adaptability

includer

ideation

empathy

strategic

My top five strengths according to StrengthQuest were Adaptablity, Empathy, Includer, Strategic, and Ideation. My initial though was slight surprise. While I was reading the list of character traits I immediately began identifying which traits I think I really posses and which I don’t.  I agreed with Adaptability, Includer and Empathy. However, I don’t really agree with the traits of Ideation and Strategic.
Although one of my favorite things in life is traveling and meeting different people, I was a little frustrated with the Includer strength. Many times I include others so much that I might find myself including people in my life that are not necessarily good for me. I constantly do this because I have a great sense of empathy for other people. That being said, I easily adapt to others around me in order to make them feel more comfortable, therefore my includer side more often than not, can hurt me.

All the strengths are related to one another, after reading all of the descriptions I realized that they are like a chain, they work together and work because of each other. A strength that I most related to was my adaptability; because of my upbringing I believe to be very adaptable and this in a way is the source of all my other strengths. I was born in Ecuador, grew up in the arts world, surrounded by nature and different groups of people. Both of my parents made sure that I knew the native culture so we were always visiting communities and learning about their traditions. I was raised Hippie Jew but with conservative influence from my grandparents. My mother is Ecuadorian but all her family emigrated from Colombia. My father was born in Cuba but left to New York as a child because of the Cuban revolution, similar story to his parents who left Poland and Russia as babies to escape world war two. I visited them very often so I grew up in constant transition between Spanish to English and American culture to Ecuadorian culture. Besides all these facts I have a million reasons why I absolutely agree with my Adaptability strengths but this is definitely the most influential.

I don’t completely discharge my ideation and strategic strengths, I don’t fully agree with them but I can see why I have them and hopefully I will get better at them because so far my strategic side has not shown its best side and my ideation is very limited within my artistic process.