Living Your Strengths Catholic Edition (2nd Edition): Discover Your God-Given Talents and Inspire Your Community

Are you on the right track? Do you wonder about why you love doing certain things and dislike others? Do you wonder why you react in certain ways? Are you looking for a better way to make right decisions, enjoy peace of mind, and live in harmony with others. This may be the book for you. "Living Your Strengths" is an extension of "strengths" research begun more than forty years ago by Dr. Donald Clifton of the Gallup Organization. Clifton researched the natural patterns of thought, feeling, and action of two million people in more than 25 countries. The result is the Clifton "StrengthsFinder," a tool that reveals a person's top five themes of talent - one's "Signature Themes." A "Strength" is the ability to provide consistent, near-perfect performance in a given activity. This ability is a powerful, productive combination of talent, skill, and knowledge. Talents are naturally recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior that can be productively applied. Unlike skills and knowledge, talents exist within you and cannot be acquired. We must first need to identify, affirm, and apply our unique mix of talents then apply them. Clifton's research highlights folly of the widely used "weakness prevention" model - to be successful, we must "fix" our weaknesses. This thinking is wrong. Building a life around one's greatest natural abilities rather than trying to repair weaknesses is the path to success. The book is organized around the use of the StrengthsFinder (provided with the purchase of the book) to identify, assess and affirm our Signature Themes (talents), and how to apply them for growth and life success. There are thirty four identified talents ranging from achiever, maximizer, ideation, individualization, and significance to woo. The Signature Themes are unique to the individual. According to Gallup, the chance of finding someone with your Signature Themes, in the same order, is 1 in 33 million and the chance of finding someone with your top ten themes of talent is 1 in 3 trillion. Finding one's themes and understanding their uniqueness should help one to gain a better appreciation of how special they are and how special the people around them are - deeper self-respect, deeper mutual respect. Most of us generally are not harnessing the power of our innate gifts. We are not fulfilling our purpose...we do not even know it! "Living Your Strengths" provides a tool so we can assess our talents and harness them in the betterment of ourselves, our families, and the various communities we participate in.

I love the applicability of this book to everything that I am doing. It has helped me work better as a part of every team I have helped in church, it has helped me at work, and it has helped me understand my friends' strengths better. These guys have the right idea: find your strengths, see how they work together, and start using them. The test that comes with the book is by far the best one I have ever taken for giving me a clearer idea of how God has designed me to serve, and it's even more important than the actual book.

This book is the "spiritual/Christian" version of the renowned and completely accurate Strengthsfinder assessment. It has the same strengthsfinder assessment that you would find in any other of the Gallup books; however, this book focuses on Christians and how we can use our God-given talents to draw nearer to him, discover who God has made us to be, and begin to inspire others. I completely recommend it as an individual who has taught and is continuing to teach this course at my church. Blessings on your discovery to discover your calling in Christ as you discover who he has innately created you to be.

We used this book on a church staff retreat because it was suggested by our resource leader. Everyone was provided a copy and did the assessment on their own. It was a quick, and enjoyable read and gave us good information to both discover each other's talents and how we can work together as a team. We plan to keep an extra copy on hand for new staff as they are hired.

We have just begun to use this text and accompanying workbook and video at our church for a seven-week study to determine our God given talents and calling. Apparently this material is also used in business for the same purpose. The initial process is to go online and take a strength finder assessment (approx. 30-40) minutes. This assessment then provides the user with a ranking of their top five strengths. Note: Each book has a unique code that can be used only once to take the assessment. The results from that assessment is then the basis for the remainder of the study, e.g., six weeks in the workbook. I have not read through the entire book. Most of the content is concerned with describing the thirty-four "themes" (e.g., strenghts). I would not recommend purchasing the book without the accompanying "Journey" workbook - and I would think that doing this on your own (with the book and workbook) would be valuable but not as vaulable as doing it in a small group.