Discovering your strengths is the foundation of authentic leadership. Before we design our path or take action, we get Ready, and getting Ready begins with knowing what makes us uniquely us. Our strengths are not just skills. They are the essence of who we are. Our strengths shape how we think, act, and influence the people around us. And they are where joy and resilience begin to take root.
Why Discovering Your Strengths Matters
n The Joyful Leader®, I describe the Ready stage as the work of self-discovery. It’s about understanding what lights you up, what makes you authentically you, and what brings you real joy. It’s about doing the internal work so that you can not only survive but thrive.
That internal work is what makes you unique. It’s the essence of who you are. No one can duplicate it, and no one can lead from it but you.
Yet many leaders skip this step. We jump straight into action, reacting to the next demand on the calendar without pausing to ask the more important question: What do I bring that no one else can?
I lived this pattern long before I named it.
Here’s a fun fact I don’t usually lead with: I used to be a professional cheerleader, which is funny because I’m not always a “rah-rah” person. There were so many days I showed up thinking, Okay, let’s just get through this. You can get away with that for maybe 30 seconds. After that?
Everyone can tell.
Your timing is slightly off.
Your energy doesn’t land.
You’re doing all the right moves, but something feels flat.
I learned it in a cheerleading uniform first, and I’ve seen it again and again in leaders ever since: You don’t need to be perfect. But you do need to be there. Not performing it but actually in it.
And that’s really what discovering your strengths is about: Not adding another competency to your résumé but coming back to yourself enough to recognize what you already bring.
It’s not the workload that’s holding you back. It’s the disconnect. And the fix isn’t more pressure or better performance — it’s coming back to yourself.
Strengths Are the Foundation of Your Leadership Brand
Whether you realize it or not, your strengths are already part of your brand. They are visible in the way you make decisions, the way you show up in conversations, and the way people experience you when you walk into a room.
Your unique strengths define how you think, act, and influence others as a leader. When you know what they are, you stop trying to lead like someone else. You stop performing a version of leadership that drains you and start leading from your essence. And that is where confidence begins.
Research is starting to catch up with what so many of us have felt in our bones. A 2025 systematic review of strengths-based leadership in the Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies synthesized 39 empirical studies and concluded what your nervous system already knows: When leaders help people use their strengths, engagement rises and burnout falls. A complementary 2024 multisource study found that resilience is the bridge: Strengths-based leadership builds employee resilience, and that resilience is what fuels work engagement over time.
When I worked through this step in the Ready stage of my own resilience model, something surprising happened. I discovered that the way others see me is not always the way I see myself. I had been focusing on what I thought were my strongest areas. But when I asked family, colleagues, and mentors to describe me in one word, they pointed to qualities I had taken for granted because they came so easily: building relationships, connecting people, and energizing a room.
There is real research behind this exercise. A 2024 study in the Journal of Leadership Education — Can you develop self-awareness? Only if you are willing — found that leaders who actively sought feedback from peers, supervisors, and subordinates not only closed the gap between how they saw themselves and how others saw them, but the accuracy of self-perception improved measurably over a two-year program. In other words, the willingness to ask is itself the practice.
That experience taught me something I now share with every leader I work with: Your real superpower is often the thing you find effortless. The thing you don’t have to perform. The thing that simply flows because it’s who you are.
Leading from your essence is leadership that’s sustainable, joyful, and unmistakably yours.
Strengths and the Sphere of Resilience®
In our first April post, I introduced the Sphere of Resilience® and invited you to take the assessment. This week, I want to expand on why it matters in the Ready stage.
The Sphere of Resilience® is a self-assessment that looks at eight dimensions of how you manage stress and sustain energy. Four are internal: spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and physical. Four are external: social, professional, lifestyle, and financial. Together they paint a picture of where your resilience is strong, where it is stretched, and where your strengths can help you grow.
Discovering your strengths and assessing your Sphere of Resilience® work hand in hand. Strengths show you what you have to give, and the Sphere shows you where to invest it. When you focus on what you’re truly exceptional at and continually refine your strengths, you build resilience that adapts with you. That is what makes the Sphere a sphere — it’s a continuous cycle, not a checklist.
