670: Unlock Your Signature Strengths: The Surprising Path to a Career That Fits

Scott Anthony Barlow 0:01:

If there's one thing that I've seen in the last 10 years or so is that our readers, listeners, clients love the idea of strengths. Love the idea that there's a unique value that we can offer to the world in the form of our strengths. But here's the funny thing, when it comes down to identifying and then using our strengths, well, that's where it gets much more complicated.

Introduction 0:31:

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Scott Anthony Barlow 00:36:

When we talk about signature strengths, we're talking about the unique way that your individual strengths work together to make you, ‘you’. If you think back over any situation in any area of your life that you have been truly successful and felt like you were operating at your best, what we find is that once we break it down, you're not excelling because of your individual strengths; it's because of how those individual strengths work together in combination.

That is the difference between what we refer to as strengths and what we call signature strengths. Your unique contribution to the world is your combination of strengths, those things that are uniquely making you, ‘you’. Those talents that are underneath the surface, that make it easier to be able to do different types of skills– skills that we see all the time.

Those are what's on the surface. So there's many, many different combinations, possibilities, and so many ways to your strengths that your signature strengths become very unique. So, defining your signature strengths will allow you to really find the value that you can bring to any situation.

We often hear, "Well, I know my Clifton Strengths. I should be able to use them to excel." But it turns out, there's a lot more that goes into it. Today, we're going to cover quite a bit as it relates to strengths and particularly finding and beginning to use your signature strengths. We will go over an exercise that we've talked about on the podcast, but we'll go over an advanced version that sometimes we don't even use with our clients unless they're in the exact right scenario.

And we'll cover a mental barrier that stops almost everyone from identifying what their unique combination of signature strengths are. It's counterintuitive. It's almost comical. And yet it stops every single one of us, including me, if I'm not careful at all. More importantly, we'll talk about how to overcome that, and I'll give you another exercise that can actually assist with that.

Will it be a magic bullet? No. Will it get you started in, well, on your path? Yeah, absolutely. I think you'll love it. And we'll cover a few stories and examples along the way so that you can see how this can work for you in reality. More importantly, though, and I would say maybe most importantly is, I want you to leave today with an understanding of what signature strengths actually are. And what you can do to begin identifying them so that you can continue to build on them for the rest of your life.

Now, if you think about signature strengths, they are the most true representation of you. They're where you're able to be at your best and your truest self. If we oversimplify for a little bit, that's what it is. How do we get there? Well, it's that combination of strengths.

Okay, let's talk about the counterintuitive way that strengths work. The way that we think it works is that if we know our strengths, we should be able to automatically then use them, right? Like if we know it, we should be able to do it. Turns out not the case. The way it actually works is it's a cycle, over and over.

You get familiar with your strengths, initially. This is a lot of the work that we find behind the scenes, we're doing with clients, particularly, how your strengths are working together. You would then attempt to define those, then try to use them, and observe how you're using them in the real world.

Then that causes you to better refine them to, well, let's say, even how you describe them. And then your understanding, the depth of your understanding, which then hyper-focuses how you're attempting to use them in the real world, which then allows you to better understand them. You notice that we're going in a cycle.

That cycle repeats over and over. It can become an intentional feedback loop for you to understand and then use your strengths and then refine, and then repeat. Interesting note here. When we're working with our clients who have the goal of an intentional career change, we usually don't get into mastering this feedback loop. So this is pretty advanced stuff. The reason why is we actually usually don't need to.

A mid-level understanding of your individual strengths, where you're beginning to adapt them to your own words, is usually enough to make it to your next role that can be an amazing fit for you. Your next version of extraordinary. More importantly, the real reason why we do this is, it's actually not as useful to you. This concept is not as useful to you compared to if you're already in a role that isn't an amazing fit. We observe that you can grow faster and develop faster in your strengths if we've already got an alignment from a fulfillment standpoint.

If you're already in a place where you feel like you can be much more of your truest self. When you're there, that's where you can really start to establish those intentional feedback loops over and over again. So we find that we're really working on the deep level and more advanced level of signature strength stuff once somebody is already in a much better fit type role.

