239: Using Signature Strengths to Make Your Life More Enjoyable

Scott Anthony Barlow 00:00
What if you could take the very small parts of your past jobs that you love the very most, and spend most of your day doing those things that make you happy and your great at?

Introduction 00:16
This is the Happen To Your Career podcast, with Scott Anthony Barlow. We help you stop doing work that doesn't fit you, figure out what does and make it happen. We help you define the work that's unapologetically you, and then go get it. If you're ready to make a change, keep listening. Here's Scott. Here's Scott. Here's Scott.

Scott Anthony Barlow 00:40
Welcome to the Happen To Your Career podcast. I'm Scott Anthony Barlow. This is the show where we share stories of how high achievers find career happiness and meaning. Okay, that first question that you heard earlier, I'm serious about it. What if you could take the parts of your job, those pieces of your past roles that you really truly enjoy and what if you could expand upon them? And what if those things really allowed you to focus in on those pieces that make you most happy at any given time? Or put you in a place of happiness at any given time? And you also happen to be great at them? What would that be like really? Think about it, what would that be like? How would that change your life? Okay, so in this episode, we're doing things a little bit differently. I wanted to help you understand some of the biggest questions that I get about strengths and help you understand what is the real magic of strengths. Because that question that we just mentioned earlier, well, that is the magic of strengths. What do I mean by that? But I'll tell you what, and let me tell you a story first. In 2006, after I got fired from a job that I just absolutely detest it, I said about answering those exact same questions for myself, and really trying to figure this stuff out. And I moved from this regional manager role that, quite honestly, was a pretty terrible fit for me into a role in human resources that felt like I was on vacation all of the time. And the interesting part about this is it didn't feel like I was on vacation, because it was super easy, or because I wasn't working hard, not on vacation in that way, but it was because I found that I was great at it and I was really enjoying it very, very much so. And this was because in this new role, and this new company, I was much more aligned with my strengths than I ever had been before. The only thing here was, way back then, I didn't really fully understand this right away, I was honestly just excited because at the time, I didn't know work could feel like this at all. And it wasn't until many years later, and many career changes later too and then working with thousands of other people in their careers that I finally really started to understand how much of an impact working in your strengths really makes on someone's life, on your life. But aligning yourself with your strengths, and spending more of your time, more of your life, in areas of what we call your "signature strengths" and I'll tell you more about that in a second, and we've done some past episodes on that, you can go back and look for as well. It's much bigger than just your work. I've grown to believe that what initially started out is it seemed like a good idea that I should probably do this whole concept of working in your strengths and living in your strengths, it actually is really a compelling way to live your entire life and not just your career. Okay, so here's just a few of those compelling reasons that I found over the years that come from research, not my opinion. And Gallup, by the way, has done some really amazing research on strengths in particular. Now, one thing that has been found– and this comes from Gallup, this comes from a couple pieces of research they've done, but the more that we use our strengths in a given day, the less likely are we see a positive correlation with being less likely to feel stressed, worried, angry, or even sad, pretty cool, right? Okay, now get this, just one to two extra hours a day of using your strengths, regardless of whether it has anything to do with work or in any other area of life, just one two extra hours of using your strengths corresponds with increased feelings of happiness. Pretty cool, but it gets better. Using one strengths is associated with increased productivity levels and also increased well being. All right, so I'm a total nerd for the charts and the data that goes behind this. And if you are, too, you can go over and see the links that we've got back to some of the research and some of the sources for this over at happentoyourcareer.com/239 and that'll allow you to be able to download the entire set of resources that we've got along with this. But it'll also link you up to some of the research, too, if you're that kind of nerdy as well. But for those of you who are not, I got to tell you that seeing all of this, not just made a really compelling case, but I started to see a lot of evidence, too, in my personal experiences. For me, I just felt more valued on a day to day basis, I felt more at peace, I felt more content with any given stage of my life, you know, whether it be the beginning to raise kids stage, or whether it be the building wealth stage, whether it be... for all these different types of stages in life, the times where I was spending more time working or living in my strengths, increasingly felt better and better.

