It’s easy to get stuck in a rut. We can get so caught up in our daily routines that we forget how to be our best selves. The good news is, you don’t have to wait for a big life event or a huge change in your life to make your life better. You can start right now.
All you need is some inspiration and the right tools.
Here are 50 powerful strengths quotes to help you get started on your journey to living a better life.
You’re going to love where this list.
- “If your senses are numbed with delusion and denial, you will stop looking for these true strengths and wind up living a second-rate version of someone’s life rather than a worldclass version of your own”
― Donald O. Clifton - “At an early age, you started hearing it: It’s a virtue to be “well-rounded.”… They might as well have said : Become as dull as you possibly can be.”
― Donald O. Clifton - “When we studied them, excellent performers were rarely well rounded. On the contrary, they were sharp.”
― Donald O. Clifton - “From this point of view, to avoid your strengths and to focus on your weaknesses isn’t a sign of diligent humility. It is almost irresponsible. By contrast the most responsible, the most challenging, and, in the sense of being true to yourself, the most honorable thing to do is face up to the strength potential inherent in your talents and then find ways to realize it.”
― Donald O. Clifton - “While your spontaneous reactions provide the clearest trace of your talents, here are three more clues to keep in mind: yearnings, rapid learning, and satisfactions. Yearnings reveal the presence of a talent, particularly when they are felt early in life.”
― Donald O. Clifton - “Knowledge consists of the facts and lessons learned.
Skills are the steps of an activity.
These three-talents, knowledge, and skills-combine to create your strengths.”
― Donald O. Clifton - “As John Bruer describes in The Myth of the First Three Years, nature has developed three ways for you to learn as an adult: Continue to strengthen your existing synaptic connections (as happens when you perfect a talent with relevant skills and knowledge), keep losing more of your extraneous connections (as also happens when you focus on your talents and allow other connections to deteriorate), or develop a few more synaptic connections.”
― Donald O. Clifton - “The point here is not that you should always forgo this kind of weakness fixing. The point is that you should see it for what it is: damage control, not development. And as we mentioned earlier, damage control can prevent failure, but it will never elevate you to excellence.”
― Donald O. Clifton - “There is one sure way to identify your greatest potential for strength: Step back and watch yourself for a while. Try an activity and see how quickly you pick it up, how quickly you skip steps in the learning and add twists and kinks you haven’t been taught yet. See whether you become absorbed in the activity to such an extent that you lose track of time. If none of these has happened after a couple of months, try another activity and watch-and another. Over time your dominant talents will reveal themselves, and you can start to refine them into a powerful strength.”
― Donald O. Clifton - “Talent is any recurring pattern of thought, feeling, or behavior that can be productively applied.”
― Donald O. Clifton - “Each of these strategies-get a little better at it, design a support system, use one of your strongest themes to overwhelm your weakness, find a partner, and just stop doing it-can help you as you strive to build your life around your strengths.”
― Donald O. Clifton - “Our research into human strengths does not support the extreme, and extremely misleading, assertion that ‘you can play any role you set your mind to,’ but it does lead us to this truth: Whatever you set your mind to, you will be most successful when you craft your role to play to your signature talents most of the time.”
― Donald O. Clifton - “The acid test of a strength? The ability is a strength only if you can fathom yourself doing it repeatedly, happily, and successfully.”
― Donald O. Clifton - “To develop a strength in any activity requires certain natural talents.”
― Donald O. Clifton - “You cannot be anything you want to be – but you can be a whole lot more of who you already are.”
― Tom Rath - “The key to human development is building on who you already are”
― Tom Rath - “The most successful people start with dominant talent—and then add skills, knowledge, and practice to the mix. When they do this, the raw talent actually serves as a multiplier.”
― Tom Rath - “Perhaps the ultimate test of a leader is not what you are able to do in the here and now – but instead what continues to grow long after you’re gone”
― Tom Rath - “What great leaders have in common is that each truly knows his or her strengths – and can call on the right strength at the right time.”
― Tom Rath - “It appears that the epidemic of active disengagement we see in workplaces every day could be a curable disease…if we can help the people around us develop their strengths.”
― Tom Rath - “When we build on our strengths and daily successes — instead of focusing on failures — we simply learn more.”
