Choosing Life

I love strengths. I love anything based on positive psychology and helping people learn to be their best selves. So when I had the chance to review Marcus Buckingham’s newest book in this area titled Find Your Strongest Life I jumped on it.

Buckingham’s newest book originated from a realization he had while visiting the Oprah show– that despite progress in women’s rights over the last several decades, women are profoundly unhappy and under a great deal of pressure. Reading one personal story after another, Buckingham set out to determine what makes women happy and successful- what is different about those women than other unhappy women.

I have to admit– I found this book rather slow moving. I took the “Strong Life Test” before I got the book to discover my “lead” and “supporting” roles. I was anxious to discover more about those and how to apply them to my life. However, the chapter with this information did not even begin until 97 pages in. Leading up to the 97th page was a lot of information about how unhappy women are and why living a strong life is important. I liked the information about the different roles, but I think there is still a lot of room for developing these roles deeply like StrengthsQuest.

I will say that I felt my results of the Strong Life Test were pretty spot on with who I am. My lead role is caretaker and my supporting role is creator. I would have liked to see Buckingham expound about each of these roles more than he did, but I do think that they make sense and help affirm things I do well.

Overall, I think that Find Your Strongest Life is an interesting book, and that the Strong Life Roles seem to make sense. I would like to see further development of these things, including a better test, and more research on validity of the tool. Find Your Strongest Life is not my favorite of Buckingham’s book, however, it is still somewhat helpful in the quest to better understand one’s self. Overall though, I think this book is really best for working mothers, but there is not much for women who are single career women.