking about our strengths with others, helping others identify their own areas of strength, looking for new ways and new places to apply our strengths, volunteering our strengths to help others, and seeking out ways to improve upon our strengths and take them to the next level. 

Most of us, me included, tend to be a little more like the well-meaning interviewer. We expect perpetual blooms from a single planting…and we are looking for magic seeds! We read one book on strengths, or maybe take one particular strengths assessment…and then we wonder why nothing has really changed for us. The reality is that developing our strengths is a lifelong practice that we will never finish, and this is actually very good news. Positive psychologists have identified the on-going use and development of personal strengths as one of the essential components of happiness, engagement, creativity, resilience and overall well-being. Consequently, my wish for you is that you never-ever-ever get finished developing your strengths since it is one of the surest steps to a happy and fulfilling life.

So let’s stop looking for those magic seeds that will give us instant and permanent results and instead start enjoying the process of growing our strengths with small steps that we can take every day.

What new strengths seeds will you plant today?

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If you have never taken a strengths assessment before, here are two great ones to try: 

Values in Actions (VIA) Survey: https://www.viacharacter.org/survey/account/register 

Clifton StrengthsFinder: http://www.gallupstrengthscenter.com/Purchase

Why You Want To Be a Community Strengths Champion™

Your strengths are more than just the “things that you are good at” as many of us have been taught to believe. Your strengths energize you and bring you joy. Your strengths are the ways you act, think, and feel that come most naturally to you. Because our strengths are the best that any of us have to offer, bringing out the strengths in ourselves and others should matter to any of us who are trying to make a positive change in our own lives or in our communities. So why are so few of us focusing on strengths and what can be done to change that?

I think the answer lies in more of us becoming Community Strengths Champions™.  Community Strengths Champions™ are volunteers whose main job is to make sure that the people in their community are helped to understand their strengths and to find meaningful ways to contribute them. Community Strengths Champions™ (CSC) don’t have to be professionals or experts. They only have to be passionate about using their own strengths to encourage the strengths of the people within their community. Here are 5 good reasons why you want (and need!) to be a CSC:

1. Our strengths are how we shine…and how we light the way for others. Our strengths are what we are sharing when we are using our best talents, making a positive contribution, and loving it. Using our strengths is an essential, necessary component of experiencing personal well-being. If you want people to experience well-being then you should help them to discover and use their strengths.

2. Each one of us has strengths, but far too few of us know what our strengths are. We all need help identifying and describing our strengths. We also need to be reminded over and over again that it’s okay that we have different strengths than our siblings, classmates, neighbors, coworkers or friends. Diversity in strengths is a good thing. Some of us were born to fly, some of us were born to swim, and some of us were born to run.

3. Your strengths need a champion. – We all need someone who sees and encourages the unique strengths and the talents inside of us. We can’t always see our strengths or remember what they are.  Way too many of us struggle because we have never received the right kind of support and encouragement to help us keep moving forward with our strengths. We all need to belong to a team or community that values and nurtures our strengths.

4. Our challenges will only be solved by using our strengths. The big challenges we face in our lives, our communities, and in our world can only be solved by the kind of passion, commitment, energy, resourcefulness, creativity, and excellence that human beings demonstrate when we are using our strengths on behalf of something that matters to us. Sharing our strengths is the only way that people have ever changed the world in the past and the only way that we’ll ever make it better in the future.

5. Someone out there will only hear about their strengths if it comes from you. If you understand how important strengths are, then you are now called to share this message with your family and friends, in your community, school, or workplace – wherever your circle of influence happens to be. Understanding our strengths is one of the most important things any of us can ever learn, but many people in your world will never get the message about their strengths unless it comes from you. We all have the ability to show someone their strengths.

6. Unless it’s someone’s job, it will never get done. You caught me! I said I would give you 5 reasons and this is reason #6! But when we use our strengths we are energized and inspired to do more than the minimum. This is another key reason why focusing on people’s strengths is so darn important.  Now back to the ultimate reason for this 6th point. We can talk all day long about how much strengths matter and we can truly believe it. But unless recognizing and nurturing strengths is someone’s assigned responsibility on a team or within a community, it will receive lots of lip service, but it will never get done in a consistent and effective way. Sure, most of us believe that it would be nice for everyone to be helped to “play to their strengths,” but who is really going to make sure that it has a chance to happen in the midst of all the competing tasks, demands, crises, and deadlines of everyday life?

We need people in our communities, schools, and organizations whose main mission and role is to help bring out the best effort and talent from each person by helping them see and share their strengths. Ultimately, you become a Community Strengths Champion™ not because you are greater than anyone else, but because you know that we all have greatness within us…greatness that needs and deserves to be nurtured.

Consider these points, therefore, to be your call to action to be one of the Community Strengths Champions™ that is so desperately needed in every family, school, neighborhood, and organization in our world. Everyone can believe in strengths, but in the end, someone has to help bring them out into the world.

Are you ready to be that someone?

So What Are We Waiting For Again?

I believe that one day we will look back at this time in history and be simply astonished that we tried to teach, train, manage, lead or even just live with people without taking into account their individual strengths. If you are wondering what I mean by "strengths," I mean the qualities and behaviors that we are good at and that we enjoy. Strengths make us feel more alive. If we are good at something, but it doesn't energize us and make us feel stronger, then it is not a strength. Strengths are more than just a feel-good topic. Here's what the latest evidence-based research says about people and their strengths:

• We are more creative, productive, engaged, and energized when we have the opportunity to work with our strengths.
• We all learn more and learn faster when our strengths are engaged.
• We are more likely to accomplish our goals and to bounce back from our setbacks when we use our strengths to help us move forward. (source: http://www.cappeu.com/Portals/3/Files/Why_Strengths_The_Evidence.pdf)

Of all the important things we know about strengths, it seems the main thing that we don't know is…why we aren't we doing more with the knowledge we already have about strengths? Our strengths are the best that we each have to offer. Now more than ever we need people to contribute the best of themselves so that together we can do more than just get through these challenging times but also create a better collective future. Many of the problems we face as individuals and as a society will only be resolved by the kind of energy, resourcefulness, and creativity that is generated by people who are passionately applying their strengths.  So what are we waiting for again? And even more importantly, if you have not already started on the strengths path in your own life, what are you waiting for?

Discovering how to understand and use our individual strengths is eye-opening and life-changing for most people who have the opportunity to do so – but not nearly enough of us have had the chance. Many of us are languishing within environments where the powers that be are unaware of the power of personal strengths. If more of us truly understood the wealth we are squandering by not utilizing our own strengths and those of the people around us, we would no more ignore strengths than we would leave a water faucet running or allow a gas pump to spill out onto the pavement.  And yet ignoring our strengths is just that wasteful.

Helping more people to discover and shine with their strengths is the reason for this blog and the purpose of All Our Strengths.  I hope that the information, tools, and resources that you find here will support you in your personal strengths journey and empower you to help wake up the sleeping strengths in your family, school, workplace, neighborhood, or community.

Shall we begin?