Leading with Strength: A Journey to Professional Joy and Success | 001

Consuela Muñoz: Today I want to share with you guys a little bit about myself and my story and how this podcast came to be. And to start with my story, I really did the standard kind of things, you know, I've the average, the default way to approach my working career, right? So I went to college right out of high school, got a degree actually to and chemistry and geology. And then, you know, got married, started having children, raising my children, growing my career, right, like moving up the ladder. It's really doing that, that standard default thing. One day, I realized at work, and I just kind of like came to a stop and said, Oh, my goodness, what am I doing? Like, every day, it's like, day after day, I come into work, and I go home, week after week, year after year. And what is the point? What am I doing here? What am I? What am I meant for? And I felt like I was meant for more than I was doing? I don't know if you've ever had that feeling like what? What am I even doing? What is the work I'm doing? How does it matter? Now, I knew that I was meant for Warren, how was I going to get there? Well, around this time, I went to a conference. And the lady was talking about strengths. StrengthsFinder assessment. Awesome. I'm really super excited about so when I got back, of course, I didn't work on it, right? Because when you get back from a conference, you know how it is, you're busy, and you're behind and you start working on stuff. But then I had this really low day. And I thought, you know, I'm gonna take that strength assessment, let me see where my strengths are. So I take the strength assessment. Mind blowing, right? How did they figure this out? Literally, when I read the first sentence, I was looking around, like, how do they know this about me? I just answered these questions. How did they get this information? This report from the questions that I answered, right. And what's so great about reading this report isn't so powerful for you, because here it is in black and white words on a page, words that are coming from somebody else, not from you, but somebody else about the most amazing parts of you, everything on there is how you are amazing. And it was very powerful.

And it started changing how I was approaching my work, how I was approaching my life, the opportunities I was looking for, and even what rules I wanted to take on next. So I was working as a chemist in a very isolated lab and an isolated plant and a manufacturing complex, right. And I knew that I needed to something that could really give a chance for my strengths to shine. And so I looked for a role that would give me a little more exposure, I lead from influencing my strengths or communication, woo, which is Winning Others Over futuristic positivity and activator. And lead from influencing I needed a little bit more roll with that. So I started taking a role moved into a safety role dealing with the contractor program. What's great about this is I now have to speak to every contractor or contracting company that comes on site. I'm speaking with all of the people working with the contractors, I am getting to develop and grow my communication. And it was amazing. But even more than that, I realized I was now excited to go to work. I don't know if you've ever had that. If you haven't, it's something you want to have. I would wake up before the alarm excited to go to work excited to work with the people I was going to work with. And I realized that that is something that everybody should get to have, you should be in a job where you're excited to get up to go to work in the morning. Because I'm sure you've heard, but life has really long. No, right we hear the other way life is really long, if you are miserable in your work, but life is truly short. So you need to make good choices about how you spend your time. That's what I wanted to do. So I started looking for ways that I could bring strengths to other people, bringing them to the team I was working with. Then I joined the Women's Business Group, our employee resource group, to really start looking for ways that I could bring strengths to more people. As I do that, we create a strength program. I start teaching the women about their strengths. They're really excited. They love this. They want to bring this to their teams. I start doing team building events, I start coaching whole teams on their strengths. And I knew that's what I wanted for me. And so I left corporate got officially certified as a Gallup certified strength coach and started working as a coach and an entrepreneur are training leaders and teams, how to develop their strengths and how to have their teams work more effectively together. Now, before I go into a lot, I did want to talk about strengths a little bit.

So if you're joining in, you're like, What the heck are strengths? What are their strengths? What are the strengths? So to talk about it just real briefly, the StrengthsFinder are now known as Clifton Strengths Assessment is an online fast paced assessment. So it's going to take you 34, five minutes or so. But you're going to answer all these questions. And you're going to find out what are your natural strengths? These are strengths that you were born with their strengths that are so natural to you may not realize that other people can't do it, you may think this is just how things get done. But it could be that it's so natural to you that no and nobody else does it that way, you just don't realize it. So what do we do with this? Well, a couple reasons why I love this assessment. One, it is fast paced, the great thing about it being fast paced is a lot harder to trick the assessment or to try to make it think that you answer it in a way that you think you'll get a certain result, there just isn't time for that. You have to go with your gut response. And so in that way, you get a much better result from the assessment. The other thing I like about this assessment, a lot of times assessments will have rate yourself from one to five on these different categories. And that can be really a challenge, because what is the three look like? What does a five look like? I don't know. And so who are you writing it against you? You from before? Who are you? What is this other three or five look like you? It's hard to know. And this one, you're gonna have a this or that kind of question. So for example, and it's been a while since I've taken this rangefinder, so I really only remember one question at this point. But the question I remember is this, if you're given an hour of free time, would you really rather go fishing, kind of go fishing neutral, kind of read a book, or really read a book. And for me, that was easy. I really want to read a book. And so as I take that assessment, each question is like that, is it this or is that? And so it's easier for you to feel like you know the answer. And sometimes you'll feel like already seen this question. It's just really drilling down and getting those specifics about you. Now, as we do this, there are 34 strength for 34 strength themes. And they fall into four leadership domains.

So the leadership domains are executing, influencing strategic thinking, and relationship building. Those are the four domains. So if we look at executing, these are the folks that really want to get things done, right, they want to get things done. And so you've got strengths in there like achiever discipline, focus, responsibility, strengths like that, then we have influencing now influencing is one of the least populated domains that people are going to show up with, and influencing our strengths like communication, competition, command, whoo, Winning Others Over those activator, those are some of the strengths that are in there. And then we have relationship building, relationship building, these are the folks that are kind of the glue. These are the people that you see that are holding a team together and really make a team a team strengthen in there, you'll have like adaptability, relator positivity, those are some of the strengths, that harmony that you'll see in there. And then strategic thinking, these are the folks that want to take in all this information, look at the different paths that could be and decide on the one they feel like is the best path. Some examples on there are strategic ideation, futuristic learner intellect, these are the folks that are taking in information and then figuring out how to use it. So that's just a sample of what the strengths are and these leadership strengths and how they work. So here I am doing this. So how did we get to the podcast, we get to the podcast because I really want to be able to bring this message to more leaders. We want to hear from leaders, all the things that they're doing with their teams to get them engaged. They're they're trying triumphs, their struggles. And really using that information to help you as the listener, understand yourself, and understand how you can help your team to really achieve more, to be more of what they're meant to be to be that team that everyone wants to be on that team that is achieving things that some other people don't even believe is possible. And that is why I'm here. That is what we want to do with this podcast. So welcome. I hope you'll stick around for the journey as we learn how leaders lead to achieve it.