Living Your Strengths Discover Your God Given Talents and Inspire Your Community
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars Are You On Track?
Are you on the right track? Do you wonder about why you love doing certain things and dislike others? Do you wonder why you react in certain ways? Are you looking for a better way to make right decisions, enjoy peace of mind, and live in harmony with others. This may be the book for you.
"Living Your Strengths" is an extension of "strengths" research begun more than forty years ago by Dr. Donald Clifton of the Gallup Organization. Clifton researched the natural patterns of thought, feeling, and action of two million people in more than 25 countries. The result is the Clifton "StrengthsFinder," a tool that reveals a person's top five themes of talent – one's "Signature Themes."
A "Strength" is the ability to provide consistent, near-perfect performance in a given activity. This ability is a powerful, productive combination of talent, skill, and knowledge. Talents are naturally recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior that can be productively applied. Unlike skills and knowledge, talents exist within you and cannot be acquired. We must first need to identify, affirm, and apply our unique mix of talents then apply them.
Clifton's research highlights folly of the widely used "weakness prevention" model – to be successful, we must "fix" our weaknesses. This thinking is wrong. Building a life around one's greatest natural abilities rather than trying to repair weaknesses is the path to success.
The book is organized around the use of the StrengthsFinder (provided with the purchase of the book) to identify, assess and affirm our Signature Themes (talents), and how to apply them for growth and life success. There are thirty four identified talents ranging from achiever, maximizer, ideation, individualization, and significance to woo.
The Signature Themes are unique to the individual. According to Gallup, the chance of finding someone with your Signature Themes, in the same order, is 1 in 33 million and the chance of finding someone with your top ten themes of talent is 1 in 3 trillion. Finding one's themes and understanding their uniqueness should help one to gain a better appreciation of how special they are and how special the people around them are – deeper self-respect, deeper mutual respect.
Most of us generally are not harnessing the power of our innate gifts. We are not fulfilling our purpose…we do not even know it! "Living Your Strengths" provides a tool so we can assess our talents and harness them in the betterment of ourselves, our families, and the various communities we participate in.
5 Stars A Good Tool for Church Congregations
We have developed a weekend program around this book to use as a minsitry tool. Those who have participated have been been enriched through discovering their strenghts and how they can use their strenghts in their daily work life. Paticipants have also discovered ways to offer their strenghts to serve at church. The on-line survey is a wonderful tool. In addition to being accurate it gives participants the option to pick a time conveient in their schedule to go online and complete it in a private setting.
3 Stars So now what?
Because the book describes each of the many different talents, it does not get into depth with any of them. It is a helpful basic resource, but I was hoping for more.
3 Stars Just OK
My moms group at our parish decided to get these books and do the strengthfinders quiz, mostly out of curiosity to understand ourselves and each other better. So I've taken the quiz and was given my top five strengths, and read the book. To be brutially honest (which, by the way, is one of my top five strengths!), much like an astrology report, it seems most anyone could randomly flip open the book to one of the 34 strengths and say "yeah, that sounds a bit like me." Conversly, at least one of my five is not very much like me, and actually directly contradicts one of my others. The idea beind the "top five" really pigeonholes otherwise well-rounded people; and, by the way, the book says being well-rounded is equal to being down-right dull.
I also feel this book and test offers little insight to oneself as to what your strengths are. If you are aquainted with yourself at all, you already know that you may or may not enjoy, say, public speaking. You don't need this test to confirm what you already know. Most of what you learn is not going to be a suprise. It may be easier for a large organization like Gallup to screen applicants with this test rather than sit down and ask each applicant his/her talents, it is also unfair in that I think most people will have many more than five talents, and may not even use their "top five" very much.
5 Stars Great price and very informative!
I bought the first book through my church for the regular $25 price…I wish I had ordered on here first! I bought a copy for my mother. It is a very interesting and insightful book and it doesn't lie!
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