GALLUP® CliftonStrengths®
There’s a lot we don’t know about ourselves, so why do we think we know so much about others? GALLUP® created an assessment to help us:
Know ourselves,
Know each other, and finally
Know how we can best partner together; lending our very best to our organizations.
The venerated assessment from GALLUP® that helps you discover “Who am I?” and “How can I work better with my teammates?”
CliftonStrengths has been taken by over 31,000,000 people around the world and been translated into 37 languages.
Nothing is more powerful than a person knowing how they are uniquely wired and what they give to our world. This assessment changed our lives, our mindsets, our relationships with family members, coworkers, friends, and finally, what we bring to our clients!
True Story – Our Founder
Margaret Ricci
All my life I’ve felt that I was a misfit.
In my family, among my friends, and in my workplaces, no one thought like me. I knew a portion of who I was and everyone else knew another portion, but making sense of it all, together? Unfortunately, I had no clue.
It took a layoff from a beloved position due to an industry event to get me to pay attention to who I really was.
After the layoff, I needed to find my next position, and needed to know who I was at my core.
Networking to find my next position was a new experience that dictated that I knew myself.
I started my informational interviews, and thanks to Steve Dalton, whose book, “The 2-Hour Job Search” was a game-changer for me (check the resources page for more on this), I landed 36 informationals in a two-month period.
But during my informational interviews I kept hearing “Oh, you should coach,” “You should consult,” “You should teach.” But in my head I’m thinking, “You’ve gotta be kidding me! I’ve never done that in my life! I’m certainly not going to start now!”
I would also have massive informational interviews, not the 20-minute kind like Marcia Ballinger teaches. But people didn’t want to hear about me leaving them after 20 minutes (I’d check!), or after 40 minutes, or after an hour, an hour and a half, two hours, and more – people just wanted me to keep talking, keep answering their questions, keep helping them find answers to their own questions! I was stumped. I was TRYING to let these people get back to their work, why would they want me to stay LONGER?
After about Interview 25, I thought, “Maybe I should listen to what people are saying to me.” During this time, I finally took the StrengthsFinder 2.0 assessment by Tom Rath to tell me how I was wired internally. It told me that I WAS created to coach, consult and teach.
After I took the StrengthsFinder assessment (now called CliftonStrengths), I was floored! There I was in living technicolor. How did they know me? How could they know me when I didn’t know myself? Yet, it was all there – the teaching the coaching, and consulting. I think I felt relief first, then understanding, – and then came the tears – I wasn’t crazy or a misfit after all. Although people had been telling me I was crazy all my life, even in some unflattering terms “You’re intimidating – we purposely don’t want people to meet you!” Instead, I was wonderfully made!
I enjoyed the development of people around me in every company I was ever in, even though I was never in a position to truly be a “culture changer,” I did it by osmosis.
I lived and breathed development of people and organizations. Development inside Business was my calling – and it was the normal connecting of all of my Talents together that would fill me up to the brim. My two loves – Business and People – are the passions that keep me going and changing companies.
I’m ever so grateful for that small, little book – it changed my life and those of the many people and organizations I’ve had the privilege to accompany on their own life and business journeys.
As you can tell, we’re rather passionate about finding our innate talents, of being our authentic selves, and of giving our own goodness to our organizations, and to our world.
You don’t have to change who you are, but you can be MORE of YOU! We learn how to give more of our goodness to a world that desperately needs what we have to offer. We can change our world – one person at a time; one organization at a time.