Your Unique Ability is a combination of your personal talents, passions, and skills. You’ve always had this ability, but maybe you never stopped to clearly identify it. Figuring out this important foundation of who you are, helps you to do even more what you love doing. This book provides a simple and powerful approach to creating a life that works better, because it comes from who you truly are and what you’re all about.

What are your top 5 strengths? The learned methods that you use every day to achieve results. By identifying these strengths you can focus on making them stronger. Rather than trying to fix our weaknesses, take the same energy and grow your strengths. A wonderful and simple understanding with a great lesson for knowing yourself to make better choices and create a better life.

Understanding how we do things the way we do really allows us to make better choices about our work and improves our personal lives too. Kathy Kolbe explains how to harness, rather than work against, the tremendous power of our striving instincts. This is the best of the four books she has written and provided an incredible insight into my life.

Kathy Kolbe did that for me when we first met back in 1994. She was visiting Toronto to see the two owners of the company where I worked. Although I had only completed my Kolbe profile (6 6 4 4) just a few months before, I had started to see the value of understanding my whole past using this language. Knowing my profile provided context for many observations about how I did things. How I was pretty good at almost anything, never failing, but never being the star either. Why I had so many different interests and would jump from one focused task to another throughout the day. And how, instead of draining my energy, it would actually re-energize me to keep going. It’s because of my Mediator (sometimes also called Facilitator) conative ability.

In an offhand comment, Kathy said, in front of the two owners, “I hope they know how special and valuable you are. We’re always looking for Mediators to work at Kolbe Corp. You provide such valuable energy to the team and keep things working so well. So if you ever want to move to Phoenix, we have a job for you.”

Wow, did I ever feel I could write my own ticket after that! I’ve never forgotten Kathy’s comment. It’s helped me see how I contribute to others and provides such a great way of explaining how I do what I do. It’s also something I tell to other Mediators I meet, and each time I tell the story, they echo the same feeling of jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none – both a frustration and a strength.

Has anyone ever said something that was profound to you?

Looks at the age-old business strategy of winning market share by competing on price (red ocean) and shows that the way to true success in a commoditized world is to create new markets (blue oceans). Filled with great business examples and key steps to follow. A must-read.

An engaging story that explores the four disciplines of one special founder/president, providing inspiration to successfully grow a team and a company.

Demonstrates how electronic distribution is changing the face of knowledge and experience sales, and provides insights into what to do for your business.