Through the years I’ve had many wonderful personal relationships and conversations with family and friends. It’s clear to me what makes those conversations great – the people are terrific listeners. They encourage me to share my emotions and fears, support or challenge me when appropriate, and talk from their heads and hearts. And they share what’s going on with them.
It’s only very recently that I realized that there is another type of conversation that I also particularly enjoy. It is a connection to how I operate in the world.
More than 20 years ago I read the book Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham. Buckingham’s research through the Gallup organization asserts that we all have core strengths that affect how we operate. Those strengths span a lifetime. When we use them, we’re happy and productive.
I did the strengths assessment a couple of times and learned that my three core strengths are Ideation, Strategic and Learner. It should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me that I love new ideas and learning and figuring out how to apply them in a strategic manner.
In my past careers of chemistry, biology, computers, and financial planning, I loved reading and applying what I had learned to solving the puzzles that I came across. Now, even though I’m retired, I still have the same strengths. My new career of retirement coaching gives me another opportunity to collect ideas and develop strategies, this time for those preparing for a successful retirement.
I know that my particular core strengths apply to me and few others. Two types of conversations don’t work very well for me, and now I understand why. One is where I feel lectured at, where the speaker is a terrible listener. The other I label as trivial – the topics include weather, gossip about people I don’t know or a discussion about movies I’m not interested in seeing. Those conversations are neither ones from the heart nor are they interesting to me from an information / strategy viewpoint.
What kinds of conversations are great for you and how do they relate to your own core strengths?