123 A new way to look at your strengths (with guest John Warder)

Reinventure Me

Do you know your StrengthFinder’s strengths? In this episode, we speak with John Warder about a new way to look at your strengths.

This week’s Inspire Me quote is from Steve Jobs:

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”

John Warder, the original voice of the Reinventure Me podcast, joins us for a conversation about strengths and suggests a new way that we can look at them. John is the Principal coach and trainer for the Top Ten Talents Group, has been a StrengthsFinder coach, personal trainer, and self-proclaimed “assessment junkie” for 30 years, has given thousands of keynote speeches and training sessions to professional groups on staff and career development—including every MLB team and dozens of NFL teams. And, to cap it off, John is a triathaloner—he’s participated in 25 triathlons!

Familiar with StrengthsFinder? Know your top five strengths? John suggests we look at our strengths in a new way by integrating our StrengthsFinder results with another approach, the Color Profile.

Developed by CoreClarity, the Color Profile assessment organizes top StrengthsFinder strengths into a “color chart” or “color dashboard”—four color-coded quadrants labeled “relating,” “influencing,” “thinking,” and “achieving”—and identifies the two colors or quadrants that are strongest. Color profiles add value to the StrengthsFinder approach by highlighting a person’s strength quadrant and his or her strength personality based on the person’s top five StrengthsFinder results.

Key quotes from the show:

• “The measurement of talent is not there, nor is the measurement of the increments between the talents. What I like to call this is your top five preferences. If you have to choose something, you said you prefer a strategic talent area.” —John Warder
• “One of the best questions to ask in an interview is, ‘Leary, describe to me an accomplishment that you did that you felt you did really well and you had a sense of enjoyment in it.’ As the person describes it, they would use descriptive verbs and nouns, and I would get a sense of what this person prefers to do.” —John Warder

This week’s Challenge Me:

If you’ve taken StrengthsFinder and know your top five strengths, email them to John and he will send you a personalized color chart. If you haven’t taken StrengthsFinder, do that first, then send your top five results to John.

Comments? Questions? Stories from your own life? Share them with us in the comments below.

Resources mentioned in or related to this podcast episode:

• John’s website: TopTenTalents.com.
• John’s email: [e-mail]
• Gallup Strengths Center website: GallupStrengthsCenter.com.
• StrengthsFinder 2.0.
• CoreClarity’s website: CoreClarity.net.