Can your strengths change?

Have you ever caught a glimpse of yourself in the mirror and noticed something new? 

That's what happened to Sujani when she revisited the Gallup Clifton Strengths Finder Test 10 years later. 

Years of nurturing a public health career have surprisingly added strategic thinking to my skill set, alongside my core abilities in execution and relationship building. 

Join Sujani as she reveals how personal strengths are not set in stone but evolve over time, and how recognizing this can significantly shape your professional journey.

Featured on the Show:

• Clifton Strengths Finder
• Follow PH SPOT on LinkedIn
• Follow Sujani on LinkedIn
• Join our community

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Welcome to PH Spotlight, a community for you to build your public health career with. Join us weekly right here, and I'll be here too. Your host, sujani Siva from PH Spot. Hello, and welcome to another episode here on the PH Spot podcast. This is Sujani, your host, the founder of PH Spot, and, yeah, this is the second episode for 2024. Another solo episode, me and you.

Speaker 1: 0:37

I get to tell you a little bit about what I've been thinking about, which is super exciting, and in a few weeks, we will be resuming our interviews with amazing public health professionals from around the world and telling you their stories and the reflections and advice that they have to share with us. Today, though, I want to talk about strengths. So we all have strengths, and I really believe in working in your strengths and focusing less on the weaknesses and getting bogged down by not being able to do something and letting that kind of affect your motivation to pursue anything, but I also, in that same thought, believe that the things that you are not good in in the past, or you thought you weren't good at, can improve, and for me, that has happened unconsciously, and the way I figured it out was through some external help, and I'll tell you about that in just a minute here. So I didn't think that it was possible that your strengths can change over time, right, although I am someone who completely believes in the growth mindset, where we can become better and that we are not limited by the things that we're not good at at the moment and that we can grow into certain roles or do things with effort and a little bit of work. But at the same time, I thought at the core, I have certain strengths and those are the areas where I shine. Those are the roles that I see myself navigating myself towards or being attracted to. But what I discovered and this was a very recent discovery, I'd say just a couple of months is that my strengths have kind of shifted. So I don't know if you know about and there's various companies that do it, but there are these strengths tests, right, and the one that I have used in the past is the Gallup Clifton Strengths Finder Test, and if you search up gallupcom, you'll be able to find what I'm talking about.

Speaker 1: 3:19

And essentially, the Clifton Strengths Assessment is a way for this quiz or assessment that they've developed. They ask you a series of questions and it uncovers your unique combination of your strengths and each of the 34 strength themes are categorized into four larger categories or domains. And this work and this assessment comes from research led by Don Clifton, who studied and categorized the talents of the world's most successful people and the. The four large domains that the 34 strengths fall into are strategic thinking and there's about you know, just under ten different strengths under that category. There's relationship building, there's influencing and there's executing right. And then you take this quiz or this assessment and the software kind of spits out your top strengths and it's like 15 bucks to do the assessment. There are free ones on the internet, various different versions. I like this one, just to keep it consistent, from the last time I did it, and so At the very start of my public health career so that was More than 10 years ago I was fresh out of grad school, at my first job, so very young, kind of still figuring myself out, still figuring out what I like to do I Did this test in the five strengths that came up on top for me were discipline, harmony, connectedness, relator and responsibility.

Speaker 1: 5:19

And if I go and take a look at the domains that all of those kind of fall into Discipline and responsibility they fall under the execution domain, and things like harmony, connectedness and being a relator falls under relationship building, and you know, when I think about myself ten years ago or even now, those are some of the strongest Like skill sets that I possess. I am a great relationship builder and I'm great at executing on tasks. I, at the time, I had no strengths come up in that strategic thinking bucket, nor the influencing bucket, and so Recently, a few months ago, I hesitated to do it because I figured now my strengths probably didn't change. And I looked back at the list that I got Ten years ago and I was like, yeah, you know, I still feel like I'm very good at relationship building and I'm really good at execution, so things aren't gonna change. But recently I joined an accelerator and part of kind of the first module was to like assess yourself, and they encouraged us to do the strengths finder or any other kind of strengths assessment and I figured, hey, why not? Like I want, I want to be a really good student in this accelerator, so let me redo this test. I'm sure I'm gonna get the same results.

