The Applied Neuroscience Institute

Katherine wrote on Thu Jul 19th, 8:19am:

You will find in Tom Rath’s book, StrengthsFinder 2.0 a change in our old maximum of “you can be anything you want to be” to “you cannot be anything you want to be – but you can be a lot more of who you already are (pg. 9)” provides a great starting point when exploring our strengths.  The good news is that a strengths-based approach to life can “improve our confidence, direction, hope and kindness to towards others”, according to Gallup’s research (pg. 12).

The fact that our weaknesses will only change slightly over time and our strengths our what genius is made of sets the stage for developing an awareness of what our top 10 strengths are, recognizing when they are in play and developing our use of them more often. 

Once I identified my top 10 strengths I completed The Strengths Portrait assessment (12 New Steps for a New Millennium, Dr. William Larkin – Appendix A [pg. 301]). This assessment is a way to find out which of your weaknesses are predominant in your life and provides a spectrum of how to find your way back to the strength that relates to that weakness.

It is important to memorize each one of your top 10 strengths. You can do this by writing them down and leaving them in many different places, like your desk, bathroom mirror, in your wallet, etc.  One tool I used was my recorder on my smart phone.  I simply recorded my top 10 strengths and would listen to that throughout the day. This works well for me since I am an auditory learner. 
Once I completed my StrengthsFinder 2.0 assessment I was able to access My Dashboard (strengths.gallup.com/) and I had lots of fun using many of their tools to reinforce and help memorize my strengths. One was the Certificate Creator that can be used to print door hangers of your top 5 strengths and you can hang them around your house for a reminder to live in your strengths. 

Finally, once you have identified your strengths and understand their meaning it is time to start recognizing how they come into play throughout the week.  Using my Plans to the Universe & Answers Back by Dr. Larkin has provided an opportunity for me to journal daily about my strengths.  I start the day by creating an action plan.  I consider my schedule and match which strength I can use to ensure success in an event and/or interaction coming up that day. I have positive expectations that my strengths will provide me with everything I need to succeed in whatever the endeavor is.  Also, at the end of the day I will assess how I did and identify how the strength supported my success.  This ongoing awareness is what helps me build my strength portfolio of successes supporting my increase competence and confidence in my activities. 

Licensure Student

neuromind wrote on Sun Jul 22nd, 7:36pm:

Dr. Larkin writes, “Our focus is on our deficits because they are negative. Negative things get immediate emotional reactions… Deficits get more airtime because the negative feelings associated with them just seem to demand more attention. They carry a bigger immediate ‘punch’ than our strengths.”

Reading this blog took me back to a program I saw on PBS called Happy for No Reason. In this program and in her book with the same name, Marci Shimoff explores ways to build more happiness in our lives. The part that stayed with me and ties in with this blog is, “We’re still hard-wired the same way: we pay more attention to the negative than to the positive. As the psychologist and brain researcher Dr. Rick Hanson explained to me during our interview, our brains are ‘Velcro for negativity and Teflon for positivity.’  Our negative experiences stick to us like Velcro, while our positive experiences slide right off us like Teflon. In fact, researchers have found that it takes numerous positive experiences to overcome a single negative one!” (This makes a good argument for going to the emotional gym).

As someone with a top strength of Positivity, I have often wondered why there is MORE focus on negativity than positivity, more attention to our weaknesses and not to our strengths.  Some would argue we are “hard wired for survival,” and without focus on feelings like fear or anger, we would not have survived. For example, the caveperson, who wasn’t driven by fight or flight, and who walked up to pet the saber tooth tiger wouldn’t have lived to tell the tale. This is one argument for negativity; however, over the years I have learned there are other views that do not reduce us down to reactionary survival machines.

Now there are more voices that direct us to the positive, voices like Dr. Larkin(Growing the Positive Mind), Dr. Barbara Fredrickson (Positivity), and Dr. Dacher Keltner (The Compassionate Instinct).

As a NeuroPositive Licensure Student I am drinking this all in, and watching how it fits with my clients as well as in my own life. Learning about my top 10 strengths and focusing on growing them (versus trying to fix weaknesses) has been helpful to me.

A top strength of mine is Strategic. In the book Strengths Finder 2.0 by Tom Rath, one recommendation to grow this strength is to “Make yourself known as a resource for consultation with those who are stumped by a particular problem…By naturally seeing a way when others are convinced there is not way, you will lead them to success.” I am finding this to be true. In my corporate job I come in contact with many clients who are, as Rath says, convinced something cannot be done. My mind naturally goes in another direction, as a result clients are able to move more into an UpSpiral. As a coach, I keep a NeuroPositive frame, which helps my clients focus more on what is possible for them.

Recently a corporate client came to see me… there was a moment where I knew he could have headed into a downspiral and I helped redirect his focus to his strengths. The session remained constructive, and he walked away feeling more positive about the situation and what he could do by using his strengths.

