E133 | Discovering Your Top Five Talents with Bert Robinson
Does your team need training and coaching to help people find a fit, alignment, productivity and clarity to exceed their potential?
Do you feel like you were made for more?
Are you ready to take your team’s communication up another gear?
Then you might need Bert Robinson, President at Inpowering People.
“I do coaching and consulting with my company Inpowering People. I’m in Firestone, Colorado, out in the Rocky Mountains, and have been doing this for over 12 years now. And basically, when I’m at my best, I inspire and align people to be their creative best.”
Twelve years ago, Bert had an epiphany relating to the notion of positive psychology – if you can harness the talents and the job you’re in, and those two things come together. You’ll never work another day in your life.
Bert and his team help people and businesses discover their untapped talents and potential, building them into performance that achieves tremendous success professionally and personally.
In this genuinely insightful episode, Bert talks about CliftonStrengths, how to help an executive team develop the language to have difficult conversations and the positive elements of strengths.
We rattled on for a bit, so the episode is a bit longer than usual, but we thoroughly enjoyed the conversation; we hope you will too.
On today’s podcast:
- The Inpowering People toolset
- Finding your strengths with CliftonStrengths
- Understanding your top five talent themes
- We all think differently
- Learning to ask for help
- InpowerU
Links:
Make Your Top Five Talents Work For You
“Have you ever been in one of those jobs where you were actually good at it, people liked what you did, and you were competent, you were proficient and all that. But at the end of the day, it was like, man, I should be doing something else?”
You’re not alone.
Bert Robinson had an epiphany 12 years ago, relating to the notion of positive psychology – if you can harness the talents and the job you’re in, and those two things come together, then you’ll never work another day in your life.
Bert set up inpowering People, a consultancy that helps inspire people and align them to be their creative best.
“Successful people understand their talents and their strengths. And they build their lives around that.”
The toolset he uses at inpowering People is built upon Don Clifton’s CliftonStrengths, an assessment tool that explains how uniquely powerful you are, ranking your strengths in order of the 34 CliftonStrengths themes.
CliftonStrengths
The idea being, that if people know their CliftonStrengths, and know how to use them, they are more engaged at work, more productive in their roles and generally happier and healthier.
As Clifton hypothesised, back in the late 50s and early 60s, it’s not that successful people have certain traits where others don’t, it’s that successful people understand their talents and their strengths, and they build their lives around them.
In order to enable more people to better understand themselves and therefore work to their strengths more easily, Clifton created an assessment that identifies 34 talent themes.
“The assessment identifies over 34 talent themes, when you take it, you get your top five, the top five talents. Clifton defined a talent as a natural recurring pattern of ways we think, feel or behave that can be productively applied.”
Bert takes those top five talent themes and helps and inspires people to align them into these naturally recurring patterns, turning them into their strengths.
“The assessment gives you your top five talents. What makes a talent a strength is when we begin to very intentionally add skills, knowledge, different uses of the talent in different ways. And then it grows, you know, just like a muscle.”
As talent grows it becomes a strength, and we begin to enjoy doing it.
Bert’s top five talents
“So my top five are beliefs, achiever, you know, like you achievers got to achieve, right? We got to get something done on this programme, right. So, strategic number three, command number four. And at number five is connectedness.”
Bert’s strengths align with his values, meaning he’ll move heaven and earth to make something happen, which makes sense, given his belief talent. Belief, says Bert, gives someone their north star, it gives them an intrinsic motivation to do things.
How does knowing someone’s strengths enable you to make the most of them?
Because it’s not about hiring clones, says Bert, it’s about if people are failing at what they do, it’s looking at their strengths and saying, ‘are they trying to do a thing in a way which doesn’t play to their talent?’
And no, we don’t all have the same strengths.
According to Clifton, the odds of somebody having your exact same top five talents is one in 34 million.
We truly are all unique.
“So the Strengths Finder, you know, the CliftonStrengths, it really accentuates the uniqueness and the diversity that we all have and how.”
We all think differently
“I had a boss of mine. He said, ‘Yeah, they’re adults, they’ll figure it out’. And I go, ‘maybe maybe not, you know, based on how they’re wired, are they going to figure it out the way you want them to? You might not like the result’.”
We all assume that everybody thinks the same way we do, that our thought process is normal, and we also assume that everybody has the same talents as us. But that isn’t true. We are all unique, says Bert.
Just become amazing at the thing you’re amazing at. But don’t overuse your talents.
“Our talents do have a kryptonite dynamic to them when they’re misused, or sometimes overused. It can kind of neutralise the brilliance of the talent.”
Book recommendations
- Marcus Buckingham – Now, Discover Your Strengths
- Dr. Henry Cloud – Necessary Endings