Finding strength

I've just finished reading, discovering "Now, Discover your Strengths' published by the Gallup Organisation. Buying the book gives you the option to complete their 'StrengthFinder' test.

I like tests, so I went over to the specific website, entered the code found in the book and sat down for 40 minutes to complete the test. Reading the outcome - my top five focus strengths - I wanted to call the Gallup Organisation straight away. Their test is flawed, those are not my top strengths, how can that be?

I was expecting strengths like: Activator (getting things done), Arranger (getting things done), Ideation (finding new ideas to get things done), Focus (to make sure things get done) or Relator (networking to get things done), but not a single one of them even made it in my top five! The test most be wrong, how could I end up with

1. Learner
2. Input
3. Maximiser
4. Intellection
5. Connectedness

Then I stopped to think (Intellection). And remembered how many times in the last months I wrote something in the line of "I've learned something new again today" or "I'm an eternal student" in my own blog or as comment on other blogs (Learner).

I pondered some more and realised something else. Yes, indeed I had been getting things done the last few hectic years, having to start all over again in business when the company who had 'moved' us to the U.K. went completely pear-shaped and we had decided to 'go-it-alone'. We struggled for a few years, working from home while trying very hard to find a little showroom for our business. We fought for business, we fought each other, we got things done, we survived.

I remembered something else too. Just lately I mentioned to my mentor that I felt as if I finally had left 'the survival-mode' and was 'creeping' back into my own self again. Reading more and more books, blogs, articles (Learner, Input), finding time to put everything learned better, more into practice (Maximiser). I'm always thinking things so Intellection isn't such a surprise after all and connectedness? Not only do I love networking, I see pattern - structures - relations everywhere.

I realised that focus strengths are those you have natural (talent?), are always close by, but in time of survival-mode other strengths (perhaps even amplified by the top five) creep to the foreground to 'help-out'.

I'm back into myself again, survival 'pain' has receded, learned to feel comfortable again in my expanded comfort zone.