Over time all kinds of things pile up to the point that you can't even remember why you have them in the first place. Then one day you realize that so much of it is just clutter, in your garage and ostensibly in your life. So we started to look ruthlessly at everything and throw out those things that we were saving just in case bu ackowledging the fact that we were never going to use them.

When we were done, not only was the garage much cleaner, but we actually felt lighter. All that clutter doesn't just take up space; it takes up energy too. A clean garage is just a metaphor for a cleaner, less cluttered life.

Next weekend - the basement!

The first person I noticed was a little girlabout 10 years old or so. She had no hands and no legs below her knees. My first instinct was to feel sorry for her. But as I watched her she played with her friends, then she hopped up into her wheelchair and went off somewhere else. Then I realized - what I took to be a difficult disability was nothing for her. She had adapted and dealt with it as a normal part of life. She certainly didn't need my sympathy.

It was I who really had the problem. I have two healthy children with no physical problems. I'm not sure that I would have one tenth of the strength that little girl had. She was able to ignore her disabilities and capitalize on her strengths - and they were obviously considerable.

Before you feel sorry for yourself, think again. There will always be people a lot worse off than you, yet they manage to live great lives. And you can too if you can overcome limitations that for you only exist in your mind.

I actually enjoy speaking in public, writing, telling stories, and using metaphors to make a point. And I believe that I do those things quite well. Of course those of you who have read my writing might disagree. So the thought that this wasn't one of my strengths bothered me.

Actually though, it isn't really strengths that StrengthsFinder measures but instead themes of talent - areas where I demonstrate inherent ability and where I should be able to excel. For example Ideation, my foremost talent, suggests that I am always looking for connections between ideas and that's true. I enjoy that more than anything else too.

My other talents are similar insofar as they are things I seem to be good at and to enjoy. Upon reading them my wife said that they were dead on.

But that doesn't mean that communication is not one of my talents. It just means that is somewhere below the top five.I can still be an excellent communicator. Especially if it is something that I already enjoy.

The truth is, I'm a much more effective communicator when I am talking about, or writing about, something that excites me. And more often than not, I've used my other talents to synthesize an idea, or to learn something, or to create a plan. That gets me enthused about the subject which I am then presenting.

Last night I moderated an All Candidates debate for candidates running in the October 10 Ontario provincial election. I was comfortable enough throughout the entire evening. However, given limited time, I was actually combining questions based on my knowledge of the subjects in order elicit the information a bit more effectively. It was then, when I was actually using my talents, that I felt that I was acting in the moment and enjoying myself the most.

I was a more effective communicator after I made use of my top five talents.

I'm an effective communicator, and I'll continue to enjoy and improve that talent.And that's great. But as great as that makes me feel, it's pretty amazing to know that there are things that I'm even better at.

So don't worry. Just because something isn't a top five talent doesn't mean you'll never be good at. It just means that there are things that you can do even more efficiently.

In pretty much every interview, you'll be asked two questions:

• What are your strengths?
• What are your weaknesses?

In many cases your strengths will be glossed over. After all, you did get to the interview stage so you must have some of the required skills. But the weaknesses will often be used to disqualify you, or suggest why you aren't right for the role. Or the interviewer will be thinking in their minds about how they will deal with those weaknesses, even they may have absolutely no effect on the work you will be doing.

In pretty much every employee review you ever have, your manager will tell you what you did wrong. What your perceived weaknesses were, so that you can improve upon them. Of course nothing will improve your morale quite as much as being told what your are bad at.

Weaknesses are things that you aren't particularly good at.That suggests that you probably wouldn't enjoy those things either. So you will likely find that improving on your weaknesses is extremely boring, draining, and possibly even painful. You can suffer through workshops, seminars, and other training, but at best you will probably only be able to achieve a minor improvement.

After all, if you had a natural aptitude in those areas, they wouldn't be weaknesses, right?

Now does it seem worth it to endure pain to achieve a minor improvement in something you aren't good at and don't enjoy? Of course not. It is a far better idea to spend that time improving on your strengths; the areas in which you already excel and enjoy.

By all means you should know and acknowledge your weaknesses. Then you should take steps to minimize their impact.