And they're looking to enhance or learn to thrive in that role, where they're wanting to, they already have some level of meaningful work, they already have some level of alignment, and then they're looking to make it better. They're looking to continue to improve on that and take advantage of that and ultimately thrive in that position.

Okay, so I make that distinguishing factor because what I find is that everybody wants to go right to the advanced version. That's also the other way it works. It just isn't. That said, what we're going to do today is give you some exercises where you can use them in any scenario that you're in.

Okay. Now, here's another interesting thing that we observe in coaching. At the beginning of this episode, I mentioned that there's a consistent mental wall or a blind spot that occurs with strengths. What is it? Well, people can't see how what they're doing, and how they do it, is actually unique. Why does that happen?

Well, there's this funny thing that if you're operating as your truest self, then, I mentioned on the last episode that we have a tendency to undervalue if we are operating in a way that is allowing us to... allowing things to be easier for us or easy for us in one way or another, then we have a tendency to undervalue why that's easy and make the assumption that it's easy for everyone.

So that's one way to think about it. Because of that, it creates this blind spot. But there's other reasons why that occurs too. Ultimately, they all result in us not being able to see how what we're doing is unique. This comes from a lot of different places; it can come from being in a certain type of situation.

Like if you're in a bad fit type situation, and you're not getting to be your truest self on a day-to-day basis, like, let's say that you are approaching burnout, or you have been in a situation where you haven't been able to work significantly in your strengths for a long period of time, that erodes your self-confidence. It makes you low both on the skill side of using your strengths but also the belief side, which is where self-confidence comes from.

And what that also means is that as that continues to happen over time, to get to the point where you can then start to see what your strengths are, your combination of strengths are, and what you uniquely offer, we have to actually first then rebuild that belief, self-confidence, and address the current situation. So if you can't see it, if you're finding this, if you're like, "Hey, you know, I've taken Clifton Strengths, and I've taken that assessment. And yeah, it's true, but I don't really get how this is all that valuable." Then that's okay.

It probably is a signal; take it as a signal that you may not be able to see it yet. And that's where almost everybody starts. Okay. Quick example here. One of those situations we had recently with one of our clients, she was in a director of ops role, she was in the culture and environment, she was not getting any reinforcement of any kind about what she was doing, about whether or not it's valuable, and that was just the operating culture there.

When she was in that environment for a long period of time, it ended up by not having any kind of feedback whatsoever– both in the job, in the results, in the people she interacted with, it was pretty resolute throughout the overall culture. It ended up eroding her self-confidence.

So the question in her head was, "Is what I do valuable?" Initially. And then eventually that erodes to "Am I valuable?" Which is self-worth. So when I mentioned earlier that part of what we're often doing is rebuilding that stage, rebuilding that self-confidence and self-worth, that's what then allows you to be able to take advantage from there, having that base, that foundation is what allows you to be able to take advantage of this knowledge with strengths.

Okay. So this external validation, well, it works both ways as it turns out. If you are getting... If you're not getting feedback of any kind, it can erode that base for you, it can erode that foundation. If you're getting negative feedback because of your strengths, it can also erode that foundation. There's many, many examples. And we've talked pretty relentlessly about the shadow side of your strengths, the dark side of your strengths, in one way or another on the Happen To Your Career podcast and the Happen To Your Career book, and many other places.

Strengths are a reflection of who you are. So how you do anything, in some ways, is how you do everything. And if you're working with those strengths, then you can harness them for more positive results. But also, how you do anything is how you do everything. So your tendencies, your natural way that you're wired, your approaches, without even realizing that it's an approach, is also able to be in a position where it's not actually positive too. It can result in a negative.

Here's a quick example. For me, I have a tendency to be very, very future-focused. Very future-focused. I spend all day thinking about the future. I love that. It's my natural tendency. I do it a lot. Also, at the same time, I have a tendency to be very, very strategic, which has a tendency to make me operate at a very, very high level. Okay, so the negative side of that is I can easily miss, just walks right by me without me even realizing, I can miss both the things that are happening right now because I'm continuing to focus on the future.

And I can also miss the small details, just not even know that that's a thing in one way or another. This makes me terrible when it comes to things like grammar, punctuation when I'm doing something like writing. It makes me often miss details or not think about details when it comes to planning things with my family. It has a lot of really negative repercussions if I'm not careful.

