Go Put Your Strengths to Work: Six Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance Marcus Buckingham

Must read

I read the book and found very informative.I recommend to them who are willing to make career in people management.

Simply an Excellent Book for putting your Strengths to it's ultimate use!

Awesome read!

Liked

It was original but it was too old book .

A refreshing viewpoint.

Language is not interest

As I mentioned in my previous review of Mojo, I inadvertently read a series of books which all follow similar themes with their own unique approach. Those themes are all about strengths, satisfaction, and energy. All of these things are vital to our work and personal lives if we intend to be happy, learn, and continue to grow.Unlike Mojo, this book offers a more structured and scientific approach to identifying and making use of your strengths. The author states that only 17% of people, or 2 in 10, play to their strengths and realize the benefits that come from doing so.There are several tools available to profile and discover strengths, such as the Clifton Strength Finder. Of course once you clearly understand your strengths, the goal is to use strategies to conduct your work in a way that plays to your strengths and pushes back on your weaknesses.A few such strategies are explaining to colleagues what you are doing and asking for help, or to partner with someone who has opposite strengths to yours allowing you to trade work and each perform tasks that align with your strengths. The book contains many more examples and checklists to guide the reader through the process of identifying strengths and playing to them.Sometimes as I read I come across one statement that really sticks with me, in this book it was this - a weakness is something that regardless of how well you do it still produces negative emotions. This is so true, you can be really good at something yet hate doing it. Follow this line of thinking through and you can see how people wind up being given tasks that take energy from them because they have a reputation for being good at those things. As a result, that type of work keeps coming their way and can lead to becoming and staying unhappy in a job.I enjoyed the structure and flow of the information presented in this book and highly recommend it.

This book will keep me going for a while easy ready yet you feel you need to put into practise some of ideas , hence not half way through it yet inspiring motivation If you don't know where your strengths lies then this will help you in first few chapters it's already questioned where I will go next because through life we do change , plus our careers bring out other strengths that may provide better quality of life we never thought we could achieve .

Marcus Buckingham's book, "Go, Put Your Strengths to Work" was my introduction to what is being called "the strengths movement." And what an introduction! This book has had a profound impact on my life, as I'll explain a little later. I highly recommend it as a powerful book to change your life for the better.The idea at the center of the strengths movement is that excellence is not the opposite of failure and that, therefore, you will learn little about excellence from studying failure. The action based on this belief is that we should focus on finding and employing our strengths in life because doing so will make us more creative and happier, and better at what we do. To reach this goal, we need to assess our lives and jobs and discover how well they are allowing us to use our strengths.Surprisingly, most people are already at jobs that can allow them to maximize their strengths. The trick is to look at what you currently do and to increase dramatically how much of the time in your life you're actually playing to your strengths: in other words, see if you can restructure your life and job around your strengths.Buckingham suggests a 6-Step Discipline:1. Bust the Myths - believe that capitalizing on your strengths is a better way forward than working on your weaknesses2. Get Clear - identify your strengths and weaknesses3. Free Your Strengths4. Stop Your Weaknesses5. Speak Up - talk about your strengths and weaknesses6. Build Strong HabitsThe "AHA" Moment for me came near the beginning of the book as Buckingham discussed why it was that so many of us are still drawn to learning the things we lack or are not good at. In the process of reading "Go, Put Your Strengths to Work" I discovered that too often I focus on and complain about what I don't have and what I'm not instead of seeing and giving thanks for what I do have and what God has made me. A corollary to this is that instead of going to bed late thinking I've never done enough for God or my neighbor, I can go to be even if things are left undone. This was very liberating to me!Buckingham astounded me even further when he wrote that it was a myth that as you grow, your personality changes. The truth, instead, is that "As you grow, you become more of who you already are." This is exactly what I've found to be true in my life and the lives of countless others, and yet the ideas in my head didn't match up to what I was witnessing. This is not to deny the reality of true spiritual change. But your basic personality is not what really changes in a spiritual change: just the way that you choose to use what God has already given you.The greatest change in my thinking came when I went through Buckingham's exercises in which he asks the reader to answer the following 3 questions:1. How does it serve you to believe that as you grow your personality changes?2. What would it cost you to stop believing this?3. How would it benefit you more to believe that as you grow, you become more of who you are?As I answered these questions, a great deal of stored up wisdom flowed from my heart to my head to my hand as I wrote down my answers. These are 3 profound questions that can be applied to many important areas of life, and they helped me to realize a lot of important things about myself. I found myself, for example, measuring my "success" in a new and healthier way. The remainder of the book works out the ideas I've already summarized above, especially the 6-Step Discipline.I believe this book has the power to cause you to examine your life and to, in turn, live a life that is wiser, healthier, and happier - not just on a material but also on a spiritual level.

Interesting assessment tool - helpful!

While there are many reviews of this latest book from Marcus Cunningham, I am contributing my perspective as a Psychologist and Business Coach.I have found this book to be the most practical and functional of the set of books that Marcus Cunningham has written. His other book in this series on strengths, "Now, Discover Your Strengths", serves as the theoretical foundation of the understanding of personal strenths.The focus of this book is on putting those strengths to work. The framework Buckingham uses is a 6 step program.This program includes: 1) Believing in the importance of developing your strengths 2) Clarifying and identifying your strengths 3) Finding the right settings to develop and apply your strengths 4) Identifying and limiting your weaknesses 5) Learning how to promote your strenths within a business team setting 6) Buidling strong habits to overcome challenges to focusing on your strengthsI read this book with the intention of finding the functional application of strength buiding. I found his chapters on Clarifying your strengths and Finding the right settings to implement them, very helpful in that regard. He uses personal examples, as well as case studies.He suggested exercises to follow in order to clarify and then implement your strengths. I made successful use of those with a number of my clients who were very motivated by the results.Buckingham makes a clear effort to give practical applications and tools to use in every chapter. He references his website [...] for the available tools as well as offering the colorful resource guide at the end of the book.If you are a business or life coach and looking for exercises and applications of strengths with your clients, this Buckingham book with be a big help.