Last week I turned 22. I felt anticipation leading up to that day. A strong pull for the days leading up to my birthday to be over already. Then I could get over being a year older. Not sure why, but it was difficult to reflect on what I wanted to change about myself. 

Sure I could ask for more capacity, like for the energy or the tolerance to endure difficult situations or the room in my heart to grow for people in my life. The thing is, I've always asked for these things: for more patience, more strength, more wisdom. I want to share, that these things often also come from honing who we naturally are; the strengths that make up who we are. This year I plan to rely on my natural strengths instead, in order to guide my goals and expectations for myself.

The Clifton Strengths Finder

I read the strengths finder 2.0 book almost a year ago, the book described the idea of unique strengths and the fact that everyone is born with natural strengths and abilities that prevail throughout a person's life. These skills are natural to us and it can benefit us to understand them and build them up in order to apply them in our interests. Based on research it was found that we have 5 top themes or strengths in our lives, (it is possible to have many of the unique strengths-- the book describes over 30 something). We can benefit from understanding these strengths in order to guide our careers, relationships, and life paths. 

Coincidentally for class, this month, I took the Clifton strengths finder assessment to determine my top 5 strengths.

They are:

1. Activator, 2. Significance, 3. Achiever, 4. Competition, 5. Adaptability.

It was neat to see how these strengths could come together to form a personality, at least for myself. As my professor mentioned in class, "The best way to work well in a team, is to be a better team member," this can't happen without understanding ourselves and how we might interact with others.

Here are some snippets of my final reports from the assessment, you can expect to have unique paragraphs/descriptions with the themes : 

This is quite an open-ended post for now as I progress on some methods and applications of my strengths throughout some time.

But leave me a comment below, what are your strengths? How do you plan to use them this year? Have you taken the Gallup Strengths Finder test; what do you think of it?

I am personally interested to see how my strengths can mesh with the strengths of others in a team setting throughout this engineering capstone course. 

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