Strengths Finder, May 2011

At work we met with a professional career coach - privately last week and as a planning group this week. We read a book called “Strengths Finder” and took a bunch of quizzes that supposedly identify your natural talents and strengths. The idea is that we all have areas that we are naturally good at, but we spend a lot of time working on areas that are weaknesses rather than emphasizing our strengths. By identifying our strengths and emphasizing them we can get a lot further in life. The book tells the story of Rudy - which while somewhat inspiring - he conquered his natural weaknesses - he also devoted years of his life to something he was never ever going to truly excel at and in the end ended up getting a lucky break and about 5 seconds of recognition for all those years of hard work. Why not find out what you’re naturally good at and work on that as instead?
After taking the quiz my initial reaction to my strengths was “wow! I am really a boring person!” I was a little in shock looking at the words “discipline, consistency, achiever, analytical and focus”. I took it home to Isaac and said “I’m not really this boring am I? Where in here does it say I can ski black diamond runs at 8 months pregnant? Where in here does it say ‘enjoys swimming with sharks?’ Isaac looked at the results and immediately said “this is exactly you. You are the practical one.” And I guess that’s true. There’s certainly no way I can call myself an adventurous risk taker compared to Isaac.

The funny thing is that when we discussed our strengths as a group this week, our entire staff had the same reaction: “Wow! you are really boring! You should have been an accountant....on and on....” Hearing that from a bunch of engineers really makes you think hard about your life choices. But in the end I decided I’m ready to acknowledge and embrace these strengths. They are truly essential for mothering. Everyone needs someone who will make a list of things to do and get excited about checking things off that list. That truly motivates me in life. I am not the most detail oriented person . Not a perfectionist. But if I make a list of things to do, watch out. I will do whatever it takes to cross everything off.

Poor Isaac perhaps suffers the most from this achieving drive I have. I am continually trying to check things off of his list as well. And since his list is mostly in his control we both suffer. It sincerely pains me to see tasks stay on the list for months at a time - just sitting there day after day and month after month and nothing I can do about it....

Also a strange realization to have Isaac take one of the quizzes and see that we are actually quite similar. How can this be? He has a few different strengths. His top one is “helper” which does make sense and I’m not going to diminish how nice it is to have a “helper” around. But I was surprised to see that we share “focus, analytical, and achiever”. We just have different ways of going about things. Come on Isaac, get on board with the check-lists already....I’m sure the day Isaac learns to tell time and comes home on time with a check list in hand I will pass out in disbelief and happiness.