That said, if I know that this is a couple of examples of how my strengths work together, then from there, I can actually plan for that. I can actually be able to work with that. I can hedge against that in many different ways. I can learn to use that and then also build in complement in one way or another.

Okay, so everyone's probably heard the saying that opposites attract. But if you think about it, this is one of the reasons why opposites attract, because it creates complementary strengths. Like if we were to just look at it from a strengths perspective, my wife and I, Alyssa and I, are very different as far as strengths. We share, if you want to use StrengthsFinder terminology or Clifton Strengths terminology, we actually share Maximizer; we're both trying to squeeze every little thing out of every moment.

But other than that, we're pretty polar opposite in so many different ways. It's also very complimentary. When we work together, it allows us to be able to achieve and do things and think about things that we just never would otherwise. She is very analytical and has a lot of that detail. She's very detail-driven in that particular way, which complements my futuristic, strategic, and many other things. Okay, so the reason I point this out is because two things.

One, I want you to begin to recognize that strength is very much a mental game over and over again. And also, you may not be able to go right to where you are using your signature strengths intentionally, consistently. You're often going to have to build a foundation first, and then continue to work up from there.

All right, let me give you another example here of what you can do specifically. I'm gonna give you several exercises that you can actually do. We will include links to examples of these exercises or the instructions for these exercises inside your show notes. And the first is what we've called the past roles exercise. Now I've mentioned this exercise in a couple of different formats. I've mentioned it on our website, I've mentioned it on the podcast, in quite a few other places.

So the exercise that's out there. But I want to give you the advanced version. The advanced version can be especially helpful when we're trying to diagnose signature strengths, not just individual strengths. The past role exercise, let me give you a reminder of what that is. Part of the reason I love it is because it's so simple to do. So simple.

You can literally grab a piece of paper, you can draw a line down the middle. On the left-hand side, you can put all of your past roles. You can start with the most current, what's your most recent role, and then just keep going back. And you can put volunteer roles, you can put your roles outside of work, you can put any roles whatsoever. The reason we focus on roles is because if we're looking at it from a strengths perspective, how you do anything is how you do everything.

You don't use your strengths differently at home versus at work. Sometimes you don't get to use your strengths at work, but you don't use them differently when you're getting to it. It's all your strengths. It's all you, it's all your tendencies, it's all the way you're wired, it's all how your dispositions are. So it's just coming from you. It's your truest self, right? Sometimes you let your truest self out more frequently, and sometimes you don't.

Okay, left side of the paper, it is you all your roles, you've listed those down. On the right-hand side of the paper, a couple of different things that I want you to do. I want you to list what were the areas that you enjoyed the most, what were the areas you found the easiest. Okay, the reason we do this...This is the super basic version of the past roles exercise. The reason we do this is because it allows us to begin looking for patterns immediately.

Often, when we have clients do this or other people are listening and then perform this exercise, they can list out all those pieces, and then we're not necessarily looking for the magic bullet here; we're just starting to look for clues that create a pattern. So we put this with everything else that you know about yourself. And then we start to observe what are the trends there. It might be that "Wow, you know what, I found that it was incredibly easy to be able to answer tickets in support on the project that I was working on." And those tickets, particularly the thing that was easy is it was wonderfully easy to be able to delight the people on the other end.

Because you just couldn't stop going above and beyond and writing them little quips that they thought was funny, but also solved the problem. You know, whatever it is, we're looking for those patterns. Let's say that that shows up in other places. Another place that it shows up is not in customer support, but in emails you have for your day job.

Part of the way that you get buy-in is that as you're sending emails to your team, you're offering those same little quips in order to get buy-in and maybe recognize that, "Wow, this is a thing that is showing up over and over again." We can start to dig into, okay, what is the strength that's underneath the surface that is causing that to happen, where you keep doing this over and over again, and it's not normal for other people to do? That's what we're looking for. We're looking for those clues.

But let me give you the advanced version. We have never talked about this before anyplace else. You can use it in tandem with your strengths themes. Although it is more advanced, it's still simple enough to describe here. In some cases, it can be more difficult to execute. And I'll give you a couple of ways you can handle that, too.

