Now discover your strengths...

The other day, my aunt recommended that I try this book, "Now Discover Your Strengths," by Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton. It's premise is that people spend too much time trying to minimizing their weaknesses when they should instead be finding time to maximize their strengths. People don't spend enough time nurturing their talents and abilities, which is silly, because these are the things that will push us onto bigger and better things. Rather we waste a lot of effort forcing ourselves into uncomfortable situations so that we can feel less deficient. While I don't completely agree - I think that if you see a weakness in an area and you want to get better at it, there's nothing wrong with that. At the same time however, we should spend more time being aware of our strengths - our familiarity with them will help us make better decisions.

The book discusses 34 potential strengths or themes that each person could have, and provides a password for an online test so that you can discover your five dominant themes. After the test, I found out that my themes are:

• Arranger: I'm an organizer.
  
• Individualization: It's all about the individual and why they're unique
  
• Responsibility: Well that speaks for itself.
  
• Harmony: "In your view we are all in the same boat, and we need this boat to get where we are going. It is a good boat (lol). There is no need to rock it to just to show that you can."
  
• Significance: It's all about me! me! me!
  

Isn't that kind of interesting? I recognize each of these elements in myself, but I never thought that these five traits would be my dominant five. Arranger - well, that makes sense, I like to plan things and I adapt easily, because I can rearrange things as I see fit. Individualization - totally didn't see that one coming, I always thought I was more of a generalist. Responsibility - I am an older sister lol! Harmony - always has been important to me, but I've learnt the value of confrontation and arguing at Columbia. Significance - surprises me actually. Now I just have to see how the pieces all fit together...