Summon Your Strengths

II. Summon Your Strengths
“Often the best things in life do not come naturally. Therefore, you should boldly decide what you want to do, why it’s important, and whatever you have the will to persevere. Next, figure out what strengths you have or might be able to develop—from scratch, if necessary—to make it happen. Then you need to try, struggle, fail, and fail again, until you get the results that you’re after. From that experience of learning to smelt the primary elements—skill and will—your strengths will emerge. Let adversity be the flame in which your strengths are forged.”
“But regardless of how many strengths you can build and use effectively, it’s almost impossible to achieve greatness alone. Linking with the right people can elevate the breadth and scope of your impact.”
A. Strength Formula
1. Adversity Tools
a) Skills, Talents, and Strengths
(1) Skills: Those things you are relatively good at, whether innate or learned
(2) Talents: Skills that you have a natural ability to do well.
(3) Strengths: An extremely valuable or useful ability, asset or quality (They are greater and deeper than skills and are more overarching).
b) Will
“Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.” Mahatma Gandhi
“When it comes to doing anything worthwhile, if you don’t have the will, you won’t.”
(1) Will is made up of determination, desire, decisiveness and effort.
(2) Will + Skill = Strengths
c) The Why
“He who has a strong enough why can bear almost any how.” Friedrich Nietzsche
(1) It is not enough to have high aspirations; you must have a compelling reason for that aspiration.
2. Your Summit Strengths
a) What do I want to do?
b) Why do I want to do it?
c) What is the most significant adversity or obstacle I will face as I attempt to do it?
d) What strengths do I have, and which strengths do I need to forge, to make it happen?
e) Summit Strengths Checklist
(1) Summit Challenge:
(2) Why:
(3) Sills:
(4) Strengths:
(5) Summit Adversity:
(6) Skills:
(7) Strengths:
(8) Adversity Strength Strategy:
3. Adversity Strengths versus Regular Strengths
“What matters most is not who you are or what you bring forth when all is right, but rather who you are and what you bring forth when something goes wrong.”
“Summon your strengths when adversity strikes and its countless advantages are yours to harvest.”
a) Regular Strengths: Those qualities you regularly demonstrate under calm, normal conditions.
b) Adversity Strengths: Those strengths that you summon when adversity strikes, when you are under the gun or feeling the pressure or when things go wrong.
c) Integrity is being whole or complete so that you are the same under adversity as you are under calm and normal conditions.
d) Strength Sorter:
(1) What are your Regular Strengths?
(2) What are your Adversity Strengths?
(3) How do the two lists compare? How much overlap is there?
(4) What is the one Regular Strength you are most compelled to turn into an Adversity Strength?
(5) Adversity Gap Strategy: How will you do it?
(6) Areas of Strengths:
(a) Relationships
(b) Creativity
(c) Attitude/Outlook
(d) Virtues
(e) Thinking
(f) Physical
(g) Spiritual
(h) Other
4. The Team Advantage
It is not enough to forge your own Adversity Strengths, but you must also forge the Team’s Adversity Strengths if you are to achieve greatness
a) The A Factor—Adversity: How does each team member perform and what strengths does each bring forth while under adversity?
b) Assessing Adversity Strengths of your team
(1) Step One: Rate each team member (1 to 10) on how he demonstrates each strength under normal circumstances.
(2) Step Two: Rate each team member (1 to 10) on how he demonstrates each strength under adversity or pressure.
(3) Step Three: Address these questions:
(a) Of this entire list, what Adversity Strength does each person need to develop? Why?
(b) What are the things the person tends to do best when under real, even chronic, pressure and stress?
(c) What have other people commented on or noticed about the person’s behavior when he or she is facing adversity? What are the common themes?
c) Blind Spots
(1) We all are blind to our weaknesses and strengths, failing to see our true potential. Some overestimate their Adversity Strengths while many underestimate them.
(2) When adversity strikes, strengthen your position by:
(a) Gaining utter clarity and being brutally honest about your own A Factor
(b) Helping others to shed light on theirs
(c) Working to develop the Adversity Strengths you need as a team
d) The W Factor—Why
“People will rarely exceed their why.”
(1) Keep asking candidates why they want to be a part of your team until the truest, deepest reason is exposed.
e) The E Factor—Ego
(1) Ego is your idea of your own importance or worth.
(2) What is the relationship between your self-perception and your actual strengths and contribution?
(3) It is vital to success to have a strong sense of one’s true strengths, abilities and worth.
(4) A strong self image is essential to take full advantage of adversities from which others back down.


From: The Adversity Advantage, Paul G. Stoltz and Erik Weihenmayer