Okay, now that you have on your left-hand side the roles, and on the right-hand side you have your areas that you find the easiest areas that you love the most. I want you to go back, and I want you to add, fill in, now that you have this timeline, if you will, to jog your memory. Add in the most difficult projects, time periods, situations, or facets of that role, particularly the ones that you were able to overcome with any measure of success whatsoever.

Maybe it wasn't a total success, but you were able to create some level of success with any of those projects, time periods, situations, etc. Okay, here's why I say this can be an advanced exercise, because here's what we're looking for in each of those areas. When we go and identify those projects, time periods, situations, what I want you to start doing is, after you identify them, I want you to start applying what strengths you see that were required to create that success.

So we recommend that a lot of our clients start with StrengthsFinder. StrengthsFinder is not the end-all, be-all. I love it for so many different reasons. And without going into the details of all those reasons, I think the thing that it does best is give you language that can then help you to have your first version of identification of your strengths. But here, you can take that language or that representation or the StrengthsFinder themes, in this case, those what they now call Clifton Strengths themes are, there's 34 of them.

And then you can literally list the titles of each one. So I can put futuristic, I can put strategic, I can put woo, I can put whatever it is, and apply that to why I was successful. What was going on there? And when we do this in a coaching capacity, when we're doing it in a one-on-one, here's what the line of questioning looks like from coach to our client, like, "Tell me about a situation where you were successful in the end. But it was one of the most difficult time periods that you experienced, or one of the most difficult projects that you experienced, or one of the most difficult things that you've overcome."

We look for the difficulty because that tells us the true measure of how we're performing. We often perform at our best as humans through adversity in one way or another. So this helps us to quickly center in on an area that's going to help us identify something about our strengths. Right?

Okay, so when we're there, here's the further line of questioning. Okay, when you think about that situation, what happened? What caused you to be successful? And then we started unpacking what caused you to be successful. And I think you can do the same on paper. What caused you to be successful? What strengths did you use that allowed you to be successful?

And then we can literally get to the point where we start listing those out. Now here's what usually happens. Usually, what happens is, people initially will say, "Oh, you know what? It's absolutely my futuristic. It's my futuristic strength. Yep, I totally see that. That's what I did." And then as coaches, we say, “You know, it seems also like you were using your woo to be able to help the people get by, and you were using your strategic thinking about the project in advance, and you were using your…” and we go through the list and help reflect that back to people. Now, the great thing is sometimes you can do this on paper by yourself, you can start to list out what were the strengths that were involved that allowed you to be successful.

Okay, now, this is advanced, because this gives us a whole different pattern set. This gives us a whole different patterns that because now we can start to attach language and start to see how signature strengths are functioning, not just individual strengths. It allows us to see where's the cluster of strengths, if you will, that are allowing you to create success in a variety of different roles, different situations, different projects, different outcomes, whatever it is.

And the thing that this does for you is help to start connecting back that recognition of why you're successful with your individual strengths, and then how they work together in order to create a result for you. That's where it starts to get really fun.

Okay, a couple of warnings on this, though, this is also an advanced exercise, because there's a danger here that you can do this work and still not actually be able to see where you're using your strengths, or how you might use them in the future. If that is the case, one of the things I would encourage you to do is try not to get discouraged at that point.

Instead, try to partner with someone. Partner with a highly unbiased friend who's really good at this stuff, or a mentor, or a coach, reach out to us, this is something that we'll do StrengthsFinder or strength signature strengths reviews, too. If you're already working with us to make a career change, this is something you could talk to your lead coach about and figure out if it fits into helping you with your goal and trajectory. If you're working with us to help create meaningful work and thrive in an already ideal fit, then that's where we're already likely to be working on this, too.

Either way, get somebody else involved that can help you see past your blind spots. What we're looking for in this case, I just want to share it again, is we're looking for where you have your strengths show up and what combinations of those strengths are appearing again and again.

Okay, let's talk about the neutral strengths exercise. One of the things that we also experience is that people have trouble with understanding what their strengths mean for them. What does this mean for me? Like, I have these strengths, I have this language. What does this mean for me?

