In this episode, Lisa & Brea discuss how they were introduced to the wonderful world of Strengths, and how it impacted their personal and professional lives.
Lisa discusses how reading "First Break All the Rules" as a manager changed her perspective on her team members and led her to appreciate their unique strengths. Brea remembers how taking the assessment as a freshman in college provided her with language to articulate and appreciate her unique qualities that were often misunderstood or undervalued.
The co-hosts emphasize the importance of understanding and valuing the strengths of others, even if they differ from our own. They encourage listeners to explore all 34 talent themes and appreciate the value each one brings. The episode concludes with the concept of strengths as "easy buttons" that can make work and life more enjoyable and productive when leveraged effectively.
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Finding Value in our Differences - There is immense value that comes from embracing the unique strengths of individuals, even when they may initially seem challenging or different from our own. By recognizing and appreciating the diverse perspectives and talents within our colleagues, teams, families, and friends we can unlock new levels of creativity, collaboration, and success.
Self-Discovery and Validation - Taking the CliftonStrengths assessment can provide us with a sense of self-discovery and validation. It provides language to help us identify and celebrate our innate talents, even those aspects of ourselves that may have been misunderstood or undervalued in the past. Transformation can happen when we use this awareness to seek out people, opportunities and environments that need what we have to offer, and value our contributions.
Easy Buttons for Life - Strengths are "easy buttons" for life. By leading through our strengths, we can navigate challenges with greater ease, energy, enjoyment, and excellence. Instead of making things unnecessarily hard, we can leverage our unique talents as tools to guide us through both professional and personal situations.
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Share your story! Tell us about your first strengths experience as a podcast review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts!
Read “First, Break All the Rules” by Marcus Buckingham
Unlock your “Full 34” CliftonStrengths profile
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Hey, I am Lisa.
And I’m Brea.
And today’s topic is…your very first strengths experience.
Ooh, I love it. This is a great one, Lisa. Let’s talk about ours. I think we could introduce our first strengths experience – and people could really relate to why it makes sense to bring strengths into an organization, to a team, or for their own self development.
What? Two ladies that lead with communication telling stories? Come on. Who’da thunk it? For me, it was the year 2000. I was a manager for the first time and I read First Break All the Rules. It felt a little bit rebel. I found that book. I could, I was so overtaken by it. It was like, struck with the awesomeness.
It resonated with everything I felt on the inside, but had never heard or read about in a business book and I brought it into my team. So I had all my direct reports do it and I did it. And it was so insightful for me because I had a couple of people on the team that. As you take your team on, whether you’re a new manager or not, you often inherit a team.
And so they’re not necessarily built the way that you would have hired it. And they’re not necessarily who you would have selected. In my case, that was good for me because what I realized after doing the assessment with the team was a couple of people who I thought were really high maintenance. I realized.
Oh, they’re really valuable and I have not been able to see their value because they don’t act like me, they don’t think like me, they don’t get the job done like me. And I had been wishing for that. And what I perceived as slow or resistant to change. Or dragging their feet every time we would try to implement something after doing the strengths at the time it was called StrengthsFinder.
Yeah. And after doing that with everyone, I realized the value that came from their perspective and I, it just opened my eyes so much to how I had really wanted everyone to just be a clone of me, even though I didn’t consciously know that. And those who I thought were high maintenance suddenly could be the other part of my brain that I didn’t have.
And I needed that kind of value on the team and it, and I didn’t have a facilitator. I didn’t have budget for a workshop. I just led my own. Cut Q and a with the team and we spent a half a day talking about our results and how they affect our work and how we could use those to benefit each other and our customers.
And it was absolutely career changing. So that was my first strengths experience. It’s what got me hooked. I used it with every team after that. And then eventually in 2015, started doing this full time, but it definitely changed everything about the way I thought. It changed all the rules. Is that what you’re saying?
Pretty much. Let us rewrite them and rethink them and realize it’s not what you think. I love that your story makes me think I wonder how many managers, leaders are out there just like you were, and they’re hiring for value or strengths or talent, or however you want to say it, they’re hiring for it.
Outside of their company, right? They’re spending time and money and resources when. It might just be a perception issue. Maybe the value is already there in the people on their team and they’re missing it. What an amazing gift that was for you to be able to not just change your perception, the way you feel about the people on your team, but also to be able to maximize what they’re able to contribute.
That’s incredible. It’s such a good placeholder for what happens in work. It’s what happens in people’s relationships. When you’re coaching people one on one, you hear about their intimate relationships where they’re focused on what the person is not.
Yeah. Instead of who they are and what they appreciate about them. You get what you focus on. If you focus on all the things they’re not, all the things that you wish they could be, you’re obsessing in the wrong area. And if you could spend some time in appreciation, understanding what they do bring, where they are coming from.
