Rather, your smartness and your effectiveness depend on how well you capitalize on your strongest connections. Indeed, the brain is designed to abandon half of its synaptic network in its first 15 years as a way of focusing itself on each individual’s strongest neural connections.Īs Buckingham and Clifton put it, “It is not true that the more synaptic connections you have, the smarter you are or the more effective. But we can’t sustain all of them at full strength into adulthood. That’s primarily because of the way our brain develops.įrom birth through age 3, our developing brains make trillions of synaptic connections. Often, say Buckingham and Clifton, the activities at which we excel are also the activities we most enjoy. What activities do I most enjoy? What activities bring me the most satisfaction? Buckingham and Clifton suggest we ask ourselves the following questions to root out our strengths:

For most of us, with our internal lenses so well trained on our weaknesses, this process takes some practice. Identifying Strengthsīefore we can build on our strengths, though, we have to be able to identify them. Instead, “each person’s greatest room for growth is in the areas of his or her greatest strength.”īy focusing on identifying, practicing and refining our strengths, they argue, we wind up becoming “more productive, more fulfilled and more successful” in the endeavors that matter to us most. We won’t ever find success and satisfaction when working to “stop-gap” our weak areas, they assert. Now Buckingham and Clifton, as well as other experts in the fields of positive psychology, think it’s time to reverse gears and begin paying attention to our strengths. We’ve spent so much time fixing our flaws, in fact, that one of our weaknesses became an inability to recognize our natural strengths. Most of us were taught at a young age to identify the things we didn’t do so well (a school subject like spelling or math, for example), and then to work hard to improve them (Extra study? A special tutor? Summer classes?). Clifton, PhD, authors of Now, Discover Your Strengths, it’s because we have so much practice thinking about, and trying to fix, our weaknesses. Why? According to Marcus Buckingham and Donald O.

Identifying our strengths is tough enough, but playing to them is even tougher.

Now stop and fill in these two sentences: “I’m great at _ !” and “My strengths include _, _, and _. How often do you catch yourself thinking, “Ugh! I’m so bad at _” or “Well, _ just isn’t my strong suit.” We’re all pretty good at identifying our flaws.

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