When Strength Becomes Weakness

ADAM: Hello there!

MICHAEL: Hey Adam. How are you?

ADAM: Do you know that you sound like a powerlifter?

MICHAEL: I do, huh?

ADAM: Just wondering if you actually worked on your voice muscles.

MICHAEL: Yes, I do. I do squats with my voice muscle and squats with my body. Yes.

Michael Hartle is a chiropractic physician in Fort Wayne Indiana. He wasn’t always strong.

MICHAEL: When I was in high school, I could barely bench 135.

But for the last twenty years, he’s basically been the Hulk. He’s won a national title in the bench press. His personal best came in 2006.

ADAM: How much did you lift?

MICHAEL: 535 pounds which is 242.5 kilos.

ADAM: Oh my gosh. I mean, you basically benched a baby elephant.

MICHAEL: Yes sir. Exactly.

Powerlifters know something that many amateurs don’t. You’re at your strongest when you’re well-rounded.

MICHAEL: In the gym, what you hate the most is usually what you need the most.

And some people at the gym... are a little lopsided.

MICHAEL: You might go into a gym and you look at someone, and from the waist up they're very developed—they got big chest, big shoulders, big pecs and everything else. And then all of a sudden you see their skinny little toothpick legs. That's obviously a very undeveloped person or a wrongly developed person. You should develop the whole body.

ADAM: And if you push that to the extreme, is there an injury risk?

MICHAEL: Oh yeah. Very much so.

ADAM: Do you think that this is not just a metaphor, but that it's true in our lives? That the same way you can overdevelop one muscle and under-develop another, do you see your job that way too?

MICHAEL: Oh yeah. We see it all the time. You can see it in the academic world, the financial world, relationship-wise. If you always focus on one part of it and not the whole global picture, yeah, you're going to have issues.

If you’re a powerlifter, you can’t get stronger if you don’t work on your weakest muscles. You’ve probably been told the same thing at work: you have to fix your weaknesses. But it’s a mistake to just focus on what’s weakest. Great things can happen if you have the chance to build on your strengths.

I’m Adam Grant, and this is WorkLife, my podcast with TED. I’m an organizational psychologist. I study how to make work not suck. In this show, I’m inviting myself inside the minds of some truly unusual people, because they’ve mastered something I wish everyone knew about work.

Today: Strengths at work. How—and when—we’re at our best.

Thanks to JPMorgan Chase & Co. for sponsoring this episode.

(This is the transcript of season 2 episode 8, with sources linked. If you’re thinking about gathering a podcast club—it’s like a book club, only for podcasts—you can find discussion questions at the bottom.)

When it’s performance review time at work, how does the conversation usually go? Your boss probably says some version of, “Yeah, you did a great job on this one task, but what we really need to talk about are your ‘areas for improvement.”

Psychologists have found that for many of us, bad tends to loom larger than good. So your boss tells you you have a weakness, and boom, that’s all you can think about. And this starts long before you have a job.

MARCUS: Beginning very early in kindergarten, all the way up through school and college and so forth, and then perpetuated in the workplace.

Marcus Buckingham is an author and consultant.

MARCUS: For a long time we've taught that we should be zeroing in on our weaknesses. Now that’s remediation.

Remediation. The idea that we can examine our weaknesses, and take concrete steps to fix them. 

MARCUS: We live in a remedial world. All apologies to Madonna. But we're living in a remedial world.

But remediation is really just a way to help people go from bad to average at a particular activity.

MARCUS: You don't remediate your way to excellence. And in fact, if you're not really careful, you get people's minds thinking much more about failure prevention than about soaring. No one has ever excelled because they stopped making grammatical errors in their writing.

Marcus started his career at the research firm Gallup.

MARCUS: I love interviewing people that are really good at what they do. Like my first job at Gallup was I'm building an interview to select better housekeepers. I want to go, “Holy moly, you vacuum yourself out of a room every day? And you make a scene for the guests with the fluffy toys on the bed every day?” Any job done in excellence is amazing to me.

Marcus started to recognize that any job done in excellence wasn’t because people spent all their time trying to repair their weaknesses. It was usually because someone was working from a natural or developed strength.

A strength is more than a skill—a technical proficiency like working with numbers or using a certain kind of tool. A strength is a broader aptitude you have (or build) for solving problems, getting things done, influencing people, or building relationships. And Marcus played a major role in launching a whole movement around why workplaces should emphasize strengths.

