March 16, 2013 · Filed under Work

Book Review: Go Put Your Strengths to Work

Heads up! This post is 11 years old. In 2021, I restarted my blog after many years of not writing regularly. See the the new stuff!

The book Go Put Your Strengths to Work is part of the StrengthsFinder series. I’m loving it.

One of the exercises is to track your work activities for a week and make two lists of activities that stand out as “Loved it!” and “Loathed it.”

At the end of a week you pick out the top activities and with guidance from the book, form three strength statements. My first one is:

I feel strong when…I help people (including myself) access and express spontaneous inspiration.

I never saw this before, but thinking about it I organize my whole life around spontaneity.

I call it “living from inspiration”. It means making sure I have plenty of “free time” in which I can do what I’m drawn to moment by moment. It’s why I love intuitive artmaking but couldn’t make it through a painting class. It’s why I am starting EggSpace (a spiritual community) but can’t stand church. It’s why I spend countless hours thinking, learning, and writing, but I can’t stand higher education. It’s why I’m writing this article at 1 am instead of sleeping.

My experience of creativity, spirituality, and fun all revolve around spontaneity because that’s where the magic lives.

Spontaneity is play, exploration, discovery, presence, aliveness. It’s where joy and love and humor happen. It’s the heart of intimacy. It’s the spark of inspiration. It’s the fire of passion.

This is all so obvious now that I’m naming it. But I didn’t think of it until this book asked the right questions.

The StrengthsFinder framework uncovers our implicit strengths, passions, and joys and helps us name them.

Once they are named, you can start asking questions like:

How can I support more spontaneity in my work?
How can I study spontaneity and get even better at it?
What gets in the way of me being spontaneous more?

Those questions are so exciting to me. The book makes a point that your strengths statements will just be a sentence to someone else but they will feel like a revelation to you. They’re right. I’m blown away by the possibilities this opens up.

This book rocks.

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Hi there! I’m Emma and I write about self-liberation. My writing is meant to share my process & inspire your own. If you want more frequent/current writing, visit my Substack Sparkly Dark, where I’m unpacking my neurodivergence.

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Thanks so much for reading! ~Emma