Living Your Strengths -- Background

Living Your Strengths helps individuals discover the person God created them to be, and through it, our parish will grow as individuals and as the Body of Christ.

Living Your Strengths is both a book and a process. It is the result of research with over 3 million people in a forty-year span. In conversations, focus groups and surveys, Dr. Donald Clifton and the Gallup Organization identified 34 themes of talent, or strength, that people possess in one degree or another. Following that research, Clifton and his team developed the StrengthsFinder, an online questionnaire that takes only a half an hour to complete. At the end of the half hour, an individual has a list of his or her Top 5 “Signature” themes – the five ways in which we naturally interact with people and information most strongly.

Here is where this process becomes really amazing: you have a 1 in 278,000 chance of meeting someone with the same Top 5 strengths as you in your lifetime, and a 1 in 33 million chance of meeting someone with your Top 5 in the same order. We are, indeed, uniquely created to serve God in wonderful and powerful ways!

When people discover and develop their talents, rather than trying to fix their weaknesses, they find a new and powerful sense of purpose in their lives: their relationships are strengthened, their everyday lives are transformed; they find themselves being drawn out toward the needs of others, and they report being more patient, collaborative, and forgiving.

The process is being used in Catholic parishes of every size and composition. Parish leaders (parishioners, pastor and staff) typically begin by discovering and exploring their strengths together. With just a small group as a beginning, our parish will be ready to find ways to bring the process to others.