Hey Friend -

How's your spring been?

Let's just say I've been busy. I'll tell you more about my super not-so-secret project I cooked up at the last minute around 6 weeks ago at the end of the email.

But let's talk about CliftonStrengths.

Many of us are familiar with Strengths. It used to be called Strength Finders...and funny enough, Gallup has even started changing the language to refer to them as talents, because the tool is so much more than simply learning what you might be good at.

I took the assessment for the first time in seminary. Just the top 5 and the professor gave us a 20 minute presentation. Later on, I heard Michael Hyatt raving about the assessment and I took it again. Things changed a bit, but it was still just my top 5. It was incredibly helpful and 100% nailed my life at the moment. I was starting off in a church plant, and the top strength/talent of "Strategic" hit the nail on the head. Back then, getting your full 34 report cost $100 and I wasn't willing to cough up that change.

Fast forward another 6 or 7 years and I started a year-long process of becoming a certified coach. We were given the full 34 assessment and I ATE IT UP. It was the third time I had taken the assessment. Every strength I had ever seen in my top 5 was present in my top 10 and I learned how to navigate around my bottom strengths. TBH - they made more sense than my top 10!

A few more years after that I was in a major rut. I tackled it head on and decided to hire an excellent certified Clifton coach for the first time. Can I tell you how much that changed things?!?!?!

If you have ever heard me talk on the podcast about energy, or in any of my writing...this was the beginning of it. I learned so much about why I was feeling funky and the positive and negative things I would do to try to get energy.

A couple of years ago, since I was using so much of my knowledge of strengths in my coaching work and job as a Developer in the Louisiana Conference of the UMC, I took the week-long course to become a certified Clifton coach. It added even more to my belief that CliftonStrengths is a legit cheat code in ministry work.

Here are three reasons.

It isn't about what you do, but rather how you do it.​
I've heard many people look at strengths and simply give a reason they can't do something.

This is a 100% false way to take advantage of the assessment.

Truthfully, anyone can do anything. The actual way you get it done will differ between each person. Sometimes, strengths can help set guard rails up against unproductive things. I recently was coaching a pastor who needs to focus on building up a critical mass quickly. Their strengths are concentrated in the Relationship Building domain and they get tremendous energy out of one-on-one meetings.

This had been their unknown tactic, but it wasn't working well. We had a fantastic conversation about what strengths they could activate to focus on building up a larger group of people, and how they can let a couple of strengths play on the B-Team and develop a small handful of people in a one-on-one way.

Strengths help manage energy in stressful conversations.​
I spent a couple of years while church planting serving two churches. One was my rapidly growing church plant and another was a small rural congregation struggling to stay afloat. Every time they got nervous and talked about needing to reach new people, I went heavy with my Strategic, Futuristic, and Ideation strengths.

Not only did it fail to work, but it made things worse. I was putting more fuel into their anxiety fire over congregational change.

I only realized it years later when I was serving another small, struggling church. They were radically different, but the same conversation came up, and I went down the same path. I got worried when I saw a similar look of even more fear in the eyes of the person I was talking with.

At that moment, I realized I was the problem. In my attempt to diffuse a tough conversation, I used strengths that put energy into me and rapidly drained energy in the person I was talking to. Thankfully, I was able to re-direct and use a couple of relationship building strengths to enter into their fears and establish a trust of walking together. My previous attempts essentially meant running far ahead and asking others to catch up.

That realization changed EVERYTHING about how I did ministry. A year later, I moved into my role as a Developer and 50% of my conversations with churches happen inside that conversation and the outcomes have become radically different.

Strengths can stack to provide long-game power​
Any strength, even at its healthiest, has a limited amount of ability.

Remember when I said anyone can do anything? I don't have a single executing domain strength until strength 17 out of 34. But I am able to get things done, it has always been a skill. I know my Adapter (#2) and my Learner (#6) easily work with Strategic (#1). That strength stack enables me to get things accomplished, even though Adapter has a danger point of starting tons of things and not finishing them (tbh, I still do that plenty).

Strengths can also stack in which one strength can end its power and another strength can pick up where it left off. At other times, certain strengths are helpful at the beginning of something and other strengths become helpful at the end of things. Sometimes strengths play really well by themselves.

The wild thing is this is different for each and every person.

The single biggest change to both my leadership and the way I approach pastoral ministry has been Strengths based leadership.

So if you've never taken the CliftonStrengths report, it is a $60 well spent.

Chad

PS. That big news? I've got a book coming out in a few weeks called Is My Church Healthy? and is a deep dive into one of the primary tools I use to help struggling normal-sized churches find stability. I'm also self-publishing it and I believe we are about to enter into a new reality where self-publishing becomes one of the best ways to share and interact with information.

If you are curious about this idea of self-publishing and want to peek under the hood of why I believe this, just click on this link and you can be added into an email list. I have a sequence where I share my thoughts, plus how I managed to write the book in two months. Plus, you can be one of the first to find out when it releases. Just click the link.