Scott Anthony Barlow 06:08
Okay. And now, I've got to admit, I know I'm in a pretty unique position, too, because I'm CEO of a company that helps people move to careers and businesses that allow you to be able to flourish. And part of flourishing– and there's a really good definition of flourishing, by the way, that comes from Martin Seligman, who is often renowned as the father of positive psychology. But anyhow, one of the definitions that he gets for flourishing, includes spending more time in your strengths. Okay. So we've been able to gather a lot of qualitative data within our own business as well from thousands of people that are in these before and after situations, especially as it relates to their careers. Where beforehand, they're not spending very much of their day, on any given day, or very much of their week, working in or around or spending time in their strengths. And then after, they are spending a much, much higher percentage, it varies pretty widely, but a much, much higher percentage. And increasingly, we hear from them that they are happier, they feel better, we get all different kinds of commentary back. But when our students successfully make this type of change in their life, it allows them to spend more time leveraging their strengths. And they tell us that in their life, and in their work, and relationships, and even in their focus in productivity, all of those are better. And one student put it like this... before– he was talking about before I made the change and before I started using my strengths more frequently– "Before, I felt like I was going against the grain. Now, it feels like my career is working with the grain." Okay. And I thought that was such a great illustration of just that feeling and the difference that you can get in your mind, why this is even worth talking about in the first place. Because strengths sounds really nice, but what does it actually do for you? And we find that it really is, even though it's intangible, it really makes a major difference in the quality of life. When we're talking about quality of life, we're talking about things like flourishing and happiness as Daniel Gilbert, who is a psychologist and wrote a book called "Stumbling on Happiness". And as he points out in that book, well, "who are we to argue with how people feel? They're the best judge of how they feel, right? And if they're telling us that they feel happier, if they're telling us that they feel like they have an improved quality of life, well, who are we to say that they don't, or interject otherwise, right?" Okay. So all of these things combined have convinced me over the years that I personally want to spend the rest of my life making sure that I am spending more and more of my time, and of my life focused on working in and around and developing my strengths. And then for me, too, in particular, because I've seen such a profound impact in my own life, and because I've seen what this can do for others, this also includes being an advocate for the rest of my life for others to be able to do the same. And that's part of how we ended up with this company in the first place. And one of the reasons behind it, why we started it, could see this impact, you know, as I was working in HR, as I was working with other people on developing their careers over time, more time spent here becomes worth it. There's the end conclusion. But even though all this makes a pretty compelling case as to why spending more of your time using your strengths is good for you, it's good for your well being, it really doesn't answer the question of "How does strengths really actually work? What are we really talking about when we say strengths?" Because quite honestly, I get constant questions about how this stuff actually works. When we open up the hood, and we start looking at the engine and we start, you know, tearing apart and understanding how does this really make the thing go, then we realize that it often doesn't work the way that we think it does. And so we get tons of different questions on a daily basis at this point now, like, "how much do strengths really matter?" Well, we talked a little bit about that. And, "do strengths change over time?" There's another question we get fairly frequently. Sometimes people have questions about StrengthsFinder assessment, cuz that's one of the assessments that we've recommended over the years and one that we find does a great job in giving you good, useful verbiage to describe your strengths and think about your strengths. Is it the magical end all be all? Or is it the magic bullet necessarily to just completely change your life? No, absolutely not. But it's one step in understanding, what are some of the things that are unique to you, that really, you can leverage throughout time?