Fiat Lux wrote on Mon Jul 23rd, 3:46pm:

Incorporating the practice of playing to my strengths in my professional life has completely changed
the way I perceive my value to an organization and in turn the way I show up in many group situations.

Many of my strengths and values are around relationship, connectedness, positivity, gratitude, the ability to love and be loved, individualization, communication. As such, I always found myself focusing on how to engage others in the organization’s mission in a way that empowered the individual.  “WIN/WIN”.

Often times, my colleagues who appreciated my concern for them, would gently make fun of me calling me “the caretaker” or the Spiritual Godmother.  I always felt somewhat embarrassed by my high touch approach and perceived that my concerns or behavior was not “corporate” enough…whatever that meant.

As soon as I started elevating the importance of playing to my strengths in my own “playbook”, I stopped apologizing for highlighting the human element in most work situations.  I stopped trying to
bridge the gap between who I am and who I think I need to be in order to provide value.
The minute I stopped trying to be something other than who I am, opportunities flowed to me like bees to flowers which allowed me to be myself, give what I have to give, and appreciate how those gifts help others to be who they truly are.  This work of this course has led me to those keen insights and made all the difference.

nickhhall wrote on Wed Jul 25th, 9:55pm:

Weaknesses are often focused on not simply because they “are negative,” it is usually because they create some kind of pain or dysfunction in a person’s life. This could be for one of two reasons: either a) they have expectations of being or performing or feeling a certain way which they are not (often because of social comparison), or b) one or more parts of their lives are very difficult due to a “weakness” (e.g., difficulty balancing their finances, difficulty reading social cues, their argumentative nature, etc.).

I would argue that this blog post mostly addresses the first reason - people’s expectations of themselves, usually due to social comparison: “I want to or should be this way and I’m not - I have a weakness here.” The less people focus on these kinds of weaknesses, the better. And what better way to deflect this focus than to focus on something positive and intrinsic - their strengths! (Rather than something extrinsic in the case of social comparison.)

The second reason - weakness that creates difficult life situations - is only partially addressed in “focusing on strengths.” Yes, we must definitely find and use our strengths to help and support these kinds of problems. However, not all weaknesses can be ignored. If you’re bad at math, you better learn your multiplication tables, you can’t simply ignore them. Yet, if you have a strength in musical ability, maybe you can use that strength to “strengthen the weakness” of math aptitude.

There’s a fine line between self-beratement for having a weakness and focusing solely on it to “fix” it, and accepting it/yourself for what it is, without paying attention to it if it is causing problems in your life. Pains and problems must be addressed, and sometimes, working on a weakness to strengthen it is the only way to solve it. We just have to make sure to not make the major focus of our lives be on weaknesses; they should be on what’s good and efficacious - our strengths. Even if they are in the service of our weaknesses.

palmspringsesq wrote on Mon Jul 30th, 2:05pm:

The natural play of my strengths is significant in that they appear to be correlated to one another. At least they appear to be in that these strengths compliment one another. For instance, my strength of empathy is closely related to another of my strengths, Social Intelligence.  All this while remembering the basics of the emotional gym, one does feel their particular strengths working throughout ones daily routine.

Mary Garvey Horst wrote on Wed Aug 8th, 8:30am:

I appreciated reading Neuromind’s comments following this blog article about concepts discussed in Marci Shimoff’s book “Happy for No Reason” because I am about half way through reading this book.  When I got to the section about “Velcro for Negativity and Teflon for Positivity” as Neuromind referenced in her post,  I recalled Dr. Larkin’s voice in the UpSpiraLife Group Leader training sessions calling attention to the “stickiness” of a share.  He would direct those of us who were group members to listen to a share and connect on the inside with what the person had described, particularly with how that felt within.  He was assisting each of us in focusing our attention on a positive feeling from our own experience attached to what the member sharing had described.  Rather than focusing on the stickiness or the velcro of negativity, Dr. Larkin was attuning the group to connect our velcro to the positive “stickiness” of a share.  Velcro for positivity, rather than negativity….brilliant!

For me, this shift from weaknesses to strengths and from negativity to positivity relates to adapting a new “script” for my life.  I can write a better story for my life!  I am in the process of living that better story that incorporates my strengths.  Once I learned that a slump into weakness offered me the opportunity to choose from a strength, I started to re-program myself.  I tune into my own internal guidance system (GPS) of my feelings and when I experience a slump, I know that it is time to re-orient myself toward the positive by engaging one (or more) of my Top 10 Strengths.  The more practice and skill that I developed in doing this for myself, the more readily I began to hear it in the conversations of my coaching clients.  It has become second nature to hear where a client needs to velcro to positivity, rather than focus on negativity or weakness.  The next prompt becomes: What strength can you apply to this situation in order for the outcome to change for the better?  As this process unfolds, the client becomes more and more adept at navigating his or her own life by engaging with strengths, rather than weaknesses.  The outcome is infinitely more satisfying!