One of our clients went through StrengthsFinder and said, "Sure, I recognize these things in myself. I get that, yep, this is me, all the things." But embracing the value of those strengths is very different. In this case, the way that he would describe his strengths, there would be a judgment that he would place, he would assign a positive or negative.

Now in reality, strengths, in some ways, are just a tool that you have at your disposal. They are neither positive nor negative. But as we already said, there can be a dark side or a shadow side to your strengths if you're working against them, versus a positive side when you're learning to work with your strengths, and learning to make your strengths work for you.

So think about it as a tool, much the same as like money, for example. I know this is a weird analogy. But money is a tool; it's not good or bad on its own, it just helps to achieve good or bad things. By itself is just a tool. And strengths are sort of the same way. Yes, they are the biggest representation of you or the truest representation of you when you're using them. But it's still just a tool. It can be used and harnessed either way for positive or negative.

The other thing that we see happen is when people are assigning those positive or negative, it's usually coming from an emotional place where they've had feedback in one way or another, typically about the negative side of their strengths, and how that showed up. And that is reinforced over time, that who they are because remember strengths are the true sense of you, that who they are is not great. And that then creates this negative belief and negative bias in which is sometimes difficult to overturn.

Okay, so one of the ways that we often work through that, and I should be clear, we're not therapists, sometimes this can require element that is most useful through therapy. But many times, we can work through that with a variety of exercises. This particular exercise, the neutral summary of strengths is taking your, we might take your Clifton Strengths as an example because we have starter language, and then we'll have people go through their strengths, each individual one, and then rewrite them in their own words, without judgment.

That's the neutral part. Rewrite it in your own words without judgment. So if I have strategic, if I'm using Clifton StrengthsFinder terms, if I have strategic, I'm gonna write out literally what that means to me. And I'm gonna go back over my language and remove out the parts that are positively charged, or negatively charged. Ending with a neutral summary of our strengths.

Now, here's something that we're looking for, as coaches. We know, people are starting to get to the point where they can adapt this into their world once they're taking ownership over it.

The way that ownership looks is being able to put it in their own words and have their own level of understanding around it with their own words. The reason that's important is because until we see clients, and we see you being able to apply it in your own words, then often you haven't gotten to the level of base in which it allows you to then apply it to the rest of your life. You can often do it in small ways, for sure.

But really, it becomes very, very different, and the level of application dramatically increases with your level of ownership over those words. It's strange, and there's many reasons for that. That said, that's one of the things that we see. Now, one of the other things that we see, too, that has a tendency to hold people back is they feel like they are being selfish when they describe what they want or how they want to utilize their strengths.

So often, we find ourselves giving the advice that you need to be more selfish. It's not that they're actually being selfish. If you're worried about that in the first place. If something feels selfish to you, chances are high that you're more predisposed to not be selfish at all. Like if you're paying attention to that, if that's something you're worried about, then chances are high, you are often swung away for the other way, where you're not anywhere close to selfish.

So if we're telling you to be selfish, then what that does is it brings you closer to the center, where you're still not being selfish at all. But if you're going to be able to operate in the truest sense of you, that is going to require doing some things for you so then you can better serve other people.

All right, let me go over another specific example of how we might break down some of the most difficult projects or situations that you've worked on that came out successful in the end. I'm going to do this on the fly. So let's go back to the idea of the most difficult projects, most difficult situations.

One example that occurs. Let's go way back to my HR days here for a second. One of the things that I was tasked with when I became an HR director at, it was actually a food company. And the first biggest challenge that was really a struggle was they were, they had like 30% turnover. It's like 38% turnover. It was crazy. It was ridiculous, like a lot of turnover, right? Year after year. And they couldn't solve this thing. Actually, 38% was an improvement from some of the previous times.

So this was incredibly difficult. I remember, not necessarily being overly stressed, but I remember working a lot. And it really, really stretched me. And so if I think about that, I list down that situation. Okay, that time period, because I took that, and the outcome was over about a year period, took it from 38% to I think it was like 21% turnover, so almost cut it in half. And what did it take? Like, what were the strengths that went into that?