Even then I thought I assumed positive intent. I thought I had a good perspective on all of this. None of this was, a conscious effort to say, I want you to just be exactly like me, but it was still happening. And I think because we have that, Negative cognitive bias as humans. We’re always looking for the outlier thing or the risk element.
So you look at the thing you need to fix and it keeps you stuck in what is wrong instead of exposing what is right. And leveraging it because it’s so easy to leverage what is right. And it’s so difficult to change what you perceive as wrong with somebody.
What you just described – it’s absolutely – it’s such a stand in for the perspective we have, some of these natural tendencies we have, and how powerful it is if you actually just consciously redirect your brain into what already works.
About them, what already is amazing about them and how you can use that for benefit, for themselves and for you and for the team, for the world. It’s so true. It is so true. And also it’s so hard because we don’t know what we don’t know. And we can only. We can only see the perspective that we see until we have different language.
And this actually connects really well with my first strengths experience. I was on the other side certainly as an employee where I felt misunderstood. I felt undervalued. I felt like my manager, didn’t understand me and I felt like I had more to contribute and no one that wanted what I had to give, no one valued me. But it actually started even before that just.
As a teenager growing up in my house with parents who are fantastic and also very different than me. When I would talk back to my mom as a teenage girl, she heard it as talking back, as pushing back, as fighting. I just wanted to be heard.
My high communication knew that what I was trying to share with her wasn’t being understood. And so I would try to clarify and try to clarify and try to clarify. So her perspective and my perspective, there’s a mismatch there. Yeah. I can just imagine as a communication, so you’re so high in communication and you might be asking questions to clarify and understand and think it through.
And she’s taking that as, Hey, sassy pants, why don’t you get back in your place as my child. I was grounded pretty much my entire life because of that, and if I had known if I had the emotional awareness or the language of this is a talent, it’s called communication or it’s called command or it’s called, whatever.
I could have approached that differently, but I didn’t, and if she had the language, she could have approached it differently, but she didn’t. And so I think whether it’s in a personal situation or in, an employee professional situation, do we value ourselves?
That’s what I, I think. What I got when I first took the assessment, I was a freshman in college. My, my college paid for all incoming freshmen to take the assessment, get their top five. And I remember reading this piece of paper that described qualities in me that I knew were true. I have always known that I’m a precious little snowflake and love that about myself.
Okay. Okay. But now I have this piece of paper, it says these things about me and the things that I had been punished for, disciplined for, now are being praised. Now this piece of paper says, these are good about you. And I’m like, I know. So I think that’s what the assessment brought to me was it helped me to value myself and it gave me language to, to help me.
Kind of refine that and and look for people and opportunities and places that valued what I had to contribute. Oh, that’s so incredible. It’s making me think of this time when I had a one on one coaching with a sales executive and it, his first strengths experience. He was like, Yeah. I think I’m near tears because no one’s ever said anything this nice about me.
And it was, he was reading the report. He’s literally talking about what the report is saying about him. And I’m like, yeah it’s your inputs just reflected back and how these things could be amazing for you. And somebody else. Actually now sees it, puts it in words, frames it up in a way that could be useful instead of these liabilities or overuses.
It’s so cool the way it’s oriented to what you already know about yourself. You already knew you were awesome. You just needed the. Yeah. But isn’t it amazing? And I’ve, I know that we’re not the only two, everyone listening to this has their own story. Maybe someday we’ll have a way that they can come and leave comments.
Do you have a place like that on your website where people can share their stories with us? What I think would be fun is if people left it in the review, if you could be like, come tell us in your review, what your first strengths experience was, where did you get exposed? Where did you turn your mind on to the fact that you’re listening to this episode?
Because you’re at least curious about what it could mean to think from a strengths lens. So yeah, come tell us in the review of the show. Yeah. I love that because also that will help other people find the podcast and maybe find strengths for the first time. So they can have their own first experience.
So great suggestion. Exactly. A nice tie into first experience because they come around and they look at what people have written and say, Whoa, maybe I need to give this a shot. Yes. So big shout out to all the managers out there who are ready to break all the rules. Really encourage you to keep listening here.
To learn how to apply strengths in your teams and at work every day. And also big shout out to all of those in higher education who are making this available to your students. I have such a heart for strengths, at the college university level, because it literally changed my life. And. Gosh, I just said the thing that I always get mad when I hear other people say it.
The assessment didn’t change my life. It helped me to change my life. There’s no magic bullet out there. Let me just say that. But it is so powerful. So shout out to all the people doing all the good work. Absolutely. Yeah. And I like that because you’re introducing that favorite things section and mine for short, just tied into this episode would be go read first break all the rules.