Scott Anthony Barlow 11:02
Another thing that pops up again, too, another example, and I'll try and answer some of these questions here as we go along. But, people say things like, "Hey, I'm really great at some things, but honestly, I don't enjoy them that much. How do I know which strengths to focus on?" So these are the types of questions that I get, this is the types of questions my team answers every day with the people that we're working with. And these are all really great questions, especially if you want to focus a career, business, or your life around your strengths. But do you want to structure a career or business or life around the areas that you have strengths? And if so, why? Well, let's evaluate that for just a minute. Let's tear this apart. Okay. When I mentioned the word strengths, most people I find envision skills or tasks or actions, they say things to me, like, "Hey, I'm great at building pivot tables in Excel. But honestly, I hate spending all my time in Excel. It's not what I enjoy doing all the time." Or people say things like, "I'm great at making people laugh. But does that mean I should be a comedian?" And still, other people say things like, "Hey, people give me feedback all the time. I'm a really great project manager. But honestly, I don't want to be doing project management." Okay, well, when I hear things like this, that is my red flag to help those people understand, really what strengths are, because all of those indicate to me that they haven't yet had the opportunity to learn a deeper understanding of how strengths work. And so I'd like to help you understand what's under the surface. Every one of these cases, every one of the sets of questions or things that people say to me that I just described, they aren't their strengths. They aren't their strengths. We're not talking about their strengths when we, and I guess you can breathe a sigh of relief here, because if you're great at building pivot tables, don't worry, you're not doomed to run pivot tables for the rest of your life. It'll be okay, I promise. But what I should point out is that all of these instead are focused on the physical or tangible manifestation of that strength. That's what we see. But it's not the strength itself. Meaning, you might be good at a particular task or particular skill, but it's actually what's underneath the surface that is causing you to be great at it, plus, I would also say your individual practice and development at that scale, too. But it's that underneath the surface part that we're really talking about when we talk about strengths, the things that you can't see. And think about it this way, if you can imagine strengths to be like an iceberg, then the part that you see above the water is actually that physical manifestation. It's the part that's easy to see. It's the skill. It's the pivot table building. It's the activity, the physical and tangible information and manifestation of that strength. It's not the main iceberg itself. It's just the tip. Now, the part that is underneath the water that people often can't see, and many times it's hard for us to see it in ourselves, too, is that much larger piece of the iceberg. These are your actual strengths itself. These are what's causing you to be able to develop those skills much easier or be predisposed to be good at a particular set or provide you that ability or lens to make it easier when you take a particular type of action. And think about it as, this is the cause. What causes these outputs to be easier? Now, when we can start to figure out that's what gives us a clue as to what our strengths are. So these are often hidden from view if they're underneath the surface. And here's an example. I used to work with a finance manager. And this guy would miraculously build some of the best models I've ever seen of how businesses work. And really, really talented guy in a lot of different ways. But all these things would go into an incredibly complex spreadsheet, and then at the end of the month, the end of the month would roll around, and all his projections and everything would be incredibly accurate. Where all the other finance managers in the company might be off by as much as 35%, he was, you know, within about 1 to 3%, nearly every time, right? Okay, so what was his strength? Was his strength of building complex models? Was his strength working in Excel? Was his strength something else? Of course, it wasn't any of these particular things that he just described. One of his main strengths was actually understanding and identifying how complex systems and information fit together in ways that you or I might not even be able to comprehend. But all we see on the output of it, all that we see on the physical side, the tangible side that's in front of us is a fancy spreadsheet, and the fact that he's deadly accurate in his projections, right? But is that underneath the surface piece, that really is his actual strength? And then this can get even further complicated, too, because a lot of times, you might see something on the surface, but it's influenced by multiple strengths underneath. You might have that strength with that finance manager, where he's great at understanding and identifying how complex systems and information fit together, but another one of his strengths at the same time, that also influenced his ability to be able to do all this really cool stuff, was being able to be super curious and ask lots of questions– he had this innate curiosity. And some people were put off by this, quite frankly. But he would continue to ask questions until he had get to the cause. He just had this innate need to understand and ways that were, in some cases, offensive to most people, but he couldn't stop doing it, couldn't stop doing it until he sort of got to the bottom. That's what allowed him to be able to, when combined with his other strengths, put together all of these really very accurate things. Right? So that is hard to understand when you're just looking at, "Hey, this guy puts together awesome models." Right? "Why is he so good?" And we're often confused that hey, our strength is the model itself. Nope, definitely not. That's what's underneath the surface.

Scott Anthony Barlow 17:22
Another thing that people ask all the time is, do these strengths change over time? Okay, so let's say that I know what my strengths are, in the first place, you know, I do understand that their underneath the surface pieces, do those things change over time? Well, I want to answer this question. And the short answer is "Yes, they do. But probably not in the way that you think." You know, another derivative of that question is, you know, people say things like, talking about the StrengthsFinder assessment, "Hey, I took the StrengthsFinder assessment a few years back, then I took it again. And my top five strengths are mostly different. You know, I didn't think they were supposed to change that much, what gives?" And I'll tell you that your strengths don't change that much over the years. They do get more developed and some get more developed than others, depending on where you're focusing your time, what you're involved with, what you are focused on individually, and how you're growing as a person. And those, in particular, that get more development float up to the top. Now, here's a way to kind of think about this, we all have a variety of different strengths and if we're using the StrengthsFinder assessment in particular, which if you're familiar with that one, that they divide different types of talents, what they call it as talents, and they divide those talents into 34 themes. And those 34 strengths themes, they... when you take the StrengthsFinder assessment, they give you your top five. And the reason why that's so valuable to many different people is because if you are focused on those things that are your highest strengths or your top strengths, if you will, then that provides you this way to be able to focus your time and efforts into those areas to be able to benefit from all the other things we talked about earlier, like, you know, being able to have a higher quality of life if I get to spend more of my time in these top five areas. StrengthsFinder, first of all, since I do get lots of questions about that, too, it's not gonna solve all your problems. It's really not. A lot of people get it and they take it and they're like, "Okay, now what? What do I do with the information now?" And it's not going to be the magic bullet necessarily, but what it does do a really great job of is helping you hone in on some of those top strengths and giving you verbiage to communicate with or to understand how to think about those areas of strength, that area that's underneath the surface in a little bit different way. And that's what it's really great for. So there's no perfect assessment out there, by any means, but StrengthsFinder is a great one, if your goal is to be able to understand and prioritize some of your strengths, as well as get a good set of verbage to go along with them.

