RatStre 08-12-168 StrengthsFinder 2.0 Tom Rath Gallup Press, 2007, 175 pp., ISBN 978-1-59562-015-6

Tom Rath leads Gallup's workplace research and leadership consulting. He is coauthor of How Full is Your Bucket? and author of Vital Friends: The People You Can't Afford to Live Without. This book builds on Now, Discover Your Strengths by Donald O. Clifton. It helps you discover your natural talents.

StrengthsFinder: The Next Generation

Donald Clifton began studying how people can build on their strengths rather than fix their weaknesses. His team created a language of the 34 most common talents and developed an assessment to help people discover and describe these talents.

Research shows that people who can focus on their strengths every day will be much more engaged in their jobs and have a better quality of life in general.

This book helps you understand how each of your top five themes play out in your life. It provides ten ideas for action for each theme that can help you build a strengths-based development plan.

Part I: Finding Your Strengths - An Introduction

The American myth says, "You can be anything you want to be, if you just try hard enough." The movie, Rudy, promoted that theme. However, you may be a whole lot happier and more productive if you become more of who you already are.

When you are not in the zone of your strengths you are a different person and probably much lot less engaged and fulfilled in your job.

The use of the StrengthsFinder can help you build a true strength and your talent is one key part of it. Knowledge, skills, and practice are also important. Building your talents into real strengths requires practice and hard work.

We need to manage our weaknesses and become conscious of our blind spots to be aware of both our potential and our limitations.

A reader can complete a StrengthsFinder 2.0 assessment on-line at www.strengthsfinder.com using a one-time access code in the back of the book. Your answers are matched with those in the database to produce your top five themes plus an in-depth analysis of how each one plays out in your life. The results are customized to describe your personality. These Strengths Insights are about what makes you unique.

Part II. Applying Your Strengths

Each of the 34 themes is listed with a description of how a person with this strength operates, one or two illustrative conversations that exhibit this theme, ten action steps for developing this strength, and some suggestions for working with people who have this strength if you don't have it.

Here are the first dozen strength areas listed: Activator, Adaptability, Analytical, Arranger, Belief, Command, Communication, Competition, Connectedness, Consistency, Context, Deliberative, ….

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