Learning Your Strengths

I’ve blogged here about Strengthsfinder 2.0. I love that book, and I love what it does for people, especially leaders. Well, I’ve just finished its sister book, Strengths Based Leadership, which I also loved. I will do a review of that at another time. What I really want to talk about is this: Gallup released some data in Strengths Based Leadership that I think we can all pay attention to. It’s not strictly related to Christian Leadership, but I think that the stats that I’m about to quote say it all.


Gallup reports that people experience a significant gain in self-confidence after taking a Strengthsfinder test and learning more about their strengths. I don’t think this should come as a surprise. Knowing what you’re good at and being freed up to do it are confidence boosting bits of information. But there’s more:

In 2008, University of Florida released a 25 year study about confidence and work. Here’s a few of the highlights.

People between the ages of 14 and 22 who had more self confidence were making about 3,500 dollars more than their peers in 1979.

These same people saw dramatic increases in their income each passing year.

Those people with higher self-confidence had fewer health problems in 2004 than in 1979 25 years later.

Gallup Polling that has been released suggests that having the opportunity to learn about your strengths has the same effect as the gain in self-confidence. People 15-23 who learned about their strengths were reporting “significantly higher” job satisfaction levels 25 years later.

So what does this mean for us? I don’t know. To my knowledge, there hasn’t been any longitudinal studies on Christian leaders and how Strengths Test and the resulting self-Confidence affects them. I have my guesses though.

I cannot imagine that it would be anything short of revolutionary in the life of a Christian young person to know what strengths God built into them. We are always testing for spiritual gifts, which is very important, so why don’t we test to know how God put us together in other ways?

Imagine the possibilities if we had a generation of Christian leaders who knew both their Spiritual Gifts and their God-given Strengths. What would they be capable of? What difference would it make in their personal lives? How much less burn-out would we have?

I can’t answer these questions (right now), but I am convinced, now more than ever, of the need to test and teach students about their strengths. In fact, I don’t know why every student in the world shouldn’t be taking a Strengths evaluation. I think it’s that important.

Question: What has your experience with Strengths testing been? How has it affected young people you know?

Training Tomorrow’s Leaders Today,

Matt