If you never read that book, especially if you’re a people manager, it is really an incredible thought that here we are 20 years later after I read the book, I still think we’re just Back where we used to be in terms of break fixing all the time and only being in problem solving and perfectionist mode in the workplace.
And we’ve come, a long way in many areas, but still it’s not as far as I thought it would be. So reading that book and thinking about the rules and the narratives that are in your mind that you could. Reframe. I would definitely offer that as my favorite thing for this topic. What about you? Tool, app, technique, book, anything that strikes you?
I think. I want to encourage people to spend some time looking at your number 34 to identify the value that it brings. If there, 34 or something that’s at the bottom of your report, if there’s something that consistently frustrates you that’s what I was thinking when you were telling your story, Lisa.
There are people. Who felt like wet blankets or people who would always say no to my ideas or, my positivity got hurt, like often came from what was at the bottom of my report. I couldn’t understand what value they were bringing.
I would encourage anyone listening to pick a talent theme that’s at the bottom of your report and study it and learn talk to people who have that high, learn what the value that it brings and how it can specifically bring value to you, maybe in your work position or even just to the world so that you can appreciate it and be fascinated by it instead of being frustrated.
Ooh, that’s a really good one. So I know I put you on the spot, but. Talking about the assessment itself. What a perfect link to a first strengths experience. If you’re a listener and you don’t have your full 34, because so many people listen, they say, what there are 34. I only have five.
Just go to lead through strengths.com and in the main menu, there’s a link called Buy codes where you can buy codes. You could get an upgrade code if you haven’t done CliftonStrengths yet with the full report. And then you can see that bottom that Brea is talking about. That is so insightful. I love looking at the bottom two and saying, who is someone I know that I really respect and love, and I just find.
Absolutely adorable as a human who leads through this so that I can then transfer their intent onto other people, like maybe the person who’s annoying you and say, but if they’re coming from this other same place as this other person I love, why is it adorable over here? Cause it might just be used very maturely on the person you think is great.
And then it helps you make that transfer so that you can also see the greatness in that person. And that person who happens to be annoying you that day. I love that. Especially when it’s not, when the theme is not natural for you, it’s not the way that you think, feel or behave at a, an easy button level, right?
It’s so hard to read about it. And fully grasp it, and love it. So making that a person, taking a real life person that you know and love. I love that. At least I think that’s super super powerful. Yeah. It’s a great suggestion. Thank you. So if someone wants to work with you, Brea, and do things like, Hey, I’ve got my 34.
What do I do with this? Walk me through it. What do they do if they want to work with you? Yeah. It starts with just a quick little conversation. You can go to my website, which is Brearoper. com and click the button that says schedule a call and we’ll hop on the call and talk about how we might be able to work together.
Spell Brea for them just in case it’s B R E A R O P E R. com fabulous. And if you want to work with me, Lisa, yeah, leadthroughstrengths. com specialize in team retreats and taking people through these first strengths kickoffs as a team. And then I also support coaches in launching their tools to be able to spread this to the world.
With that. I think my closing thought on this is just realizing that this idea of strengths being an easy button for your life is such an incredible thing you can take away. You get your first strengths experience and you realize, Oh, I was making everything a little bit too hard. So that’s my kind of closing visual is imagine it like having A top five or a top 10 set of easy buttons to help guide you through all the circumstances that pop up in your work and your love and your life.
How about you? Hard work doesn’t have to feel hard. When we lead through our strength, when we lead through our strengths, then we get to use our easy buttons for more energy, more happiness, and greater results. And you just heard it in action with Brea leading through communication command with the perfect like Hard work doesn’t have to feel so hard.
Strengths in action right there. So closed up with a bow. Can’t wait to talk to you next time. See y’all later.
“Hard work doesn’t have to feel hard. Aligned with your strengths, it actually feels easy, energizing, and fun! ”
MEET YOUR CO-HOSTS
BREA ROPER
Communication | Woo | Activator | Futuristic | Connectedness
If you need a Strengths Hype Girl, for yourself or your team, connect with Brea at brearoper.com. She’s ready to deliver an inspirational keynote, empowering training, or transformational workshop. If you’re looking for an expert guide to support your internal Strengths efforts, reach out today!
LISA CUMMINGS
Strategic | Maximizer | Positivity | Individualization | Woo
To work with Lisa, check out team workshops and retreats at the Lead Through Strengths site. For 1:1 strengths or life coaching, check out the Get Coached link. For independent coaches, trainers, and speakers, get business tools support with our Tools for Coaches membership.
The Fine Print: This podcast is not sanctioned or endorsed by Gallup in any way. Opinions, views and interpretations of CliftonStrengths© are solely the beliefs of Lisa Cummings and Brea Roper.