The Role of Your Strengths in a Fulfilling Career
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In this episode:
The Role Strengths Play in a Fulfilling Career
Helping people uncover and articulate their strengths is one of my favorite parts of coaching! It’s such an empowering experience when people learn how to articulate what it is they are great at and why. Exploring strengths is where I usually start with my career coaching clients, so I thought it would be a great topic to share more about on the podcast, too!
In this episode I share:
What strengths are and how to find yours
How working in your strengths helps you to thrive at work
Why people who know their strengths and leverage them are happier and earn more
What strengths are and how to find yours
In common conversation, “strengths” is often used interchangeably for words like “skills,” “knowledge” or “abilities.” It’s not that using “strengths” in that way is necessarily wrong, it just doesn’t get to the depth of what strengths really are.
So, what are strengths?
Here’s how I like to describe them for my career coaching clients:
Strengths are your “top themes of talent”
Strengths are at the core of the things that you do well, or that come easily to you
Strengths are the areas of life where you have the greatest potential for growth
A word picture that helps to describe what strengths are is the visual of an iceberg.
What you see of an iceberg above the water is just a small portion of the entire mass. You actually can’t see the majority of the iceberg that is submerged underwater.
Your strengths are like that huge mass of ice that is under the water. The top portion that you can actually see? That is how your strengths tend to present themselves in your life through your skills, knowledge and experience.
In order to gain a strong understanding of what your strengths are, you can look at the “fruits” of your strengths and analyze what commonalities and themes you see in them.
To put it simply, by answering the questions of “What am I good at __________?” or, “Why do I enjoy ____________?” you can start to narrow in on your strengths.
You can also take a strengths assessment, which would help give you some insight and verbiage that can be really helpful in the self-exploration.
I recommend the CliftonStrengths test, but you can also find a free strengths test (that’s very similar to CliftonStrengths) at High5.com.
How working in your strengths helps you to thrive at work
So, why is it worth exploring and understanding your strengths? Because they truly are the foundation of a fulfilling and satisfying career.
Knowing your strengths, what is at the core of why you’re good at what you do and why you enjoy the things you do, is incredibly helpful for identifying careers that would be a great fit for you.
And, when you know what careers you are a great fit for and why that is, do you know what that does? It empowers you to communicate and share your value so much more confidently!
And, when you can confidently communicate your value, so you know that that does? It enables you to earn more for your work while actually enjoying what you’re doing!
Why people who know their strengths and leverage them are happier and earn more
Strengths have been studied for several decades. Gallup has spearheaded a lot of this research and they are the organization behind the StrengthsFinder/CliftonStrengths assessment and resources.
Along with identifying the 34 strength themes, they have also done a lot of research about how people who are working in their strengths experience work compared to people who are unaware of their strengths or not working in them for the majority of their workday.
They surveyed over 10 million people to learn about their engagement at work. Engagement was measured by how positive and productive people were at work. What they found was that people who were working in jobs that allowed them to focus on their strengths and spent most of their day operating in the strengths were:
6x more likely to be engaged at work (positive & focused on the task at hand)
8% more productive
3x more likely to report having a great quality of life
This sampling of statistics shines light on why people who know, and leverage, their strengths are happier and earn more for their work.
If you are more engaged at work, it makes sense that you would be more productive, right? If you’re enjoying what you’re doing, all the distractions (like refreshing your email for the 100th time, scrolling Instagram, or checking the news) become less interesting. You’re excited about what you’re working on and intrinsically motivated to see it through to completion.
Depending on your line of work, the way engagement and productivity may present themselves or be measured could look different. However, across the board, engagement and productivity will lead to success and standing out as a “star” in your organization.
That’s what leads to the ability for people who work in their strengths to earn more. Negotiating for salaries, raises or other benefits is a lot easier when you have a strong record of success.
And all of these things combined--the engagement you feel, how productive you are, and how well you’re compensated for your work all lead to the drastic uptick in how people who work in their strengths report having a “great quality of life.”
At the end of the work day if you’re able to feel like you enjoyed what you did that day, accomplished what you needed to and were rewarded fairly for your work--that’s all evidence of quite a fulfilling career!
Next week, I’ll be sharing some more tips and tools you can use to really understand your own strengths and how they present themselves in your life. If you have questions about strengths you’d like answered, please feel free to send me an email so I can answer them in next week’s episode! The best way to get in touch with me is to go right here.