― Tom Rath - “Every human being has talents that are just waiting to be uncovered.”
― Tom Rath - “At its fundamentally flawed core, the aim of almost any learning program is to help us become who we are not.”
― Tom Rath - “Across the board, having the opportunity to develop our strengths is more important to our success than our role, our title, or even our pay.”
― Tom Rath - “If you spend your life trying to be good at everything, you will never be great at anything. While our society encourages us to be well-rounded, this approach inadvertently breeds mediocrity. Perhaps the greatest misconception of all is that of the well-rounded leader.”
― Tom Rath - “Building your talents into real strengths also requires practice and hard work, much like it does to build physical strengths.”
― Tom Rath - “Far too many people spend a lifetime headed in the wrong direction. They go not only from the cradle to the cubicle, but then to the casket, without uncovering their greatest talents and potential.”
― Tom Rath - “If you focus on people’s weaknesses, they lose confidence.” At a very basic level, it is hard for us to build self-confidence when we are focused on our weaknesses instead of our strengths.”
― Tom Rath - “You cannot learn very much about excellence from studying failure.”
― Marcus Buckingham - “Everyone can probably do at least one thing better than ten thousand other people.”
― Marcus Buckingham - “People don’t change that much. Don’t waste time trying to put in what was left out. Try to draw out what was left in. That is hard enough.”
― Marcus Buckingham - “…to encourage people to take responsibility for who they really are. And it is the only way to show respect for each person. Focusing on strengths is the storyline that explains all their efforts as managers.”
― Marcus Buckingham - Identify a person’s strenths. Define outcomes that play to those strengths. Find a way to count, rate or rank those outcomes. And then let the person run.”
― Marcus Buckingham - “As a manager your job is not to teach people talent. Your job is to help them earn the accolade “talented” by matching their talent to the role. To do this well, like all great managers, you have to pay close attention to the subtle but significant differences between roles.”
― Marcus Buckingham - “Our talents come so easily to use that we acquire a false sense of security: Doesn’t everyone see the world as I do? Doesn’t everyone feel a sense of impatience to get this project started? Doesn’t everyone want to avoid conflict and find the common ground? Can’t everyone see the obstacles lying in wait if we proceed down this path? Our talents feel so natural to us that they seem to be common sense.”
― Marcus Buckingham - “Focus on each person’s strengths and manage around his weaknesses. Don’t try to fix the weaknesses. Don’t try to perfect each person. Instead do everything you can to help each person cultivate his talents. Help each person become more of who he already is.”
― Marcus Buckingham - “If you want to change your life so that others may benefit from your strengths, then change your values. Don’t waste time trying to change your talents.”
― Marcus Buckingham - “Partnership is not the crutch of the imperfect, but the secret of the successful.”
― Marcus Buckingham - “As oblivious as we can be to our own strengths, it’s even easier to ignore the particular and unique strengths of others.”
― Marcus Buckingham - “Those of us who do this best—who find what we love about what we do, and cultivate this love with intelligence and discipline—are the ones who contribute most. The best people are not well-rounded, finding fulfillment in their uniform ability. Quite the opposite, in fact—the best people are spiky, and in their lovingly honed spikiness they find their biggest contribution, their fastest growth, and, ultimately, their greatest joy.”
― Marcus Buckingham - Life is very interesting… in the end, some of your greatest pains, become your greatest strengths.
― Drew Barrymore - Nothing is so strong as gentleness, nothing so gentle as real strength.
― Saint Francis de Sales - Strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle.
― Napoleon Hill - Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm.
― Abraham Lincoln - Where there is no struggle, there is no strength.
― Oprah Winfrey - He who conquers others is strong; He who conquers himself is mighty.
― Lao Tzu - Kites rise highest against the wind – not with it.
― Winston Churchill - It does not take much strength to do things, but it requires great strength to decide on what to do.
― Elbert Hubbard - Only by contending with challenges that seem to be beyond your strength to handle at the moment you can grow more surely toward the stars.
― Brian Tracy - Greatness lies, not in being strong, but in the right using of strength; and strength is not used rightly when it serves only to carry a man above his fellows for his own solitary glory. He is the greatest whose strength carries up the most hearts by the attraction of his own.
― Henry Ward Beecher
