Strength Series – Part 1: Explore

The Building Your Strengths Series is a 4 part reflection on the strengths workshops held by the Clubs and Leadership Development department of Student Life. Stay tuned for tips and insights! “Explore your strengths” is an introductory workshop that focuses on getting to know your top 5 strengths. Before attending the workshop, you complete the online assessment, Clifton Strengths Finder by Strengths Quest, in which you’ll receive a customized report of your top 5 strengths and other useful resources on how to develop them. Here are 5 things I took away from this workshop: Positive Psychology It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, but positive psychology gets down to discovering what makes life worth all the bad and good stuff, because life isn’t all storms and darkness either. So in terms of personal development, that’s why this workshop focuses on your top 5 strengths. I learned that it’s good to take notice of what I may lack, but it’s also good to focus on what I do have to help me get stronger. From “That’s a strength?” to “That’s one of my strengths!” I found out that one of my strengths comes is my desire to collect things, like random trivial facts on pop culture and general knowledge. But now I realize that my interest and curiosity in many different random things is a strength that drives me to keep learning and growing. We’re all a different combination of strong According to StrengthsQuest, 1 in 33 million people will have the same top 5 strengths in the exact same order as you! During the workshop, I got to meet lots of different people with a variety of strengths different to mine. Labels: Nay, Strengths: Yay! I learned that sometimes I may label someone based on my misunderstanding of their strengths, especially ones that I may lack, and someone may do the same to me. For example, I may think someone is “bossy”, because I don’t recognize their strength for command. While someone may think I’m a “push-over”, because they don’t recognize my strength to empathize. Well-rounded team > well-rounded me I believed that I needed to be a balance of certain qualities to be a better person. But after this workshop, I learned that I don’t have to aspire to be a well-rounded person (or expect others to), because I am already a well formed person, unique in my combination of strengths. Instead, I should collaborate with people who are a different combination of strengths and seek to work in well-rounded teams. Stay tuned for future leadership workshops. Got any questions? Comment below or email leadership@utoronto.ca Next week - Part 2: Build Your Strengths and Career