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By Casey Grey
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I've done a lot of personal development over the past decade. I'm always doing my best to be better than I was yesterday. Am I always better than I was yesterday? Definitely not! I'm far from perfect. I've done numerous events, read dozens of books and listened to hundreds of podcasts. The issue I find with listening and doing all of these things is that I feel like I need to act on all these new ideas right away. I feel like I need to work on my weaknesses. What has become very apparent to me over the past year is that I need to stop focusing on my weaknesses and focus the majority of my time on my strengths. There's a reason they are my strengths. My strengths are who I am naturally. Why would I want to try and be somebody I'm not? The best personality test (if that's what you want to call it) I have done is CliftonStrengths 34® which was recommend to me by Matthew Britt. It pulls out your top 10 strengths with the most emphasis put on your top 5. The goal is to find a way to focus the majority of your time in areas where you can use these strengths. My top 5 are:
Alone, those did not mean much. When I read the descriptions, it nailed me. I felt like it knew exactly who I was. To go a little deeper, of the 34 strengths that you could have, they are put into 4 categories:
The order that you see above is the order that my strengths come in at. The reason I thought these results and this information to be so powerful is because this is what I needed to give myself permission to just be me. One of the things I have struggled with over my life is building deep relationships. Sure, I know a lot of people but anybody can do that by putting themselves out there. This has been nagging at the back of my mind because I hear so many people talk about how important relationships are and how you need to cultivate and nurture them. But this is not me... Yes, Connectedness is one of my top 5 strengths which is part of the Relationship Building category but this essentially is the belief that we are all one, which I firmly believe. This is likely why I feel bad when I squish a bug... "So what are you saying, Casey? Does this give you permission to be an asshole? Are you just going to ignore all your relationships?" Heck no! It's the opposite. I know we're all connected so I will do everything I can to help and the best way I can help is to focus on my strengths. I'm likely not going to send you a text message to see how you're doing (unless you are my wife) but I will happily write this blog post. Will I ignore messages that come my way? Absolutely not! But they may not be long responses. I love to work. I like to get shit done. I enjoy seeing people succeed. I want to help as many people as possible. That's who I am. And I'm proud of it. In conclusion, I would highly recommend doing the quiz if you're interested in understanding yourself more. My wife did it as well so I could understand her more and I have asked my business partners to do it. FYI, Gallup is not paying me anything to promote this. I just want to share something that has significantly helped me. They do have an example on the website but you can download my results here if you're interested:  CliftonStrengths® and the 34 theme names of CliftonStrengths® are trademarks of Gallup, Inc. All rights reserved.
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