Do Strengths Change Over Time?

I was recently hosting a Q&A panel about Strengths with Brian and Dr. Linda Schubring when these questions came up:

• “How often should I retake Strengths?”
• “Should I retake Strengths if it’s been a while since I last took it?”
• “I’ve undergone a major life change… how much might my Strengths have changed?”
• “We have new members on our team and haven’t taken Strengths… should we all retake it to be current?”

This is common. I don’t know if we’ve ever worked with a client when some variation of this question hasn’t come up. Today on the podcast, we will share the answers that Brian and Linda gave to those questions and provide some additional insights that may help you answer this question for yourself.

Grow in Your Strengths

Our next Strengths Communicator Training begins this fall in September 2022. Our Strengths communicator Training teaches cohort participants the disciplines of hearing, seeing, and understanding the behaviors of Strengths so that they can conduct 1 to 1 conversation with individuals to help them understand their own Strengths. We also teach participants the professional delivery of how to feed back this information to individual participants and a group.

Q: Should I retake the CliftonStrengths assessment?

It sort of depends on why you want to retake it. But as a general rule, we don’t think you need to. It doesn’t hurt, but sometimes it can cause more confusion if your results are slightly different.

Our Strengths don’t really change over time. How we use the Talents within our Strengths do, however. They certainly show up differently depending on the context or what’s being asked of us. Linda says we should “discover the cues of how your Strengths have shifted to survive.”

So, rather than focusing on retaking this assessment, instead, focus on how you’re using your Strengths in your everyday life.

Q: Can we rewire our Strengths? Is it worth trying?

Yes, you can absolutely rewire your Strengths. But it will take many years of intense focus and practice to make that happen. And Brian says it’s not worth it. Instead, we can learn to “recipe” our behaviors to get the desired results. He says,

“…it’s way easier to think about what behaviors of my Strength of [fill in the blank] is needed in this culture or in this relationship. That’s the hope…” not to change, but to understand.

Think about what behaviors of your existing Strengths are combined with others, is worth the work to understand how that impacts any given culture.

Q: What if you don’t like or agree with your results?

Sometimes people don’t like their Strengths results or disagree with them entirely. They think somehow the test is wrong, and thus, they should retake it. This is where it’s important to focus on understanding your story.

When you dive into the examples in your life of when you’ve had success, you can find examples of the behaviors of Strengths present in those stories. We don’t need to get so stuck on the specific Strengths words, that we miss what’s really going on.

Your Strengths Context

What about you? Have your Strengths changed over time? If so, how? If not, why not? We’d love to hear from you! Connect with us at connect@leadershipvisionconsulting.com.