MARCUS: Our whole message ought to be: you're not broken, but you're not amazing yet. And therefore the question should be, “How can you be amazing?”

Now huge employers like Facebook and McKinsey call themselves “strengths-based.” The basic idea is that when we do something unusually well, we should focus on learning to repeat it. We should play to our strengths—and manage around our weaknesses.

In his research, Marcus found that one of the key signs of a great manager is a clear focus on recognizing and developing people’s strengths. But he’s concerned that most of us don’t get to use our strengths enough at work.

MARCUS: Right now, 16-17% of people say they have a chance to what they do best every day. We just finished this 19-country study looking at that question and around the world, that's not a big number. In China, it's 6%.

An experiment from India demonstrates the power of giving people a chance to use their strengths from day one. Some new hires in a call center were randomly assigned to reflect on their individual strengths. They wrote about their Personal Highlight Reel-- the moments they were at their best—and discussed how they could bring those strengths to work. Six months later, they had significantly higher performance—more satisfied customers—and higher retention rates too.

Think about your job. How often do you have a chance to use your strengths?

Marcus and his team have surveyed people on whether they have the freedom to modify their jobs to better fit their strengths. Lots of people say they do have that freedom—but surprisingly few of them actually do something with it.

MARCUS: Some people are in the wrong job. I get it: 27% of people probably are in a job they feel totally constricted but you've got 73% of people going, “No, I can modify my job to fit my strengths better. I just don't.”

ADAM: Why not?

MARCUS: I think deep down, we don't actually think that our unique way of engaging with the world is worth uncovering. And what we need sometimes is someone going, “No, no, no, that's you. That's weird. Like, not everyone does X or does Y.” It does take a while for you to go, “This actually is the way I uniquely engage with the world.”

Strengths are important, and emphasizing them is definitely more productive than working on weaknesses alone. But for a while now, I’ve been concerned about the opposite problem. Remember what the powerlifting champ Michael Hartle said: you can actually overdevelop one muscle at the expense of another. You need some balance.

At work, research shows that it’s common for managers to overuse their strengths. The persuasive boss who talks so forcefully that everyone else in the room is silenced. The creative colleague who’s still generating new ideas when it’s long past time to finish an old project. The empathetic service reps who show so much concern that customers take advantage of them. It seems that if you lean too heavily on your strengths, they can become weaknesses.

I was curious about Marcus’s take on this. Each spring I co-host the Wharton People Analytics Conference, which focuses on using evidence to improve work. So I invited Marcus to debate on stage, because the data suggest that overusing strengths is a big problem.

MARCUS: So I would disagree. I would—I would strongly disagree.

ADAM: I thought you were only going to give me positive feedback here. Come on, Marcus! Come on!

MARCUS: I'm just giving you my reaction. A strength is not good or bad. It's morally neutral. You can use it for ill and you can use it for good. You can never have too much of a strength; you can only use it poorly. What we're talking about here is intelligence. You can use your strengths unintelligently. If you think you can ever have too much of a strength your coaching then sounds like this: “Be less of yourself, Adam. Turn yourself down.” And for you, you're like, “How do I metabolize that?”

Whereas if I say to you, “Listen, you've got a great strength in—maybe you are super assertive—stop pissing people off and start using that to persuade them to do something they didn't intend to do.” And then you lean in and go, “How do I do that?” Now all of a sudden, I'm like 'Well, I don't know, here's what I would do. But I’ll tell you what you might try.” That just feels better than me going, “Turn yourself down. Turn it down. You’re at 11, turn it to 6.” And you're like, “I can't.” Like, “Oh you're too empathetic.” No, you can never be too—if you've got empathy, you're empathetic. A challenge with you is how do you leverage that intelligently to create the outcomes that you want? You can't be crying all over people all the time, but that doesn't mean you have too much empathy. It means we've got to help you channel that productively. It's a different—it leads to different conversations.

ADAM: Great. So I think—I think I'm on board. Help me apply this to my own life. So apparently when I took the StrengthsFinder (I took an early version of it), and one of my strengths was that I was logical and data-driven, and I think you have a term for that now.

MARCUS: Logical and data driven? Annoying.

ADAM: Thank you. You are really all about strengths. I was hoping it would be true.

