Now What? 3 Ways To Put Your Profile Data Into Practice
Fifth in a series explaining how Certified Practitioners help you process profiles
Image: Career Watch
After you receive your Leading From Your Strengths profile assessment and review it with a certified practitioner, you discover your dominant strengths, particularly how you are most likely to respond in typical situations and under pressure.
This information is interesting – even intriguing. But now what?
Most of us want to know how to purposefully use our strengths in a healthy way to cultivate more productive relationships at home and at work. A certified practitioner can help you identify at least three ways to do so.
Three Ways a Practitioner Helps You Put Your Data Into Practice
1. You Can Maximize Your Natural Strengths
You have a unique combination of strengths – the ways you naturally solve problems, process information, manage change, and face risk. You view them one way. Others view them differently. A practitioner gives you exercises to help you understand how others view your strengths. This way you can know how to approach current or new situations to maximize your value to the team.
At the same time, a practitioner guides you through the process of identifying the strengths that resonate most with you. These are key factors in keeping yourself motivated – ones you want to find ways to cultivate. You’ll also discover what you need from a leader so that you can perform at your optimum level. This is important information to know as you change jobs or meet with your supervisor.
2. You Can Communicate More Effectively
When your practitioner asks you to review your report’s “Checklist for Communicating,” you will choose the statements that describe how you like others to communicate with you – and how you do not like to be communicated with.
In doing so, your practitioner affirms the value in your particular approach to communication and explains how your approach brings value to your relationships. The checklist also gives you concrete wording you can use with others to share how you want to interact with them. You can work with your practitioner to practice sharing those preferences with your team members or family members.
3. You Can Minimize Your Stress
When a practitioner studies your Strengths Chart (which reveals your natural way of handling problem solving, processing information, managing change, and facing risk) and your Strengths Movement Chart (which shows how you adapt to your current situation in those four areas), she documents the differences in scores. Specifically, she will notes movement of 5 points or more in any of the four areas and then helps you to identify the source of stress.
A side-by-side comparison of your natural strengths style and your adapted style further reveals the stress and pressure you may feel in your current environment. A practitioner helps you identify elements that contribute to this movement, such as your duties, expectations, or responsibilities. Some frustrate you. Others exhaust you. All reduce your performance in some capacity.
This is not to say you should avoid areas for improvement. On the contrary, for each of us has natural limitations or tendencies. When you know yours, you can create an action plan for managing them well and moving forward.
But a practitioner will also ask you several questions to get to the crux of the issue: which of these elements do you control and which are controlled by others? Together with your practitioner, you can identify action steps to take in the areas in which you have control – steps that allow you to use your natural strengths more effectively. You will discover you can find ways to minimize the stress inherent in adapting your strengths to a less natural environment.
Moving Forward
Paul said, “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Corinthians 12:7, ESV).
In other words, you can maximize your strengths for the common good, including your own. And you can minimize your stress, too, for the common good, including your own.
What a wonderful formula God has given us for moving forward and learning to lead from our strengths!
More Articles from The Practitioner Series
Ways a Certified Practitioner Can Help You, Part 1: Introduction
Ways a Certified Practitioner Can Help You, Part 2: Are You Independent or Interdependent?
Ways a Certified Practitioner Can Help You, Part 3: Four Ways You Are Unique
Ways a Certified Practitioner Can Help You, Part 4: Get the Most Out of Your Profile Data