CliftonStrengths for Writers
After hearing about CliftonStrengths (and Becca Syme’s Strengths for Writers program) on several writing podcasts, I checked out the course via Syme’s Better-Faster Academy to learn more about them.
The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it.―
What are the CliftonStrengths?
Developed by Gallup (the poll people) in the 1990s under the leadership of Donald Clifton, the CliftonStrengths are a method to find and unlock personal potential. They do this via a proprietary set of 34 themes grouped into four domains of leadership strengths.
According to Gallup, each theme is “a category of talents, which are defined as recurring and consistent patters of thought, feeling, or behavior.” Here are the 34 themes, organized into the four leadership domains.
The purpose of determining your CliftonStrengths is to help you focus on what you’re naturally talented at. Clifton, an educational psychologist, hypothesized that a person could better achieve success by focusing effort on developing one’s natural talents, turning those talents into strengths.
To identify natural talents, they developed the CliftonStrengths assessment tool. This online assessment requires you to respond to a series of 177 paired statements. It presents each statement as a spectrum with an option at each end. Sometimes the options are contradictory, but often, they’re complimentary. While the choice between many of the statements was clear, at times, both statements described me and at others, neither did. When that happened, I opted for the neutral choice. You don’t get long to ponder the choices because the assessment is timed. It provides only 20 seconds for you to read and make your selection per pair of statements.
At the conclusion of the assessment, Gallup emails a report of your CliftonStrengths. Fun fact: with 34 themes, there are 278,256 combinations of top 5 strengths. Here is a 2014 technical report about the development, validation, or reliability of the assessment tool.
Syme’s Strengths for Writers Course
When I signed up, the Better-Faster Academy gave me a code to use on the Gallup site. This allowed me to take the full CliftonStrengths 34 test ahead of the start of the course. At the conclusion of the assessment, Gallup emailed several personalized reports. These included a Signature Theme Report, A Strengths Insight Guide for my top 5 themes, and my CliftonStrengths 34 Results report. Gallup also provides a series of short videos to describe the characteristics related to each theme.
Besides the materials from Gallup, the Strengths for Writers course also provided me with a personalized report on my top 10 CliftonStrengths. The discussion of each strength included Syme’s definition, how the strength can be helpful and hurtful, and how each strength can be used by writers.
Like Gallup, Syme created a series of videos for her coaching community. They focus each video on one strength. All the videos begin with Syme chatting with a coach about what the strength is and how writers can use it. The video then switches to a panel of writers who have that strength in their Top 5. Each writer then discusses how the strength applies to them and their writing.
But wait, there’s more!
In addition to all the above, the Strengths for Writers program also provides two private coaching sessions. During these sessions, the coaches discuss your strengths and pain points. Afterward, you develop an action and strategy plan to make the most of your strengths. Syme and several of the Better-Faster Academy coaches are Gallup-certified to be strengths coaches, and have a deep understanding about both the CliftonStrengths and how writers can best use them. The class is a combination of self-directed learning and coaching, so there aren’t classroom discussions, and the lectures are more focused on how to think about your results than on how to apply them. However, joining the course also provides access to private forum groups specific to your top 10 strengths, so if you want to process your strengths with a larger community, you’ll have the option.
My Top 10 CliftonStrengths
One of the first things I noticed upon receiving my report was how out of balance my CliftonStrengths are. Five of my top ten come from the Strategic Thinking domain, and I had none of the Influencing domain themes in my top ten. Here’s a visual representation of my full 34, based on the 4 domains.
The top 10 CliftonStrengths are what Gallup recommends we strengthen, and the rest of the themes are in the “navigate” section.
- Strategic
- Learner
- Relator
- Futuristic
- Individualization
- Achiever
- Ideation
- Empathy
- Intellection
- Deliberative
My Takeaways
The strategy of focusing on my natural talents, instead of working on what I’m not good at, was liberating. I mean, in business, it makes sense to capitalize on what you’re good at. But in academia, the focus and effort always seemed to be on shoring up our weaknesses.
I believe in the Law of Attraction, that what you focus on is what you bring into your life. Given that, it makes sense to prioritize what we’re good at and enjoy. I found the CliftonStrengths assessment and program useful in helping me identify my natural talents. Syme’s program then gave me a path for me to develop them (via learning and practice) into a strength.
While you can take the assessments (Top 5 or Full 34) from Gallup directly, Gallup’s information is broad and business focused. So if you’re curious about how your CliftonStrengths apply to your writing, I’d recommend you go through the Better-Faster academy. Not only do they provide writer-specific content, their coaching is terrific. If the full Strengths for Writers course is too much, they have smaller coaching programs available too.
A Deeper Understanding of Self
Unlike a personality test, understanding my strengths has changed how I think about writing, revising, and marketing my stories. I find I trust my intuition more. When I’m not ready to proceed, I give myself the grace to think about an idea before jumping in. I no longer worry about my constant future-focus. I’m also more willing to trust that my current process is exactly right for me, at this point in time.
When I hit resistance, I think about the why, in relation to my strengths. No longer is the answer as simple as “I’m feeling lazy”. Instead, I consider which of my strengths might cause friction for me and use the knowledge I’ve gained to move forward.
Understanding my strengths has also given me freedom from comparing my journey against the progress of others. While we writers may be focused on similar destinations, I now have a better understanding of how we’re all on our own paths. Moreover, each of us will use a unique set of strengths to get there!
Do you know what your CliftonStrengths are?
Header Photo by Art Lasovsky on Unsplash