For example, one of my weaknesses is the area of attention to detail, preferring instead the big picture. I can force myself to do it and do it well, but I don't enjoy it.So I try to pair up with someone who enjoys dealing with the details, and we make an excellent team. I'm also weak when it comes to finance, so I make friends with accountants and business analysts. You owe it to your employer to deal with these issues so that they don't impact your work.

Finding the weaknesses may be difficult; while there are tests to determine what strengths you have, there are few that determine your weaknesses. If you try to think of tasks that you find difficult or particularly boring, that should give you a clue as to your weaknesses.

However, once you have handled the weaknesses, you should concentrate on making the most of, and improving on, your strengths. Because you are already strong in these areas, you enjoy them, so improving them will be fun and you should be able to improve them substantially.

Effective use of your strengths will improve your productivity, make work more pleasant and possibly even fun, and the tasks will be accomplished almost effortless. And when you are "firing on all cylinders", people won't even notice your weaknesses because you'll be getting so much done and having fun doing it.

You'll be a lot more fun to work with too.

So to summarize:

1. Acknowledge your weaknesses.
2. Mitigate and minimize those weaknesses.
3. Know, use, and improve your strengths.

1. Ideation

   You are fascinated by ideas. What is an idea? An idea is a concept, the best explanation of the most events. You are delighted when you discover beneath the complex surface an elegantly simple concept to explain why things are the way they are. An idea is a connection. Yours is the kind of mind that is always looking for connections, and so you are intrigued when seemingly disparate phenomena can be linked by an obscure connection. An idea is a new perspective on familiar challenges. You revel in taking the world we all know and turning it around so we can view it from a strange but strangely enlightening angle. You love all these ideas because they are profound, because they are novel, because they are clarifying, because they are contrary, because they are bizarre. For all these reasons you derive a jolt of energy whenever a new idea occurs to you. Others may label you creative or original or conceptual or even smart. Perhaps you are all of these. Who can be sure? What you are sure of is that ideas are thrilling. And on most days this is enough.

2. Futuristic

   “Wouldn’t it be great if . . .” You are the kind of person who loves to peer over the horizon. The future fascinates you. As if it were projected on the wall, you see in detail what the future might hold, and this detailed picture keeps pulling you forward, into tomorrow. While the exact content of the picture will depend on your other strengths and interests—a better product, a better team, a better life, or a better world—it will always be inspirational to you. You are a dreamer who sees visions of what could be and who cherishes those visions. When the present proves too frustrating and the people around you too pragmatic, you conjure up your visions of the future and they energize you. They can energize others, too. In fact, very often people look to you to describe your visions of the future. They want a picture that can raise their sights and thereby their spirits. You can paint it for them. Practice. Choose your words carefully. Make the picture as vivid as possible. People will want to latch on to the hope you bring.

3. Strategic

   The Strategic theme enables you to sort through the clutter and find the best route. It is not a skill that can be taught. It is a distinct way of thinking, a special perspective on the world at large. This perspective allows you to see patterns where others simply see complexity. Mindful of these patterns, you play out alternative scenarios, always asking, “What if this happened? Okay, well what if this happened?” This recurring question helps you see around the next corner. There you can evaluate accurately the potential obstacles. Guided by where you see each path leading, you start to make selections. You discard the paths that lead nowhere. You discard the paths that lead straight into resistance. You discard the paths that lead into a fog of confusion. You cull and make selections until you arrive at the chosen path—your strategy. Armed with your strategy, you strike forward. This is your Strategic theme at work: “What if?” Select. Strike.

4. Learner

   You love to learn. The subject matter that interests you most will be determined by your other themes and experiences, but whatever the subject, you will always be drawn to the process of learning. The process, more than the content or the result, is especially exciting for you. You are energized by the steady and deliberate journey from ignorance to competence. The thrill of the first few facts, the early efforts to recite or practice what you have learned, the growing confidence of a skill mastered—this is the process that entices you. Your excitement leads you to engage in adult learning experiences—yoga or piano lessons or graduate classes. It enables you to thrive in dynamic work environments where you are asked to take on short project assignments and are expected to learn a lot about the new subject matter in a short period of time and then move on to the next one. This Learner theme does not necessarily mean that you seek to become the subject matter expert, or that you are striving for the respect that accompanies a professional or academic credential. The outcome of the learning is less significant than the “getting there.”