MARCUS: I don't actually do this myself, are you kidding? So, well, analytical would be one.

ADAM: Yeah. And I think there's a little bit of maybe—winning over others loaded with that as well.

MARCUS: Yeah. Command.

ADAM: Yeah. So I sort of took this as feedback and said, “Okay, this is probably gonna be a useful skill as a teacher.” And a few years ago, I had a student who called me for some career advice, and I gave her a bunch of advice, and at the end of the conversation she said, “You're a logic bully.”

MARCUS: You’re a logic bully?

ADAM: Yeah. I was like, “What does that mean?” And she said, “Well, you just overwhelmed me with rational arguments, and I don't agree with them, but I can't fight back.” And I said, “Good! That's my job right?” And she said, “Well, no, because I actually want to own my decision.” And I realized that I had sort of failed in at least my vision of my role as a mentor or an advisor. Right? Which is: I wanted to help her see how I would think through a situation, but not tell her what I thought the right answer is.

MARCUS: So that's super interesting. Obviously every strength has a dark side, if you will. I mean you say to someone, “I just have incredibly high standards,” and somebody else behind your back is going, “Stupid perfectionist. Just anal.” You know like everything: “Oh, I'm super assertive.” “Aggressive.” Like every strength has that kind of dark side. “You're a logic bully”—and by the way, that's a great word combination. Logic bully. But weirdly, I would, if I was coaching you, I'd go, “People follow you because of that. Don't turn that down. Turn that up because people follow you because of that. So turn it up. Step into it. And…”

ADAM: And bully you more.

MARCUS: Well, more like learn how you can leave space for people to model what you're doing as they make their own decisions. Is it true that in general people tend to want to own their own decisions because their learning is emergent? Yes. Is it therefore true that you telling them exactly what to do removes from them the opportunity to learn? Yes. Are you also a teacher? Yes. So therefore, if you want people to learn, you've got to use your logic bullyness to help them step into their own intelligence. Like that's an—you would find lots of tricks and techniques to do that, but I would say to you that I bet one of the people—one of the reasons why people are drawn to you is because you are so purely you, and hopefully over time intelligently you, and we know you're not perfect, there's a whole bunch of qualities that teachers and professors and so forth have that you don't have. But these ones that you do have are really distinctive and elevating for people. And my challenge in helping you grow would be to say, “Do you know what those are? Do you feel able to channel them in a way that helps and benefits your students?”

I came away convinced that Marcus has a valid point: the problem isn’t always overusing strengths. Sometimes it’s misusing them, or using them unintelligently, or applying them in the wrong situations.

MELINDA: I completely agree with you, Adam, that often our greatest weaknesses are the other side of our strengths.

That’s true if you’re at the very beginning of your career—and it’s also true if you’re in a very senior leadership role.

MELINDA: Hi, I'm Melinda Gates, and I'm the co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

ADAM: Can you tell me about your greatest strength?

MELINDA: I think my greatest strength is listening.

ADAM: I'm curious about whether there are times when you've actually listened too much. Or found yourself maybe listening when in retrospect you wish you had asserted a point of view more?

MELINDA: One of the things I’ve had to look at and systematically learn about myself is: it's not okay for me to sit in a meeting and listen and listen and listen, and then not be able to get my viewpoint out because that meeting time has run out, or somebody is speaking in my stead, or you know, when I start to make a point they speak over me. Not okay. And so what I've had to learn to do is to really assert my voice, and assert it at very strategic moments in meetings, and even to speak openly about, “I disagree with the person who just spoke, and let's have a conversation about that,” and I think I've learned how to do that in very respectful ways.

 Recently, Melinda got some surprising feedback about how she was using another one of her strengths. I was working with leaders at the Gates Foundation on building a culture of openness. Melinda had volunteered to film a video where she reacted to feedback from colleagues in real time—sorta like the “mean tweets” segment on Jimmy Kimmel’s show.

MELINDA: You're in front of a camera, and the camera's rolling. And employees have feedback they want to give you, and they've written that feedback on a set of cards. And so you're handed the cards, and then when you turn one over, you read the feedback they have for you, and then you react to it. And so one of the cards said, "You're like Mary F-ing Poppins: practically perfect in every way." And when I turned that card over I laughed—first of all—so hard, and I thought, “Oh my gosh.” First of all, I can't believe people think this. And second of all one of the biggest things I've had to work on the last five plus years is perfectionism. I have a huge dose of perfectionism as do many other people, particularly women. And I have been systematically working on that, and so I was able to express in that video how much I am so not perfect. And that was actually really fun for me, and really cathartic in a certain way.

