What is Clifton Strengths?
Clifton Strengths is a survey that was developed by psychologist Donald Clifton. The purpose fo the test is to start people on the path to developing strengths by helping individuals discover their most dominants talents. Talents are considered the "raw materials" that are required for strengths development, and the more dominant the talent, the greater the opportunity is for the strength. The strengths that I received from the test were:
Individualization
Empathy
Input
Positivity
Command
The website says that people exceptionally talented in the individualization theme are intrigued with the unique qualities of each person, and they also have a gift for figuring out how different people can work together productively. With the empathy strength, people talented in this theme can sense other people's feelings by imagining themselves in others' lives or situations. For input, people talented in this category have a need to collect and archive. They may accumulate information, ideas, artifacts, or even relationships. For my fourth strength, positivity, people talented in this theme have contagious enthusiasm. They are upbeat and can get others excited about what they are going to do. The last one, command, people in this category have presence and can take control of a situation and make decisions.
With these words being the ones I received out of the 34 different options, I feel that these words are the best in describing me. I think that the test is very accurate, and it is good to know that these are some of the biggest strengths that I can focus on.
I also believe that a few of these different themes could be applied to my research project. Empathy could be applied because I needed to be able to sense other peoples feelings in their different situations and be able to code the data together based on the feelings the participants were trying to portray. Input could be applied to my research because I collected and archived all of the participants responses and put them into certain categories. The last one that could be applied to my research is command. While being guided by my mentor, I very much stayed in charge and was able to make decisions within the work we were doing.