5. Maximizer

   Excellence, not average, is your measure. Taking something from below average to slightly above average takes a great deal of effort and in your opinion is not very rewarding. Transforming something strong into something superb takes just as much effort but is much more thrilling. Strengths, whether yours or someone else’s, fascinate you. Like a diver after pearls, you search them out, watching for the telltale signs of a strength. A glimpse of untutored excellence, rapid learning, a skill mastered without recourse to steps—all these are clues that a strength may be in play. And having found a strength, you feel compelled to nurture it, refine it, and stretch it toward excellence. You polish the pearl until it shines. This natural sorting of strengths means that others see you as discriminating. You choose to spend time with people who appreciate your particular strengths. Likewise, you are attracted to others who seem to have found and cultivated their own strengths. You tend to avoid those who want to fix you and make you well rounded. You don’t want to spend your life bemoaning what you lack. Rather, you want to capitalize on the gifts with which you are blessed. It’s more fun. It’s more productive. And, counterintuitively, it is more demanding.

I was actually a bit surprised. I've always considered myself a good communicator, yet that didn't show up in my skills. At first glance these skills just don't seem to describe me, but as I read the descriptions they do seem to come pretty close. So I guess my next step is to determine just how best to use those skills in my drive to find my life's work so to speak.

I've been trying to determine my strengths for some time, and I assure you that this is the fastest way I've seen to do just that.

Every Friday my wife and I have dinner with good friends of ours. We haven't known them all that long, but we seemed very comfortable very quickly. We ended up back at their place and our conversation turned to ways to improve customer service - yes some people actually enjoy discussing that kind of thing.

He had just finished some business training on how to improve their automotive repair company, and he mentioned the book Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton.The book explains how the Gallup organization, through literally two million interviews, was able to isolate 34 key talents. Combined with knowledge and skills, these talents could be built into strengths.

The book notes that most organizations are built on two flawed assumptions about people:

1. Each person can learn to be competent in almost anything.
2. Each person's greatest room for growth is in his or her areas of greatest weakness.

It turns out though, when they interviewed the world's best managers, they found those assumptions to be completely wrong. These two assumptions guided the best managers:

1. Each person's talents are enduring and unique.
2. Each person's greatest room for growth is in the areas of his or her greatest strength.

He spoke so passionately about how learning his strengths had helped him in business, growing sales substantially in what some might feel to be an area of fairly low growth. Yes he was able to grow by impementing changes that others in the same business were afraind to. He had realized that his business was really about dealing with people, so he played to he strengths in that area, and minimized his weaknesses.

His wife had learned her strengths as well and found them very interesting. His trainer, and now his friend, was a great proponent of the book as well, basing a good deal of his training on it. If you can believe it, the four of us actually sat down to watch a couple of very entertaining DVDs by Marcus Buckingham. Mr Buckingham posed the following question:

What percentage of employees do you think strongly agree that they have an opportunity to do what they do best every day? What percentage truly feel that their strengths are in play?

Twenty percent.

Fully eighty percent of employees were not using their strengths.

Imagine how much more your company could achieve if you could merely double that to forty percent? Or perhaps even fifty percent? The thought intrigued me, and I've actually been trying to determine my strengths. For purchasers the book provides an online tool, strengthsfinder.com, to do just that. This seemed to be exactly what I was looking for, so he loaned me his copy of the book.

I found it so interesting that I read the entire book today. I'll grab my own copy tomorrow so that I can take the assessment test. The book also provides complete descriptions of each strength theme with examples, as well as examples of how the strengths can benefit your organization and how to manage people effectively based on their strengths. It also explains in detail how Human Resources departments could use strengths-based systems to determine accurate metrics on how their employees are actually performing.

I've often felt that Human Resources tries too hard to fit people into predetermined spaces rather than figure out how to actually use their real strenghs, and the book seems to corroborate that. Of course I've never understood why the department is called Human Resources either. Perhaps to distinguish it from the Animal Resources department?