ADAM: But I think your perfectionism is also a huge strength.

MELINDA: Perfectionism in a certain way, if not taken too far, can be an amazing strength. It's part of how I got to where I wanted to go in life. In high school, I set incredible high-achieving goals for myself, accomplished those, got to go on to Duke University, which is where I wanted to study computer science, which ultimately took me to a job at Microsoft. So having that perfectionism trait was incredibly helpful to meeting and achieving goals. However, perfectionism, when taken too far—there is no such thing as perfect.

So Melinda began paying attention to when perfectionism was productive and when it was counterproductive.

MELINDA: I started to look at where it was showing up in my life. And I started to look at times when I would be preparing for a speech and say, “Oh my gosh, I'm driving the people around me crazy, because I'm asking them to answer 20 last-minute questions. And yes, maybe there's one last-minute question I should make sure I have a fact to that I can't remember,” but I started to look at it there. Because I think you're one of the many people who've talked about the fact that if you have a perfectionistic culture in your workplace, you don't get the most innovative ideas out on the table. And so for all of those reasons, it was important for me to look at that, and then also say, “Where does it show up well for me?”

So whatever your role or level in your organization, there’s value in learning to use your strengths more effectively. But I still don’t think you can simply ignore your weaknesses altogether. My inner logic bully really wants to convince Marcus that not working on your weaknesses can be a career-limiting move. For one example? NBA basketball.

ADAM: Shaquille O'Neal. Do you remember the “Hack-a-Shaq”?

MARCUS: Yes.

ADAM: Right. The only way to stop the guy was just to literally tackle him when he was in front of the basket because he couldn't make a free throw.

MARCUS: Yes.

ADAM: And I think the biggest barrier to his excellence was the fact that he couldn't do that one thing. And if you want to make Shaq even greater than he was, the single best way to work with him would have been to improve his free throw game.

MARCUS: The pushback on it: they did work on it like crazy. And he went from terrible to really, really bad. That isn't—that isn't a non-use of time, but it's incremental improvement.

ADAM: So I think that's right. I see that though as a failure of remediation. DeAndre Jordan, right? Knicks Center: 44% free throw percentage in his first 10 years, he's now over 70%. Andre Drummond: first five seasons shooting 35-40%, last year over 60%. Karl Malone: he shot 48% at the beginning of his career, and then the next two years up to 60 and 70. I think that there are cases of dramatic improvement of weaknesses, right? When you're on the precipice of excellence, sometimes you have an Achilles heel that you need to fix.

MARCUS: Yes, although spending time trying to turn yourself into somebody else is a dubious use of time. Yeah—with normally incremental improvement at best. Sometimes it's really destructive.

How much you need to work on your weaknesses depends on how critical those skills are to your job. If you play basketball, it’s pretty important to be able to make a free throw. But if you switch to soccer, that weakness would become irrelevant. How do you identify situations that better leverage your strengths?

[Ad break]

So: how do you become your best self at work? You don’t just need to know your strengths. You have to figure out what are the activities or situations where your strengths are put to good, intelligent use. Other people can help.

For a long time, I had no idea what to do with my career. Then one day a mentor asked me about the times when I was at my best. We made a list: coaching divers who were trying to figure out a new dive, writing a training manual for new salespeople, giving feedback on presentations and papers. There was a clear pattern: they all revolved around situations where I had a chance to share knowledge to help people solve a problem or achieve a goal. And suddenly it clicked: I needed to find a career where I could use that strength.

LAURA: What are the kinds of situations that help to bring out your best self? What are the kinds of situations that block or obstruct, or make it more difficult for you to be at your best?

Laura Morgan Roberts is an organizational psychologist at Georgetown. She studies how we develop our identities and reputations at work. And it drives her crazy that when someone excels, we say “Great work!” without being specific about what made that work great.

LAURA: We have very thin, superficial ways of sharing positive feedback with one another that often miss the mark—with respect to communicating a significant degree of affirmation, but providing people with enough information so that they know specifically what they do that matters.

