Closing Session: Coming from a Position of Strength

By Michelle Khouri, Quotes president

In the last session of the day, presented by Carolyn Shaffer and titled “Coming from a Position of Strength,” we learned valuable lessons on how to grow by working on our natural talents. Shaffer started her presentation with a story about a rabbit that goes to school. The rabbit is enrolled in swim class, climbing class, and running class. Naturally, the rabbit excels with running, but fails at climbing and swimming, even after repeatedly trying. The moral of the story: the rabbit was made to run and was naturally good at it. Shaffer teaches about the strength movement, where the saying “You can be anything you want to be if you try hard enough,” shifts to the more realistic saying, “You can’t be anything you want to be, but you can be more of who you are.”

First, Shaffer offered definitions to the following terminology:

• Knowledge: what we know (transferrable)
• Skill: what you can do (transferrable)
• Talent: natural way of thinking and behaving
• Strength: the ability to consistently provide near perfect performance
• Weakness: anything that gets in the way of excellent performance

The most important part of the strength movement is knowing exactly what is a strength and what is not. Something is most likely not your strength if:

• It doesn’t come naturally
• It is consistently difficult, sometimes even seemingly impossible
• It is energy draining
• It is confidence-reducing
• Repeated experience shows little improvement

Some tips she offers us for how to work from a position of strength is to spend some time observing ourselves and others to figure out what makes us or them tick; link strengths to performance goals, and leverage them accordingly; reevaluate so-called weaknesses in order to see how to best manage them; and finally, keep the focus!

“How would you like to spend your day? Playing with your strengths or wrestling with your weaknesses,” asks Shaffer, “It’s a rhetorical question.”