As longtime member of the Virtual Business Group (free annual membership in 2008), one of the perks is its Book Club — a benefit I hadn’t taken advantage of until late last year. Boy, am I glad to be participating in this months’ activities, since we’re discussing Marcus Buckingham’s Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance.

This is turning out to be a life-changing book for me.

In the introductory chapter, Buckingham explains the emerging strengths movement — a technique to getting unstuck, taking back control of your time, and steering yourself towards your strengths and away from your weaknesses.

It may sound simplistic at first, but it’s not that easy. A little less than 2 people out of 10 succeed in capitalizing on their strengths. Why? Society puts more emphasis on identifying and improving our weaknesses as opposed to working toward and favoring our strengths — it’s what we’ve been programmed to do since childhood.

The strengths movement, and more particularly this book, is about becoming one of the 2 out of 10. It’s about moving beyond a label and putting your strengths to work — identifying what is best and most effective in you and applying it in the real world.

The 6 steps walk you through a practical process of sorting through your everyday activities and pinpointing which ones invigorate you and which ones deplete you. Discover how to get more of what “juices” you and steer away from everything else. Find out how to to push vs. being pulled. Learn how to explain what you’re doing persuasively enough to get others to help you (and hopefully they’ll participate in the process too).

The 6 steps are:

1. Bust the Myths — So, What’s Stopping You?
2. Get Clear — Do You Know What Your Strengths Are?
3. Free Your Strengths — How Do You Make the Most of What Strengthens You?
4. Stop Your Weaknesses — How Can You Cut Out What Weakens You?
5. Speak Up — How Do You Create Strong Teams?
6. Build Strong Habits — How Can You Make This Last Forever?

How can this book help you run and market your business? The benefits are more numerous than I can come up with, but here’s a list to get you started:

• You are an expert at something. Once you’ve figured it out, you can clearly communicate and market it.
• Build your business around your unique specialty and carve your own little niche.
• By pinpointing what invigorates you, it’s easier to delegate activities that deplete you. (Can you believe there are people out there who actually LOVE to do what you HATE doing?)
• By concentrating mainly on activities that inspire you, you will be more productive, fulfilled and you’re more likely to stick around.
• By being very clear on your specific strength areas, you won’t be sidetracked by other opportunities.
• You will still have to do activities that aren’t the most exciting for you, but your focus will intentionally be tilted toward the stimulating ones and away from the others.

While I don’t know where this journey will lead me and my business (that’s a scary thought), I am keeping an open mind and remaining curious about the discoveries and breakthroughs I’ll make along the way.

I’m SUPER excited about this process (can you tell?) and I look forward to applying it in my life, my business, and using to help clients get unstuck. I’ll be sharing my journey with you, through each of the 6 steps.

Sound like fun? Start your own journey to see where it takes you!

If you’ve already subscribed to the strengths movement, I’d love to hear how it’s helping you in your business.

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Partnering is defined as the synergistic affect from pooling of resources to work together toward a common goal. This reduces duplication of effort, helps ensure that the appropriate level of resources are available. The savings in time, money and expertise can then be reinvested into other projects.

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Cross-marketing partnerships can include “bundled” offerings, joint media appearances and events, and unconventional cause-related marketing. It could also include collaboratively produced how-to’s and other resource booklets and videos, co-branding, coop advertising, and shared space.

A joint venture is when two or more businesses join together under a contractual agreement to conduct a specific business enterprise with both parties sharing profits and losses.