Amy Kennedy The Creative Crone

Sure, just do that, go ahead and unveil your inner strengths… Continuing my chatGPT “becoming my own Gandalf” journey.

Side note: I have been a Gallup Strengths facilitator for 10 years and rarely do people know their strengths. I’m not just talking about the prescribed ones from Gallup, or rather Don Clifton the man who started it all. They view their strengths as normal things “doesn’t everyone think that, do that?”

Another side note: Don Clifton first named his “strengths” as talents–but no one was interested in that! Or couldn’t make the leap from what we think of as talents and what we think of as strengths.

So recognizing our strengths as strengths is hard. Unless other people point them out, and then we’re all like, “oh, this old thing, pshaw.”

The first step is to make a promise to ourselves that when someone points out one of our strengths we will not discount it. We will thank them, and if it’s not feeling too cringe, we’ll get curious: can you tell me how you see that?

What if we were bold and simply asked our friends and family: what do you see as my strengths? I have a friend who is adept at this, and I love that about her–I still haven’t done it, but, I aspire to do it. 🙂

Second step is to do/be more of what I’ve alluded to: get curious. We all need to be gosh darn detectives, searching out the clues to our strengths. Think back to a challenging time or moment, what do you remember? How did you act? Did you bring folks together, did you organize the situation, bake a cake? What can you infer from that?

Get curious and be willing to dig deeper–that’s what detectives do!

Third step is to keep a journal or google doc. If you don’t document what other people have told you and what you’ve learned about yourself, you won’t be able to measure or compare anything. I’m a firm believer in journaling for any reason and I will fight anyone on this. Is that a strength of mine?

Bonus step! Reverse engineer: what strengths are you envisioning you need on your own quest (hero’s/heroine’s journey)? What strengths do you know you have? How could the strengths you have act as the ones you need?

I know I need determination and or perseverance, these are not naturally in my wheel house. But, curiosity is, therefor, I get curious with myself and ask, what could happen if I kept going here, or if I did this thing ten more times, or if I tried this new thing? See how that works? I sure hope I do.

I know I have to trust myself more and not be the world’s best negotiator with my own dreams. I would hazard a guess that we all need to do that.

Until next time, be brave and kind and love each other, Amy