Serendipitously, this seems to be the perfect tool for me at the perfect time. A simple assessment tool that can accurately assess my talents, and lead me toward my strengths. And perhaps toward my passion.

Next step: Discover my strengths.

As he was trying to find his own way, Mr. Bronson interviewed 900 people, and whittled that down to 70 people that he spent a great deal of time with:

These are ordinary people. People of all ages, classes, and professions -- from a catfish farmer in Mississippi to a toxic-waste inspector in the oil fields of Texas, from a police officer in East Los Angeles to a long-haul trucker in Pennsylvania, from a financier in Hong Kong to a minister at a church on the Oregon coast. These people don't have any resources or character traits that give them an edge in pursuing their dream. Some have succeeded; many have not. Only two have what accountants call "financial independence." Only two are so smart that they would succeed at anything they chose (though having more choices makes answering The Question that much harder). Only one, to me, is saintly. They're just people who faced up to it, armed with only their weaknesses, equipped with only their fears.

I've always figured that I, like everyone else, was here for some purpose. There was something we excelled at and that should just jump out at us if we looked. But Mr. Bronson found out that wasn't necessarily true:

Most of us don't get epiphanies. We only get a whisper -- a faint urge. That's it. That's the call. It's up to you to do the work of discovery, to connect it to an answer. Of course, there's never a single right answer. At some point, it feels right enough that you choose, and the energy formerly spent casting about is now devoted to making your choice fruitful.

And he identified four key stumbling blocks that get in the way of us acting on that calling:

• MONEY Doesn't Fund Dreams

  The ruling assumption is that money is the shortest route to freedom. Absurdly, that strategy is cast as the "practical approach." But in truth, the opposite is true. The shortest route to the good life involves building the confidence that you can live happily within your means (whatever the means provided by the choices that are truly acceptable to you turn out to be). It's scary to imagine living on less. But embracing your dreams is surprisingly liberating. Instilled with a sense of purpose, your spending habits naturally reorganize, because you discover that you need less.

• SMARTS Can't Answer The Question

  The point is, being smarter doesn't make answering The Question easier. Using the brain to solve this problem usually only leads to answers that make the brain happy and jobs that provide what I call "brain candy." Intense mental stimulation. But it's just that: candy . A synthetic substitute for other types of gratification that can be ultimately more rewarding and enduring. As the cop in East L.A. said of his years in management at Rockwell, "It was like cheap wood that burns too fast."

• PLACE Defines You

  The relevant question in looking at a job is not What will I do? but Who will I become? What belief system will you adopt, and what will take on heightened importance in your life? Because once you're rooted in a particular system -- whether it's medicine, New York City, Microsoft, or a startup -- it's often agonizingly difficult to unravel yourself from its values, practices, and rewards. Your money is good anywhere, but respect and status are only a local currency. They get heavily discounted when taken elsewhere. If you're successful at the wrong thing, the mix of praise and opportunity can lock you in forever.

• ATTITUDE Is the Biggest Obstacle

  Environment matters, but in the end, when it comes to tackling the question, What should I do with my life? it really is all in your head. The first psychological stumbling block that keeps people from finding themselves is that they feel guilty for simply taking the quest seriously. They think that it's a self-indulgent privilege of the educated upper class. Working-class people manage to be happy without trying to "find themselves," or so the myth goes.

It all comes down to how comfortable you are with The Inevitable Cocktail-Party Question: "What do you do?":

In other words, if you don't like The Inevitable Cocktail-Party Question, maybe it's partly because you don't like your answer.

I've never really enjoyed the question, and I've never enjoyed answering it either, because I was never really able to say what I did without having to describe my job. I've always thought that I should be able to say what I did very simply. something like "I make stuff work when other people say it's impossible". It's not my job; it's what I do.

But before I can really say what I do, I need to figure out what I'm really good at. I need to determine my strengths.

And that is my next step.

I've wanted to start a blog on the topic of personal development for a while now, and kept coming up with reasons why it wasn't the right time. So I took my own advice and just did it.

I've been researching what to do next with my life, and I've learned a lot, so I thought I'd put pen to paper so to speak, and share it.Please excuse the look for now - it is a work in progress. Welcome, and I hope you enjoy the ride.