Founders Strengths Reveal • Michelle Winn • The Good Ideas Club Podcast

And how does it compare? Because I'm glad you mentioned the letter ones and the different color hats and things like that.

How does it compare to, say, a Myers-Briggs and the four letters with the little ending bit on that? I can't remember.

But I'm an ENTJ is what I know.

But equally, I did that test years and years ago.

So I don't know if I'm still an ENTJ.

Does it change? But anyway, how does it compare to those sort of more traditional psychometrics?

Yeah, so I do use those as well in some ways, and they're really good for raising self-awareness of who you are, how you choose to work.

Strengths is a layer on top of that almost, which is what energizes us, what we're quite good at, and what we've got the potential to be great at as well.

So often, as a general thing, we tend to look, we've got a negativity bias, so we tend to look at what our weaknesses are, what we're lacking.

And the strengths profiling and strengths focus then just takes that to an alternative because it's a lot easier.

So the Myers-Briggs and everything have got a place and I use them a lot myself in different ways, but less and less so because I find that there's more and more research coming out that if you put people in boxes, it can be a little bit restrictive and it's a bit more collaborative.

It's an

interesting kind of dichotomy on the personality side and psychological labeling and everything, because on the one hand, it is good to identify strengths and weaknesses.

But on the other, it's like, how adaptable are we really? And how susceptible are we to siloing ourselves into specific factions that have been given to us? Now, interestingly enough, Dan, the ENTJ one is known as the commander.

And for context, Dan's background is 12 years military in the army.

There's a nature versus nurture debate there.

And I'd love to unpack what that actually looks like from your point of view.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And the reason why I tend to now focus more on strengths is because rather than confining, it's more developmental because we can access whatever we want, really.

And in the right situations, we need to be able to access those.

So our strengths are what we naturally migrate to and what we naturally use.

But if we need to access other things, we can.

They're quite developmental.

And that's part of the reason why I quite like that strengths focus, because it's not restrictive.