In the early 2000s, Laura and her colleagues at the University of Michigan developed a different way of providing feedback. It’s a tool to help you see your strengths through the eyes of others. It’s called the Reflected Best Self Exercise.

LAURA: It gives you a very rich set of insights about the kinds of situations that bring out your best self. And that then enables you to go create those kinds interactions again in the future.

To start the exercise, you reach out to ten or fifteen colleagues and friends who know you well, and ask them each to tell a story about a situation when you were at your best.

BIJOU: My name is Bijou Abiola, and I am a buyer for a major department store in the northeast. I remember the first thing I did was panic, because 15 people, you’re like, “Well who do I ask?” because you kinda wanna get the good stuff, right, if you’re looking for “best self.”

Once you’ve collected all the stories, your challenge is to identify the common themes, and write a self-portrait reflecting the instances when you’re at your best.

Laura often coaches professionals like Bijou who have reached a transition point in their careers, like changing jobs or companies.

LAURA: The more specific and precise we can be in describing our strengths, the better able we are to leverage those strengths.

Strengths aren’t just qualities you have. They’re things you do well at key times—actions you take in certain circumstances.

LAURA: We're not looking for a personality trait or characteristic, like "I am kind," but what we found from our research is that the more compelling descriptions of strengths and best selves are in the form of action orientations. So instead of saying "I am kind," it's saying, for instance, "I show up for people when they need me.”

Bijou over-delivered on the assignment: she got 25 different people from her personal and professional life to write short stories about situations where she was at her best. And Laura helped her to identify the patterns in those stories.

BIJOU: A common theme that I saw was: I think I'm at my best when I'm showing up for other people. My brother said something like, "She throws the best surprise parties." I didn't even think of that as a skill set. I just love to see their faces when they walk in the room and are happy to see their family members together. 

Other people can help you identify strengths that you didn’t even recognize. But they can also help you see the kinds of situations where you’re at your best—which aren’t always visible to you.

BIJOU: I heard the word “strong” a lot. I know I have a strong personality, but in those moments when they thought I was exhibiting strength, I thought I was at my weakest. So it was kind of interesting to hear people say, “She is so strong,” because I’m like, “Are you kidding me? I was a wreck then. How do you see that as strength?” But again, we're our own toughest critics, so the way we experience ourselves and the way other people experience us can be so different.

LAURA: So once you've discovered more about your best self by reading these contribution stories, aggregating the themes in these stories, the next set of discussions involve what kinds of changes do I need to make so that I can be at my best more often, make my best even better, bring out the best in others? Can I add new roles or responsibilities or tasks that might be more stimulating and exciting and help me to play to my strengths? But essentially, if I'm not able to make enough changes to my current role, to the culture, to the relationships that will activate my best self, I'm going to start looking for new opportunities. How can my understanding of my best self help me to find the right opportunity or end up in a place that feels better for me?

Think about a hard choice you have to make at work. Which option will bring out the best in you? It’s a powerful lens for making tough decisions. And for Bijou, it clicked at the right time.

BIJOU: I was considering two job possibilities, and one was internal and one was external. But one of the questions said, "Which of your strengths will be able to show up the most in this opportunity?" And everything about the one that was internal would be playing on areas of strength. Because it was a position that would require me working with people, drawing out the best in them, influencing without authority. Pretty much a lot of the things that I had heard feedback from my peers or my responses that I had done well. And then the other one was an extremely exciting opportunity with a really large retailer, but it just didn't seem like it would require much of my best self to show up. I couldn't help but notice that—it was almost like the survey helped me make my decision, because I was sort of in between what I was going to do, or which one I thought would be the best next move for me from a career standpoint.

When I did the Reflected Best Self for the first time in grad school, a bunch of the stories were about my attention to detail. Apparently, I’m good at catching typos in long articles and PowerPoint decks. Even now I’m on two different teams that ask me to review documents before they go to press. There’s only one little problem with that role: I hate it.

MARCUS: From my perspective, the idea that an activity that drains you is a weakness even if you are momentarily good at it, or even consistently good at it: if it drags you down and drains you then we can't call that a strength, can we?

Marcus Buckingham wants to redefine a strength—not just as a thing you’re good at, but…

MARCUS: An activity that strengthens you. An activity that makes you feel strong. You are at your best when you are not only performing well, but doing so in such a way that it invigorates you to keep practicing.

