Rick Richardson Reimagining Evangelism: Inviting Friends on a Spiritual Journey
The Deliberate Church: Building Your Ministry on the Gospel
Bill M. Sullivan New Perspectives on Breaking the 200 Barrier
« Twitter Updates for 2008-06-24 | Home | Wednesday Links »
Strengths: Competition - The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly
By jason | June 25, 2008
I’ve been thinking a lot about the Strengths Finder and subsequently my own strengths as we are going to begin our first Partner Connection this coming Sunday. If you are unfamiliar with the Strengths Finder check this out.
Basically the SF assesses your top 5 themes of strength. The idea is here are 5 themes of strength that you display, how does that work out in your everyday life. It is a mistake to merely think “competition” is my strength. We have to take the next step to see how this is actually played out in our lives to discover our “strengths.”
My top theme of strength is Competition.
It’s not hard to see that I’m a competitive guy. People who don’t even know me very well see this immediately.
I was the kid that loved Techmo Bowl. And if you remember the original it didn’t keep team and player stats. So what did I do? I kept my own stats in a notebook! I know, I have issues.
I’m the guy who now has a little notebook to keep track of his shot patterns for disc golf.
I’m the guy who loves to dominate at washers & baggo.
I’m the guy who would keep track of how fast I could close down my area when I worked at McDs in high school to see if I could break my personal record.
I’m the guy who would keep track of how fast he could cut the greens, again to beat my own records.
Let’s face it, basically anything that can become a competition I turn it into one.
This can be a good thing for me. For me this is part of what makes me so internally driven. I don’t need tons of outside pressure and prompting to strive to do better, to become better. If I have no external measures I will measure myself against myself and strive to do better next time than I did this time.
Sometimes this is tough because not everything I do has easily quantifiable measures. When you have the odd “skill”-set I have you don’t get phone calls to help build stuff (where you easily see the results when you’re finished). I never have someone call me up, “Hey dude, on Friday can you come over and write a Bible Study for me?” That’s got some upside I suppose. 
It also can go really bad though. I can have a tendency to not just want to excel and win, but I can also want others to lose. This is where my self-centeredness collides with my strength and morphs into a sinister super-villian. So I constantly have to check my motivations and my drives.
But knowing this theme of strength in myself I am able to put myself in situations that will help me “play to my strength.” So I deliberately play games in my head, turning things into a competition. I do compare what and how I’m doing with others who are excelling because that drives me to do better. (I know for some the comparison game is a huge detriment.) These things help me become a better me, so to speak.
Topics: Leadership, Spiritual Growth |