Hi Tasha here with Emerge Sales Training, and our mission here at Emerge helps students give hope, confidence, and skills to network marketers that want to help people.
Today what I want to talk to you about are the three reasons that you won’t like my training on strengths, but before we do that you may want to check out some of our courses and you can check them out EmergeSalesTraining.com/courses.
Okay, so why would I start any bit of content with three reasons you won’t like my strength training, or training on strength? What I specifically am referring to is Gallup’s content around Strengths Finder 2.0 and then Strengths Based Leadership. And why would I start off like that? Well, I just think that you should know, because pretty soon here we’re gonna make a course on it, and I guess I just want to level with you a little bit.
So three reasons you won’t like my strength training: Number One – I don’t think that knowing your strengths creates customers. The number one function of business is to create customers and to help them. Just talking about strengths and discussing them doesn’t, in fact, create customers. We still have to do the things, we still need to set up appointments, we still need to recruit people, we still need to coach people, we still need to build team culture. Some other things that still need to have happened regardless of strengths are we need to have a budget, we need to manage our time in a way that is effective enough based on our strengths, but we still need to do it. We can’t just set aside the things that we need to do to help customers while we are engaging in this self-awareness process.
So Strengths Finder work is a self-awareness process. It’s professional development, it is not in and of itself a revenue generating activity, so we need to sure that we understand that.
The second reason that you won’t let you may not like my training on strengths is that I do think we need to be aware of our strengths. I’ll actually explain my strengths in a bit. We need to be aware of our strengths, we need to tip the scales toward our strengths. I don’t think we need to try to build our weaknesses into strengths, but we do need to know what they are.
So I think there’s really two things we need to look at that are not just focusing on your strengths. The first is what are our strengths, like when it sends a state of stress, and the second is where are we low, what are our bottom five? I feel the bottom five are just as important as knowing our top five. After I’ve been working with this over the past several years and really intensely over the past past few months, a lot of my clients and a lot of our students have been working on Strengths Based Leadership concepts.
So here’s an example: there is a strength called adaptability. The meaning of adaptability is creating alternate ways to proceed. Now when that strength isn’t in a state of stress, that’s a good thing. But when that adaptability is stressed, what it starts to look like is “I just live in the moment, I’m not gonna make any plans.” We think adaptability people have loose plans that can be flexible, they’re really, really flexible, but that’s not the same thing as “I’m not gonna make any plans and I’m gonna show up late everywhere because I’m adaptable.” That would be adaptability in stress.
One of my strengths is Maximizer, and Maximizer is actually by definition an obsession with strengths. What maximizers do is they are obsessed with making something that’s already strong, making it super, making it amazing, and that is a good thing in and of itself. However, in a state of stress, what I do is I just start maximizing every single area of the business and create chaos for everyone when I work. Because to me that’s the answer to whatever is stressing me out, and so I just start turning up the dial on everything and it’s not a good situation. That would be my strength, and stress now the other piece is where we don’t have strength: our bottom five.
One of my bottom fives is empathy, and I did a previous podcast on this which is “Why Your Greatest Weakness Might Be Your Greatest Strength”, which you can look up. I don’t have the strength of empathy, which is really connecting with people’s feelings and understanding them. So I hit a lot of situations that makes me kind of awkward, where I could be face to face with someone that I’m coaching and they’re really upset, they’re crying, I just can’t even and actually respond in an appropriate way. Now, I think that that’s important that I understand that so that I can create a workaround for how I can handle the situations, which leads me to the next reason that you might not like my strength training.
It is because I believe that sometimes you need to suck it up even if it’s not your strength. I do think that we should try our best to operate in the 80/20 rule where 80% of our activity is focused in our top 10 strengths and the other 20%, it’s just kind of stuff we have to do whether you’re good at it or not; and I just want to be careful that when I’m training people if they are under my care that it doesn’t create this, “Well, that’s not my strength, so you don’t have to do it.
So strengths based work is specifically around focusing and developing your strengths and managing weaknesses. It doesn’t mean you’re not trying to turn your weakness into a strength, but sometimes you do need to manage it. So I do think there are some times they’re going to need to suck it up.
My last strength is adaptability. I’m not that adaptable. I don’t like schedule changes and all that, but sometimes I just need to suck it up, sometimes we just have to power through. Other times we can use a different strength.
I have a client who’s travelling this past week, and she had to change our appointment, which based on my adaptability I don’t like. However, what I drew from was my individualization strength, which is: I can see each situation on its own. Because I’m a Maximizer obsessed with strengths, and I’m trying to make this amazing client into something even more amazing, and because I can see these individual situations in individual people as standalone situations as opposed to getting really upset about it, I was able to easily reschedule and not go into a state stress.
