Peter Bockenthien

Peter has extensive design and marketing experience, working for leading health and lifestyle companies such as Wild Oats, Whole Foods Market, and Patagonia. Peter has a knack for successfully completing things he's never tried before. He calls himself a good rat, meaning that he gets through the maze faster than most others. He is always available and ready to take on a new project.

When he's not at his computer you can find him in the yarden. Peter recently completed the Colorado Master Gardening program at the JeffCo Extension. Loves it. He's currently launching UltraSEF using MODx 2.0

Strengths

At Angela's urging, I too recently completed the Strengths Finder assessment. It jibed what I knew about myself. For example I've always said that I'm a "can do" person who does extremely well the first time things I've never done before.

Strengths Finder expands on this and articulates it in better ways:

People who are especially talented in the Strategic theme create alternative ways to proceed. Faced with any given scenario, they can quickly spot the relevant patterns and issues.

There's more to this. Here are few that standout as accurate descriptions of my strengths:

Because of your strengths, you can design innovative plans. You probably raise issues and identify recurring obstacles as you generate tactical options. Problems and possible solutions become apparent to you. Once you outline action steps, you quickly execute them one by one. You refuse to waste time questioning your ideas after everything has been set into motion. By nature, you pay close attention to what is going on around you. You listen. You quiz people. You read. You probably take notes on key points. As you accumulate lots of information, you disregard what is unrelated, and pay heed to what is really important. The more you reflect on what you know, the more problems begin to reveal themselves, and eventually solutions start taking shape in your mind. Finally, given the situation, you select the best plan from your list of options. It’s very likely that you can reconfigure factual information or data in ways that reveal trends, raise issues, identify opportunities, or offer solutions. You bring an added dimension to discussions. You make sense out of seemingly unrelated information. You are likely to generate multiple action plans before you choose the best one. Driven by your talents, you are known for your ease with language. This ability serves you well when you need to talk with newcomers or outsiders. Your vocabulary probably allows you to tell stories or express your ideas with great clarity. Chances are good that you comprehend what has gone wrong. Eagerly, you uncover facts. Sorting through lots of information rarely intimidates you. You welcome the abundance of information. Like a detective, you sort through it and identify key pieces of evidence. Following these leads, you bring the big picture into view. Next, you generate schemes for solving the problem. Finally, you choose the best option after considering prevailing circumstances, available resources, and desired outcomes.

Where I struggle is that people tend to focus on other people's weaknesses because that's what we've been taught to do. You've heard the cliche "Fences are as strong as their weakest link". The problem is that it ignores strengths and favors weakness as some kind of homogeneous condition that can be overcome with hard work.

That's crazy. You can't change who you are, but you most definitely can become more of who you are. That's to say your strengths absolutely can be developed further. Most of us have been conditioned to focus on weak areas and not develop our strengths. Not a happy lot when we do that, are we?

The choice is clear: develop our strengths and become better. Or focus on weak areas at the unrecoverable expense of developing one's strengths; waste time, energy and the potential that our strengths hold.