Scott Anthony Barlow 20:26
Okay, so now let's go back to that question of, you know, "How does it work? How does strengths actually change over time? Do they change over time?" Yes, they do change over time, but it is slower than what you probably think. And you might have not just, you know, five, like StrengthsFinder gives you, but you might have seven or eight different areas that are really your strengths. And over time, you know, one of those might float higher to the top versus another one. And it really depends on how you are developing that and what's causing that development over the years. But in general, you know, from now, until six months from now, they're probably not going to change drastically, you might rearrange the order in terms of what is your top strength based on how you've been spending your time, but for the most part, when we're talking about strengths, which are those underneath the surface pieces, and you know, sometimes are... you even think about it as the way that you're wired and you know, the things that are causing you to be good at those skills, or knowledge or abilities or actions, those types of things. Okay, so let's go back to this final question of, "How do I know what strengths to focus on?" Because I mentioned earlier the example of, you know, somebody saying, "Hey, everybody's telling me I'm great at project management, and guess what, I hate project management." Or, you know, they might think, you might even think, that I'm great at a particular area, but I just honestly don't enjoy it that much. So first of all, just like we acknowledged earlier, it's really the underneath the surface part that we're focused in on. And this is a great opportunity to be able to define what we call "Signature Strengths". Now, a lot of times, you might have heard us mention this on the podcast in the past, where we've said, "Hey, just think about signature strengths as the overlap between those things you're great at or have the potential to be great at and what you enjoy." But when we dive a little bit further into it, what we teach in our classes and courses and programs, and with our students, we even go a little bit further in depth and say, "Okay, really, it's not just those pieces." But we're also very interested in finding, where can you add the most value, the intersection between adding the most value to the world, as well as those areas you enjoy, as well as those areas that you happen to be great at, either through nature or nurture, or the combination of. Okay, so that is really what we're looking for. And those in particular are the strengths that we want to focus our time and effort on. Because we find both through research and practical application, that those are the very, very same areas that you are going to be able to flourish in. You find that those are the same areas that you're going to contribute the most to your career, plus, be able to very likely earn the most, as well as have the most fun on a regular basis doing them.

Scott Anthony Barlow 23:38
So a couple of ways to be able to figure out what those are, we've got a few different resources, and we're not going to be able to dive into all of it, and I don't want to leave you hanging. So I've got a few different things that you can do from here on out to begin to identify what are those areas of signature strengths for you, and begin moving more of your life to spending more of your time so that you can be more happy, more fulfilled, more often. Okay, thing number one, I mentioned earlier, you can go over to happentoyourcareer.com/239. And that's going to take you to all the notes in the blog post and a little mini guide that we've put together for this episode, as well as all the links for everything that we've talked about here. So that's happentoyourcareer.com/239 and that'll help get you started, tioo. Another great resource, I mentioned strengthsfinder, so you can actually go to happentoyourcareer.com/strengthsfinder, so happentoyourcareer.com/strengthsfinder, and that will take you to the StrengthsFinder assessment. And if you want, you can actually get the StrengthsFinder assessment alone or you can even get it combined with a little mini training of three videos that help you understand and dive even deeper into your strengths, how they work, and how you can make them work for you. And also some of the misconceptions that tears apart some of the misconceptions on strengths, too. And so there's a couple of different resources for you. And then even still, another resource, and will provide links to this as well when you go to happentoyourcareer.com/239. But we have put together a guide, that's called the "Ultimate Guide To Using Your Strengths To Get Hired" and that'll take you through some ways to find your strengths and focus on some of your top strengths, as well as give you some ideas and examples of how to leverage them through a career change or through a hiring type process. So there's three different resources that can get you started. And feel free to choose one or all of them that you want to do if you want to dive even further into strengths. Okay, I hope this has been really, really helpful for you. And now that you understand just a little bit more about how strengths actually work, and why we feel that they're so incredibly important, especially as a part of your career, but as a part of your life as well. And we have even more coming up for you next week, right here on Happen To Your Career. I'm so excited to be able to welcome to the podcast, somebody who I have been told we should get on many, many times. And she's written a number of different books, about happiness, about behavior, and a whole bunch of other topics, even Winston Churchill. Take listen.

Gretchin Rubin 26:38
I never thought about happiness. I never asked myself if I were happy. I never thought about "could I be happier?" Like, is it even possible to be happier? Like, is that something you can affect? And I said, you know, I should have a happiness project and I was like, "Babeym! Happiness Project." like yeah.

Scott Anthony Barlow 26:56
All that and more when we bring Gretchen Rubin to the podcast next week right here on Happen To Your Career. Until then, we are out. Adios.