Strength mourning

I had an hour long meeting with my mentor this morning and it was one of those conversations that I wish I could just bottle and bring out whenever I needed. Like great mentors do, his focus was asking questions and then using his wisdom & insight to help me reach my own conclusions regarding various aspects of my life. This morning we were discussing my juggling of my two different jobs as well as my MBA program and personal life. As we discussed the corporate role and how I've been trying to understand why I'm struggling with achieving the same level of passion I used to have, we had a tremendous breakthrough. I've been assuming the passion issue was a result of having such strong passion for my church role as well as my desire to get in the battle of world poverty and HIV/AIDS. However, what this wise council helped me get to was the realization that of my 5 strengths (based on the Strengthsfinder), the ones that I'm most wired to do are the Strategic & Achiever. He helped me understand that for the past several years at Thrivent I've been in roles that have leveraged these two key strengths and my move to my current position (which allowed me to do more church work) utilizes my other strengths, but my use of Strategic & Achiever have dropped. Basically, my Thrivent issues are not necessarily around my passion for ministry; but around the Thrivent role itself. I need to look for opportunity to re-ignite the position requirement for strategy and the sense of achievement rather than management.

This is tough to explain in journal-language, but this is the kind of breakthrough that can change paradigms and lead to much better career & life decisions. I would have paid hundreds of dollars for this insight (but please don't tell him that!).