Self-Awareness and the Generative and Degenerative Nature of Strengths pt 1

Today’s episode is a short primer, with an activity, in preparation for part 2 of this mini-series. Next week, Brian and I will be back with a full-length episode of the podcast where we’ll talk about the generative and degenerative nature of strengths. We’ll define terms, give examples, and provide you with several activities that should help you and your team better understand how your Strengths give life to you and others. We’ll also deepen your awareness of the ways in which your Strengths may unintentionally be less life-giving than you intend.

At the heart of all of this work is self-awareness. Without a better understanding of your self-awareness, you certainly can’t change anything about yourself. We hope this series will help you become more aware of ways that you’re impacting others and then implement some positive changes to make those experiences flow from generative instances of your strengths.

A Simple Strengths Activity

To understand how your Strengths are beneficial or harmful to you and others, you need to understand your Themes of Strengths. To complete the following activity, you’ll need to read through the long descriptions of your Themes of Strength. Here’s how:

1. Print out each of the long descriptions that you got with your results (or you can use ours here).
2. Using your favorite highlighter or multi-colored pen, read each description and underline or highlight key phrases, sentences or words. What jumps out? What resonates? Use different symbols or colors to indicate how much those things describe you.
3. Next, do the same thing, but use a different color, or in some other way, indicate the things you’re not quite sure of. Perhaps you can see some truth to them, but not all the time. Maybe you’re just confused by the wording. Identify the things that are unclear and mark the.
4. Repeat this process for each of your five themes.

After you have done this, you may notice two or three of the themes that have more marks then the others. These could be more dominant for you. Even if they didn’t show up as the first or second result, you may be using them more then the others.

You may recognize this activity from our episode called What To Do With Your StrengthsFinder Results. Whether you’ve first taken Strengths or you’re familiar with them but trying to better understand their intricacies, this is a great activity to return to. When working with clients, we will go through a more formal process of this we call our ThemePrint Activity and we encourage them to revisit this process every 6-12 months.