In recent studies, they are proving that being valedictorian does not increase odds of happiness, nor important successful careers. The signature strengths to be valedictorian are most directly correlated to success in the context of school and do not necessarily translate to career success. The ability to study, memorize and take tests works best at school!
Taking the time to understand both your signature strengths, and your optimal environments to work in, is the prescription that offers the highest potential and odds for success.
One of the most important things that occurs for someone in a coaching relationship with me, is the awakening of their self awareness. When we can truly identify one's "signature strengths" it offers a prescription for career paths. There are many profile tools that offer one form of identification of strengths. They are information that is "newsy" but rarely translate into wiser choices, or more success. They are also less reliable that self discovery through experience, because they base their conclusions on cognitive answers, biased with paradigms are influenced by conditioning of one's life experiences.
What is more powerful, richer, truer, is to give clients the experience of awakening to their signature strengths through facilitated experiences. The information is deeper, more universally true, and insightful because it brings a presence to the unfolding of that information that offers self insights and a sort of awakening. It also brings the body and it's wisdom into the discovery, yielding information closer to absolute and thus more applicable in a variety of contexts.
This approach also opens the door to discovering "energetic skills," things like empathic knowing (as applied to people), intuition, and field a
wareness, that are used all the time in business but are still mostly valued in the realm of illness or spirituality. These skills are important technologies for success and happiness, and offer a depth of understanding beyond visible fields of information to guide us more succinctly. Yet they are still as yet undervalued in business and are applied more in the realm of spirituality. But the truth is, our greatest leaders and disruptors, see things beyond and then make them happen.
Experiential profiling,also quickly helps identify, processing bias, how we take in and process information most optimally. Discover what activities are natural for us, that make us inspired and offer ease, vs what things are tough. For example one client was great at problem solving when it required him to use his body, but when it was simply a cognitive process, his mind wandered. He is highly intelligent, but it doesn't show in the usual ways.
Experiential profiling helps identify more optimal environments or contexts for our signature strengths, allowing us to "choose the right pond" to work in. When the environment is optimally conducive, we succeed much more easily. This is overlooked in traditional profiling tools. By the design of how the test is taken, they simply cannot identify characteristics of optimal context.
As a saltwater fish needs saltwater and a fresh water fish needs freshwater, we too have optimal environments. And just as a proper fish tank is balanced with a variety of fish with different purposes, bottom feeders, algae suckers, and middle
wimmers, all serve to create a successfully operating homeostatic environment, we can take our optimal environment into our design so that our ability to apply our signature strengths is cohesive in our business and career choices.
The result is being able to create value closer to a flow state for the individuals and the business.. There are many ways to success, with hard work and sacrifice being one of them. Hard work and sacrifice will take it's toll on us. But when we can work in flow resulting from conscious design, we can have much higher odds of success, and much more ease and
enjoyment along the way.