Speaker 1: 6:58

To my surprise, though, the List changed Not drastically, but there were some very important changes. The three strengths that popped up Again from you know, ten years ago, were responsibility, relator and discipline, right. So the relator one is from the relationship building, and then the discipline and the responsibility are from the execution bucket. The two new strengths that came up and One of them was actually number two, so as high as my first strength was futuristic, and this falls under the strategic thinking bucket, and the other one was input, and that also falls under the strategic thinking bucket. So, ten years later, two skills that I thought I didn't have, or they weren't part of my kind of like top five strengths, end up becoming my top five strengths, right? So yes, I was a little surprised to see that futuristic and input showed up as part of my top five strengths, and when I think back to ten years ago, I Recognize that the ability for me to think strategically or even feel comfortable in that domain was kind of non-existent.

Speaker 1: 8:37

Like I remember being young and fresh out of grad school and just doing the work I needed and not really thinking about how does this work then impact the rest of my organization or how will this work transform things or what do I need to do to make changes in my organization. So that kind of future thinking or that strategic thinking I remember wasn't kind of at the top of my mind. It's not something that I exercised, right. But I think about, then, the journey over the 10 years and I'm able to identify exactly why there's been this shift in my strength and why they've become so dominant. And two things in particular stand out for me.

Speaker 1: 9:29

The first one is pH spot. Right, I founded pH spot seven years ago Yesterday was actually our seven year anniversary and I have had to think about how to run pH spot and its future in a very strategic way, right? So, not knowing, I was being forced to build those skills about. What is the vision of this company? How am I going to place different team members? What are we going to do day to day in order to make the vision come to life? Right, and then in my day job, I started off my public health career as a junior epidemiologist and then I worked my way up a little bit and then I was a public health officer, then I did more EPI work and then, more recently, I've become a manager and I've built a team from the ground up. I started with just one person and grew it to about eight people. I've led that team, I've had to be a part of management discussions and contribute to the future of our organization, and essentially what this has done is it has allowed me to build those skills that were once not really strong in my toolkit, right? So 10 years is a long time, yes, but in the perspective of our entire career, it's not right.

Speaker 1: 11:09

And what I want to share in this mini episode today is that I hope this reflection that I've had can act as a reminder to not only myself, but to you as well, that we can improve on the areas that we didn't think we were strong in, right? I remember early on in my career telling myself oh, I'm not good at strategy, work right, and it wasn't something that I would talk down on myself, but it was kind of like thoughts that would just pop up in my head. Or I'd say things like I'm definitely better at relationship building, but not strategy and vision. I'm gonna hand that over to somebody else, right? And that's something that will limit us if we continue that sort of self-talk.

Speaker 1: 12:04

And this is where, again, having a growth mindset is so important, and I encourage you to go you know, google about growth mindsets or even look up a few YouTube videos about growth mindset, but essentially it's this concept that we are not, you know, born with certain skills and that's all we have we are. It's having the mindset to think that, okay, I'm not good in this today, but I can become better at it if I work on it right. So leadership one of those things you can think. I don't think I'm a great leader, but I would like to. Right, and today I don't have the skills, but I know that with different experiences and different mentors, I can build the skills I need to be a good leader in public health. So having a growth mindset is going to be key for your career and we have to tell ourselves that if there are areas we're not strong in, we can work to improve it right.

Speaker 1: 13:13

And if you're like me and you need evidence to prove that, this is great evidence, right, I essentially studied myself from 10 years ago to now to kind of identify this and I had data to back it up and it was this Clifton Strengths Finder test.

Speaker 1: 13:31

So encourage you to try it for yourself. Maybe today you do a test like this and you reassess yourself 10 years from now and kind of study yourself and see where you've improved. So I really hope this is going to inspire you to think about where you want to go in the next few years in your career and the kind of skills that you want to develop and really be successful in your public health here. That's what I want for you, right? So with that I'm gonna wrap up this quick episode. I'm hoping to do a lot more of these where I come on here and just talk to you one-on-one and it's gonna be like 15 minutes. You can listen to it on a quick break and really like reflect, and I hope they end up being like reflective episodes as well as quick tips, like I used to do them. So, yeah, I'm looking forward to it, and I hope you are too, and until next time, I hope you have a wonderful week, thank you.