Connectedness | Ideation | Intellection |Strategic | Maximizer
I have these five words around me in several places. They are in my email signature and on my zoom screen. But why?
I have been on a discovery mission for a long time. It’s a mission to understand myself and others around me. Early in my adult life I was told what to believe about myself and the world around me. That world did not serve me well. Relationships failed, and as I became less certain of what worked, I began to search for what would work. I relate to this as my “hero journey”.
As you might guess from the words “Ideation” and “Intellection” I spend a good deal of time in the world of ideas. I read a lot, and my early journey to find myself was in books. One of them was from Gallup Press, a popular book at the time, “Strengthsfinder 2.0”. There was a code for an assessment in the book that I used, and at the end these five words in rank order of my Strengths, appeared. The idea that appealed to me most was that I was not broken or defective, there was nothing wrong that needed to be fixed, I just needed to focus on what I did best.
Dr. Don Clifton during his tenure at University of Nebraska, Lincoln, decided to study the talents of successful people, those regularly occurring innate thoughts, feelings, and behaviors people used on a regular basis. He took several hundred talents and refined them to 34 talent themes he called strengths. He started a company from his work named Selection Research with the idea of finding ideal jobs for people with a match of their strengths to talent required by a job. SRI soon merged with Gallup Inc. in nearby Omaha, NE, and Dr. Clifton is widely regarded as a founder of the positive psychology movement.
My hero’s journey has progressed quite a way. I have taken up a role as guide to other people on this journey; a coach with questions, not an oracle with answers.
People deserve to be engaged and fulfilled by the work they do every day. I’m old enough to have seen the social contract between people and their work change in radical ways. We are four generations away from when I began to work, and each generation has their own idea of what they give and get from work. What has not changed are the innate strengths people bring with them. I endeavor to help leaders understand themselves and the people they work with to make that fulfillment a reality.
Note: The 34 CliftonStrengths® Theme names are Trademarks of Gallup, Inc.
The non-Gallup information you are receiving has not been approved and is not sanctioned or endorsed by Gallup in any way. Opinions, views and interpretations of CliftonStrengths® or BP10® results are solely the beliefs of David Jackson.