Resilience itself is not a fixed trait. It’s a process that adapts according to the challenges at hand. Your level of resilience can fluctuate depending on your goals, and that’s exactly why knowing your strengths is so foundational. They are the steady ground beneath a moving landscape.
Take the assessment when you’re ready. It’s a gentle, honest mirror and a powerful starting point for the Ready stage.
What Other Leaders Have Taught Me About Strengths
Some of the most resilient leaders I’ve interviewed have shaped how I think about strengths and self-discovery.
Pedrya Seymour, two-time Olympian, taught me that failures are events, not who we are. We take the lessons from whatever we go through, but we don’t let those moments define our identity. Our strengths do.
Jeff Hoffman, global entrepreneur and speaker, asks himself a question I return to often: What is the gift I bring to the world? That single question reframes the search for strengths from an assessment exercise to a calling.
Karélix Alicea, founder and president of Lotus Behavioral Interventions, reminds us that the right mindset is everything and that even the most successful leaders we admire are navigating challenges of their own. Strengths aren’t about being above the struggle. They are what carry us through it.
Strengths Move You Toward Alignment
In The Joyful Leader®, I talk about how when everything is in alignment, you’ll begin to have more of a sense of control over your destiny and your outward circumstances. You’ll create a resilient life of your own design.
Discovering your strengths is one of the first acts of that alignment. When your awareness of who you are catches up with the reality of who you already are, the path ahead starts to look different. You stop forcing. You start choosing.
This is what The Joyful Leader® is really about — not becoming someone better but becoming more accurate to who you already are.
A Different Way to Carry It
Earlier this spring, I was on a virtual session with the Prince William SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management) Chapter #740. I looked at the grid of faces on my screen and thought, These are the people everyone goes to when things get hard.
Before I even got into the keynote, I asked, “What’s been weighing on you lately?”
There was a long pause, the kind on Zoom when no one unmutes because they’re deciding how honest they’re allowed to be. Then one woman finally said, “I feel like I’m doing five jobs … and every time I catch up, something changes again.” I smiled and said, “Only five?”
The cameras flickered. The chat started filling up. Retention. Legislation. AI. Exhausted teams.
And I had this thought: No one in this room is struggling because they aren’t capable. They’re struggling because they’ve been holding everything for so long that holding it has quietly become the job.
I asked one more question: “What if the problem isn’t how much you’re carrying but how long you’ve been carrying it without putting it down?”
Even through a screen, you could feel the shift.
This is why discovering your strengths matters so much in the Ready stage. Burnout doesn’t start when everything falls apart. It starts in the moments you keep overriding yourself and calling it leadership. And the way out isn’t less responsibility. It’s a different way to carry it — one that draws from your strengths instead of working around them.
That’s what the Ready stage gives you. Not a lighter load. A more aligned one.
Leaders aren’t asking for less responsibility. We’re asking for a different way to carry it.
A Few Questions to Sit With
As you move through this week, here are a few prompts from the book to return to:
- What are you naturally good at, and how do these strengths help you as a leader?
- When was a time you felt a deep sense of satisfaction as a leader? What contributed to that feeling?
- What are your top three core values in work and in life?
- If you were to describe your essence in one word, what would it be?
There’s no rush to answer all of these today. The Ready stage is patient by design. It’s an investigation, not a deadline.
Call to Action
This week, I invite you to take one step in the Ready stage:
Take the What’s Your Sphere of Resilience® Assessment.
Notice what shows up. Where do your strengths already live? Where are you stretched? You don’t need to fix anything yet, as the how is part of the Set stage. For now, simply discover.Explore more reflections from The Joyful Leader® and the Ready, Set, Go® framework at nicolevanvalen.com.
This Series
This post is part of a continuing series exploring The Joyful Leader® and the Ready, Set, Go® framework. Throughout April, we’ve been getting Ready — discovering joy, renewal, and now our strengths.
Continue the Resilience Journey
Take the What’s Your Sphere of Resilience® Assessment.
Read more from The Joyful Leader® at nicolevanvalen.com/book.Explore the blog.
