Kristin Clark and Madlin Mangrum help navigate women through life’s changes. (Photo by Helen’s Photography)
With it being a new year, many people are looking for ways to
jump-start something new and need guidance to make it happen,” said
Kristin Clark, a Gallup-certified strengths coach.
She and Madlin Mangrum, another Flower Mound resident, host Women’s “What’s Next” weekend retreats in the area.
They help women get through times of change in their lives– divorce,
empty nesting, loss of a job, starting a new career or a desire to make
their current situation better– by guiding them through goal-setting and
using their natural talents, based on the CliftonStrengths 34
Assessment test. Strengths Finder, a self-help book written in 2001 by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton,
is the basis for the internet-based “Clifton Strengths Finder;” an
online personal assessment test that outlines the user’s strengths. The
authors advocate focusing on building strengths, rather than focusing on
weaknesses.
The theory behind the book is that each adult individual possesses a
certain number of fixed universal personal-character attributes– or
traits– defined by the authors as “talent themes,” which, combined,
result in an individual’s tendency to develop certain skills more easily
and excel in certain fields in a sustainable way. The Gallup Organization claims
to have distilled the trait theory into practice by interviewing
1.7-million professionals from varying fields. Having quantified the
different traits of the people they interviewed, they came up with 34
distinct patterns, or “talent themes,” that best-describe the range of
human uniqueness observed from their research.
According to “personality trait” theories, like the Gallup Organization’s CliftonStrengths 34
assessment, for example, introversion and extraversion are part of a
continuous dimension; with many people in the middle. Personality traits
could be interpreted as quantitative differences, embodying a smaller-grouping of behavioral tendencies.
Many people have taken other assessment tests, such as the
Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), an introspective self-report
questionnaire with the purpose of indicating differing psychological
preferences in how people perceive the world around them and make
decisions.
It’s used in corporate Human Resource Departments to assess a
person’s personality type, based on a total of 16 categories. It uses
psychologist Carl Jung’s conceptual theory that humans experience the
world using four principal psychological functions – sensation,
intuition, feeling and thinking; and, that one of these four functions
is a dominant type for a person most of the time.
These “personality type” assessments involve qualitative differences
between people. According to type theories, for example, introverts and
extraverts are two fundamentally different categories of people.
“After I took the CliftonStrengths 34 test myself (March 2017), it was so revolutionary for me that I had my family take
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