At first, that might be funny but that’s kind of how non-adaptability people are. I also believe that no matter what your strengths are, we can do hard things.
Those are some of my thoughts on reasons that you might not like them, so then you’re probably wondering what do you believe about strengths? Well, let me at least explain my strengths combo to you, because I think this will be helpful. My number one strength is strategic – being able to see relevant patterns. My number two strength is arranger – so it’s command of language and also being able to move things around, which complements my strategic really well because I’m moving around based on patterns I see. My number three is individualization, which means I really honor diversity and people and different strengths. Number four is learning – so I like to learn about strengths. Then number five is Maximizer which is literally being obsessed with strengths. So I do actually have a pretty great combo to be able to coach the strengths, but in all the coaching I have those are some things that I think not a lot of people would really pick up as they’re working with strengths.
So what do I actually believe and how do I use this in coaching and what do I teach our students to do? So there’s a few things I jotted down. Number one I think it’s really important to know this is a leadership exercise, it’s a self-awareness exercise and so it increases our confidence when we know who we are and who are not. It also increases trust with people we speak with based on who we are and who we are not. That leads to increased retention and that’s really important.
On the first point of increasing confidence, I think when our confidence is higher we know who we are. We will show up more than we compare and despair and give up, and I think that’s really important.
Second was increased trust by communicating. It increased team retention, and increased kindness, grace, and compassion for other people. I used to get really, really frustrated with my husband, because I felt like he would complain about everything, until we unlocked his top 34 strengths. And I realized positivity was literally number 30. I mean…that’s kind of how he’s wired, so I don’t need to be mad at him about that. I just need to go, “Well that’s kind of just what’s gonna happen.” And my job as his wife is to support him through that and be kind and compassionate and gracious as opposed to, “Why are you always complaining??”, which is kind of how I used to handle that. I’m not proud of that, I am sorry Charlie for doing that for a majority of our marriage.
The next thing is to increase consciousness of our genius so that we can teach it a lot of times. Whatever our top few strengths are we do it so unconsciously it’s like breathing to us, and we would never just go to another human and say, “You know what I think would be really helpful, if you just learn how to breathe. Let me teach you how to breathe.” To you it’s just breathing, and so we just do it. We think that it’s a human quality as opposed to a quality that is unique for me.
I’ll tell you how how this has really made sense to me so my number one strength is strategic to be able to see patterns and make plans and anticipate that way kind of create alternate paths to success. Well, what happened is I would want to empower my team and have ownership, so I would say things like, “Oh, I trust you; you’re smart go ahead and make the strategy.” Well, the problem is if they don’t have strategic strengths that’s a Herculean task for them.
Now, will they suck it up and try to do it? Of course they will they do the best job they can, yes, but I was putting them in a state of stress, which was really, really not good. I could just remove that burden from them, but I could ask a question instead of saying “What’s the strategy? What’s the best way to proceed?” which is a strategic question. I could say, “Well most of my leadership team has relationship superpowers.” I can say, “What’s the best way to enhance the relationships with our students?” Now it’s the same outcome, but it’s a different question. So there’s kind of two pieces at first I needed to understand what I do strategically, or what I do know strategically is like breathing to me and I need to start actually writing down so that I can bring it into consciousness so that I can teach other people to do the thing that I’m strong at.
A lot of people will say, “Oh well you’re really strong, this helps someone else, but the problem is when it’s your 1 to 3 strength you can’t teach it because you don’t even know what you do you do. It so intuitive. A number one positivity person could not teach my sweet husband how to be positive, they don’t know being positive is just like breathing. So we have to bring all of that into consciousness. What does the positivity do so intuitively then we can kind of map out a process? Relevant patterns this is my strategic showing up, and then it’ll be a lot easier to teach that to others.
The other piece of it is I think that based on someone else’s strengths you can change the questions that you ask so that it really highlights their genius instead of putting them in a state of stress. So I mentioned that as opposed to what are the different ways we can proceed it would be what are the different ways we could build a relationship with our students? Same outcome, a little bit of a different question puts them in their strengths zone. It helps them to have just a lot better content.
So those are my thoughts for today on strengths.
Now, we’re actually gonna do a special webinar, a special free training specifically on strengths. I know this is a hot topic.
We’re gonna do it on Memorial Day, so that’s Monday May 28th. This will be a free training where I will give free training on strengths. Right now the plan is “Seven Days to A Strengths-Based Team Culture” (maybe I will change that by then). Either way it’s gonna be really, really good. I’ve tested some of the content, and it’s been really well received by different students and clients.
So I want to be able to share that with you. You can register for that at Emergesalestraining.com/freestrengthstraining. You can sign up for that, you can share that with your team. So again that is Emergesalestraining.com/freestrengthstraining.
I hope you have a great day!