Well, if I think about what had to happen, I had to continuously recognize where the loss was happening. I had to continuously recognize, like, what was causing the turnover. So that was pulling from my strategic side. And recognizing that one of the things that we could do was hire the right people. For the most part, I could see that strategically, we were hiring the wrong people. So if we hired more of the right people on the root side and put our efforts there, that would over the course of a few months, stop some of the bleeding.

And then another thing that required for me, I mentioned that futuristic part earlier, but I had to be able to look ahead, because if I were just really focused on things like training and just really focused on the shorter impact, instead of the long game, then wouldn't have been able to see that, "Hey, this is something where we can make a fix." And it's going to come down dramatically over time to the point where you know, eventually we got it down closer to 10%. And that requires that futuristic portion, being able to look a year and a half or two years ahead and see what might be the outcomes.

What could we envision here? What could that look like? And then it had to be able to utilize generating a lot of different ideas, and then be able to test those ideas quickly, which pulled from some of my ideation strengths if we're continuing to use Clifton Strengthsfinder knowledge. Okay, so then I can go back and say, Okay, well, it's the combination of those three that really actually helped. And really, there's more here, but let's just go with the three.

Now, I can recognize that, okay, that's one combination that shows up. And I can go in and repeat this again. What I find is that almost anytime I personally am being successful, it really is that combination of those three strengths, working in tandem over and over again that just shows up again, and again, and agai,n and again. So I can start to pay attention to that and say, "Okay, well, what are ways that I can develop that in the future?"

That again is the feedback loop I mentioned earlier, and how you can use feedback from situations that you handled really well to reiterate the combination of strengths you're using at times when you feel like you're operating at your best.

Okay, we've covered a lot. So I want to give you some specific action items to take away from this episode. Because, as it turns out, knowledge is fun, it can be amazing, it can be entertainment, but that's what it is if you don't put it to use.

So you can find the links to all of what we talked about in the show notes. But first and foremost, if you're starting out with strengths, I would encourage you to take the Clifton StrengthsFinder assessment. We'll link you to get access to it on our site. It's a pretty tiny fee to be able to take it.

And it's gonna give you a first version of your strengths verbiage so that you can take that, begin to understand it, work with it, and figure out what is in fact true for you. We also went through the past roles exercise, neutral strengths exercise, and difficult situation exercise, and I highly recommend completing all of them because you'll come out with a much clearer picture of your signature strengths. But the first one I would say to complete is that past roles exercise. Do it solo.

And then secondarily, after you do the basic version of the past roles exercise, which you'll be able to find in the show notes, then you're ready for the advanced version. Keep in mind, with the advanced version, you probably want to do it with somebody else– a friend, a mentor, a career coach, someone that's going to help you make more sense of it.

Because it truly has advanced this difficult to see what you're not seeing because of those natural strengths' blinders. Okay. Finally, I want you to begin to take ownership. Ownership of the language that you use for your signature strengths, and what truly makes you, ‘you’. So this is where you're going to be able to use that neutral strength exercise where you begin to define it.

It being your signature strengths, in your own words, your own verbiage, and what that specifically means to you. This is the point where you can graduate into using, understanding, and articulating your signature strengths. If you're already in role, by the way, that's a great fit for you; that's going to be a little bit easier.

And if you're not, it's not that you can't do it, but it will allow you to be able to, it'll be a little bit more difficult, it allows you to develop your strengths at a more rapid rate. And if you use them more frequently, pay attention, and you'll be able to make adjustments. You can also do this outside of work too. The other areas where you find that you might already be well aligned, and be able to utilize your strengths there.

The same observations will be apparent; it doesn't necessarily have to be in your work. These exercises are work that the majority of the world won't do. It's not easy, but it is worth it. Defining your signature strengths will help you figure out how you can work and function best in all areas of your life. So all this work will make everything else much, much, much easier, if not more enjoyable. Pretty cool, right?

Scott Anthony Barlow 36:17:

Hey, if you're ready to be clear on what you want and find what fits you, I would say just email me — pause this right now — scott@happentoyourcareer.com. Put “Conversation” in the subject line. I'll connect you with somebody on my team, the right person on my team, who can help you discover your ideal career profile. Again, it's scott@happentoyourcareer.com.