Talents, Strengths, Strength Themes, Knowledge, and Skills: How they work

Talents are naturally recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior that can be productively applied. These talents exist naturally within you as predispositions and are not acquired.

A Strength is the ability to consistently provide a near-perfect performance in a specific activity. Strengths are the result of a combination of talent, knowledge, and skill working together in tandem to produce repeated excellence in a given task. 

Strength Themes are the combination of similar talents clustered together.  The Gallup organization has created the Clifton Strength Finder Assessment tool which identifies 34 clusters of talent that form signature themes in individuals.  Each person has his/her own unique strength themes.

Knowledge is learning about our Talents, Strengths, and Strength Themes.  We gain this knowledge through three elements which form the foundation upon which we build our skills necessary to master our strength themes.  These elements are understanding, awareness, and appreciation. 

• Understanding – most people think they understand what their talents are based on what they think they know about their strength themes and/or because they’ve learned a definition of the word that’s used to describe a strength theme.  However, they’ve never taken the time to study, learn, and get into the world of the traits of their themes.   Also, many people learn one or two or a few of the traits of their Strength Theme but don’t delve into the depths of all of the traits of their particular themes.  This is comparable to learning and using a couple of primary colors in the painting of who they are, but not moving on, using all of the colors of their palette. 
• Awareness – this is the ability to catch yourself actually using your themes and being able to know and see themselves using their themes.  It’s a clear awareness of what is happening in their life as it happens.  Your use of one or more of your strength themes becomes intentional.  It is knowing what the traits of their themes are in such a way that they can identify which theme or themes they used and can identify when that theme was engaged.
• Appreciation – you can’t develop your talents and strengths if you don’t appreciate them.  Most people appreciate other people’s talents and strengths; not their own.  Begin developing awareness by developing an appreciation for your themes by first identifying what is unique and/or special about you and your themes.  You are one of 275,000 who have the same Top 5 themes in the same order as you.  You are one of 33,000,000 who have the same 34 themes in the same order as you.  This is unique to you.  Another way to develop awareness is to figure out the value and contribution your talents and themes bring to you and those around you.

It is only by your using your Strength Themes for the benefit of others do you develop your Skill.  In order to build mastery of your Talents and Strength Themes, you have to give them away.  You have to get in the game of being involved in the lives of others, encouraging, uplifting, challenging, having difficult conversations with, coaching, mentoring, laughing, crying, and loving others.  Your mastery of your Strength Themes is directly dependent upon how involved you are in life and in living.

by George Willock