I bet there’s something you’re good at but can’t stand doing. For Marcus, that task is meeting people at cocktail parties.

MARCUS: Mingling. I am—if I was at a party with you, then it would look to you as though I was totally enjoying myself as I floated hither and yon from one conversation to another. But actually the pressure of getting into one conversation with some person, and then figuring out just the right length of time to talk with them? When I'm looking over their shoulder and worried that they're looking at me looking over their shoulder to try to figure out how to exit that conversation and get into another one? The whole thing feels like I'm (a) annoying and upsetting people all the time, (b) they can see that I'm being superficial because I'm actually not really handling myself properly as I move into one conversation and into another into another.

ADAM: So I shouldn't have invited you to this conference. I just weakened you.

MARCUS: Well, you shouldn't have invited me to dinner tonight.

So how can you turn a situation that drains you into one that strengthens you? Since Marcus can’t escape mingling altogether, he realized he could make it less painful by repurposing one of his strengths. Now, when he shows up at a cocktail party, he shifts into interview mode.

MARCUS: I've taken my love of interviewing and applied that to mingling. So when I go to a party, I will take three people, super deliberately and in a serial way, interview one, interview the next one, interview the next one, and that calms me down in a way that's—it helps me not stay in my room, which I would do otherwise. I would totally be a hermit around parties or drinks or anything if I hadn't found a way that enables me to take something that strengthens me and mitigate something that weakens me.

We all need to work on our Achilles heels. But we also need more opportunities to use our strengths, because that’s where we add the most value. If you ace a poetry class that you love, don’t spend all your time working on your B+ in math. If you have a gift for improvising, don’t force yourself into someone else’s rigid routine.

And if you find out that you’re misusing a strength, work on applying it in the right situations. Now, when students ask for career advice and I have a strong view on the options, I don’t go full steam into "logic bully” mode. Instead, I pose a question about why they wanted my advice. Do you want to hear my thought process ? Were you hoping I’d challenge your assumptions and highlight blind spots in your thinking? Or have you already made up your mind and you’re now just looking for my stamp of approval? If they ask for the challenge, I have their stamp of approval to unleash my logic.

WorkLife is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is produced by TED with Transmitter Media. Our team includes Colin Helms, Gretta Cohn, Jessica Glazer, Grace Rubenstein, Michelle Quint, Angela Cheng and Janet Lee. This episode was produced by Dan O’Donnell. Our show is mixed by Rick Kwan. Original music by Hahnsdale Hsu and Allison LAY-ton Brown. Ad stories produced by Pineapple Street Media. For their help throughout the season, gratitude to Max Linsky, Ann Hepperman, Anna Phelan, Maya Sariahmed, and Casey Walter. Fact checking from: Meral Agish, Lorena Aviles, Paul Durbin, and Joseph Isaac. Special thanks to our sponsors: JPMorgan Chase & Co., Accenture, Bonobos, and Hilton.

For their research, thanks to Paul Rozin, Roy Baumeister and their colleagues on bad is stronger than good, Dan Cable and colleagues on newcomers expressing their best selves, Rob Kaiser and Joyce Hogan on overdoing strengths, and Laura’s collaborators Jane Dutton, Bob Quinn, and Gretchen Spreitzer on the Reflected Best Self Exercise.

That’s a wrap for season 2 of WorkLife! Thanks for listening—and for rating, reviewing, and sharing the show. Stay tuned for two bonus episodes soon… and for season 3 in 2020!

ADAM: This is going to be a funny question, but can I overdevelop my butt muscles?

MICHAEL: I would say no. You cannot in my opinion overdevelop your gluteus maximus. It's very difficult to do that. Usually most people that come in my office have very weak gluteus maximus, so we’ve got to work on getting those folks a heck of a lot stronger.

DISCUSSION GUIDE

1. What would you say are your biggest strengths?

2. If you did the Reflected Best Self Exercise, what do you think your colleagues and friends would describe as your greatest strengths?

3. Which of your strengths could you use more often at work?

4. Which strengths have you misused or overused?

5. In what situations do your strengths add the most value?

6. Which of your strengths energize you, and which ones drain you?

7. Do you have an Achilles heel that would benefit from remediation?

8. Think about a tough decision you have to make. Which option is most likely to bring out your best self?

9. What moments would you put in your Personal Highlight Reel?

10. How can you create more opportunities for others to use their strengths?