Learning Community Annual Conference

A session I attended at the learning community event we attended this past Friday was, "Using Gallup's Strengthsfinder for Leadership Development". At first, I had no idea what this was going to be about, but as soon as I got in there I found all the information presented to be really interesting. Gallup's Strengthsfinder is actually an assessment that is taken and tells the participant all of their strengths, well it gives you your top five at first, but you can purchase the entire list if you wish to do so.
Following the assessment, people utilize these results in their academics to recognize talents, themes, and strengths. While we were discussing this assessment, it reminded me a lot of our MBTI surveys that we did, even though they are not exactly the same type of assessment, but they are both used to help further our knowledge of who we are and qualities we hold.
Reflecting back to the talents, themes, and strengths; we discussed a lot about strengths and what those actually are. One point that was made that stuck out to me was that strengths are built upon talents using knowledge, skills, etc. They stated that when you have a consistency to perform, it is a strength. I think that is an important statement, because we can all be good at things and that is considered a talent, but being consistent is the key to making it a strength. Therefore, I think it is important to stress applying meaningful efforts to develop talents into strengths.
There were students who had taken this assessment and received their results that spoke at this session as well, and it was interesting to hear how they applied their results to improve in areas where they wanted to. They made it a point that they were getting the same tasks accomplished, but doing it in a way that works best for them based on their individual strengths.
I found all of this information to be really interesting, and what I got out of this session is that knowing ourselves more in depth is a great way to change what we want to change and improve what we want to improve.