Donald CliftonYour Signature Themes
SURVEY COMPLETION DATE: 12-30-1999

DON CLIFTON

Father of Strengths Psychology andInventor of CliftonStrengths

10003787 (Donald Clifton)© 2000, 2006-2012 Gallup, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Donald Clifton
SURVEY COMPLETION DATE: 12-30-1999

Many years of research conducted by The Gallup Organization suggest that the most effective people
are those who understand their strengths and behaviors. These people are best able to develop
strategies to meet and exceed the demands of their daily lives, their careers, and their families.
A review of the knowledge and skills you have acquired can provide a basic sense of your abilities,
but an awareness and understanding of your natural talents will provide true insight into the corereasons behind your consistent successes.
Your Signature Themes report presents your five most dominant themes of talent, in the rank orderrevealed by your responses to CliftonStrengths. Of the 34 themes measured, these are your "topfive."
Your Signature Themes are very important in maximizing the talents that lead to your successes. By
focusing on your Signature Themes, separately and in combination, you can identify your talents,
build them into strengths, and enjoy personal and career success through consistent, near-perfectperformance.

SignificanceYou want to be very significant in the eyes of other people. In the truest sense of the word you want tobe recognized. You want to be heard. You want to stand out. You want to be known. In particular, youwant to be known and appreciated for the unique strengths you bring. You feel a need to be admiredas credible, professional, and successful. Likewise, you want to associate with others who arecredible, professional, and successful. And if they aren’t, you will push them to achieve until they are.
Or you will move on. An independent spirit, you want your work to be a way of life rather than a job,
and in that work you want to be given free rein, the leeway to do things your way. Your yearnings feel
intense to you, and you honor those yearnings. And so your life is filled with goals, achievements, orqualifications that you crave. Whatever your focus—and each person is distinct—your Significancetheme will keep pulling you upward, away from the mediocre toward the exceptional. It is the theme
that keeps you reaching.

Futuristic“Wouldn’t it be great if . . .” You are the kind of person who loves to peer over the horizon. The future
fascinates you. As if it were projected on the wall, you see in detail what the future might hold, and10003787 (Donald Clifton)© 2000, 2006-2012 Gallup, Inc. All rights reserved.

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this detailed picture keeps pulling you forward, into tomorrow. While the exact content of the picture
will depend on your other strengths and interests—a better product, a better team, a better life, or abetter world—it will always be inspirational to you. You are a dreamer who sees visions of what could
be and who cherishes those visions. When the present proves too frustrating and the people around
you too pragmatic, you conjure up your visions of the future and they energize you. They can energize
others, too. In fact, very often people look to you to describe your visions of the future. They want apicture that can raise their sights and thereby their spirits. You can paint it for them. Practice. Choose
your words carefully. Make the picture as vivid as possible. People will want to latch on to the hope
you bring.

Individualization
Your Individualization theme leads you to be intrigued by the unique qualities of each person. You are
impatient with generalizations or “types” because you don’t want to obscure what is special anddistinct about each person. Instead, you focus on the differences between individuals. You
instinctively observe each person’s style, each person’s motivation, how each thinks, and how eachbuilds relationships. You hear the one-of-a-kind stories in each person’s life. This theme explains whyyou pick your friends just the right birthday gift, why you know that one person prefers praise in public
and another detests it, and why you tailor your teaching style to accommodate one person’s need to
be shown and another’s desire to “figure it out as I go.” Because you are such a keen observer ofother people’s strengths, you can draw out the best in each person. This Individualization theme also
helps you build productive teams. While some search around for the perfect team “structure” or“process,” you know instinctively that the secret to great teams is casting by individual strengths sothat everyone can do a lot of what they do well.

Focus“Where am I headed?” you ask yourself. You ask this question every day. Guided by this theme ofFocus, you need a clear destination. Lacking one, your life and your work can quickly become
frustrating. And so each year, each month, and even each week you set goals. These goals thenserve as your compass, helping you determine priorities and make the necessary corrections to getback on course. Your Focus is powerful because it forces you to filter; you instinctively evaluate
whether or not a particular action will help you move toward your goal. Those that don’t are ignored. In
the end, then, your Focus forces you to be efficient. Naturally, the flip side of this is that it causes you
to become impatient with delays, obstacles, and even tangents, no matter how intriguing they appear
to be. This makes you an extremely valuable team member. When others start to wander down otheravenues, you bring them back to the main road. Your Focus reminds everyone that if something is nothelping you move toward your destination, then it is not important. And if it is not important, then it isnot worth your time. You keep everyone on point.

10003787 (Donald Clifton)© 2000, 2006-2012 Gallup, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Maximizer
Excellence, not average, is your measure. Taking something from below average to slightly above
average takes a great deal of effort and in your opinion is not very rewarding. Transforming somethingstrong into something superb takes just as much effort but is much more thrilling. Strengths, whether
yours or someone else’s, fascinate you. Like a diver after pearls, you search them out, watching forthe telltale signs of a strength. A glimpse of untutored excellence, rapid learning, a skill masteredwithout recourse to steps—all these are clues that a strength may be in play. And having found astrength, you feel compelled to nurture it, refine it, and stretch it toward excellence. You polish thepearl until it shines. This natural sorting of strengths means that others see you as discriminating. Youchoose to spend time with people who appreciate your particular strengths. Likewise, you are
attracted to others who seem to have found and cultivated their own strengths. You tend to avoid
those who want to fix you and make you well rounded. You don’t want to spend your life bemoaning
what you lack. Rather, you want to capitalize on the gifts with which you are blessed. It’s more fun. It’s
more productive. And, counterintuitively, it is more demanding.

10003787 (Donald Clifton)© 2000, 2006-2012 Gallup, Inc. All rights reserved.

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