Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham

Author:Marcus Buckingham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: strengths, talents, Gallup, human resources, personnel management, leadership, management, motivational, reference, inspirational
Publisher: Gallup Press
Published: 2013-05-29T16:00:00+00:00

Why Should I Focus on My Signature Themes?

The chief purpose of StrengthsFinder is not to sum you up or to offer a full character portrait. Instead, the point of the StrengthsFinder Profile is to help you achieve consistent near perfect performance — performance that is both excellent and fulfilling. This kind of strength building requires a sharp focus for a couple of reasons.

First, although you have undoubtedly experienced some moments of success and fulfillment in your life, the secret to strong living lies in being able to replicate these moments time and again. To do this you need to understand these moments deeply. You need to discern which strengths were in play and how they combined to create either the performance or the satisfaction or both. You need to be consciously competent. To achieve this conscious competence with even five themes of talent is quite a challenge.

Second, when you look closely, the difference between someone whose performance is acceptable and someone whose performance is consistently near perfect is very slight. The near perfect performer is rarely doing something dramatically different. Confronted by the daily barrage of a thousand instantaneous decisions, he is simply making a very small number of more appropriate choices.

How small a number? Well, in baseball if you hit the ball successfully 270 times for every thousand plate appearances, you will be a middling player. If you can manage 320 hits per thousand, you will be hailed as one of the league’s best. So in baseball the difference between middle of the road and superstardom is about twenty-five better decisions per season (on average, a batter will make 500 plate appearances a season). In professional golf the difference between excellence and average is similarly slight. The top players average twenty-seven putts per round. The middling players average thirty-two.

In the world of work, the difference between the struggling salesperson and the great one might be just three extra calls made each week or two more emotional signals picked up during a presentation or one more fact tossed in at just the right moment of a conversation. The difference between the exemplary mentor and the run-of-the-mill boss might simply be a few more questions asked and a few more moments spent listening. No matter what your profession, the secret to consistent near perfect performance lies in these kinds of subtle refinements.

To achieve these refinements demands expertise. You will need to study your strongest themes of talent and figure out how they combine to create your strengths. Pondering them in this way, you may suddenly realize that a small shift in emphasis from one theme to another or a deepening of your knowledge in one particular area is all you need to help you make the leap from middling to excellent performance.

For example, if one of your Signature Themes is Input, you may realize that although you read a great deal, you don’t discipline yourself to archive interesting articles and facts. So you decide to make a slight change in your weekly regimen.

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