When I was at evangelical Christian college (“virtually indistinguishable from a school in laboratory testing”), taking the StrengthsFinders quiz was mandatory for all freshman and incoming transfer students. This also required students to purchase the StrengthsFinders quiz (“assessment”), since it’s based on proprietary research like happier and healthier, increased productivity and customer satisfaction, your best self at work, delivering results consistent with measurables, now without calipers, uniquely successful and uniquely you, human behavior, when everything goes right, resources, etc. There’s a long and storied history of white evangelical fascination with self-assessment questionnaires and management consulting (see the Blanchard Companies of Who Moved My Cheese? fame, and the business-fable publishing genre more broadly) situated within a shifting, fraught relationship to Christian eugenics.

There are four overarching domains of Strengthsfinding:

• Strategic Thinking

• Relationship Building

• Influencing

• Executing

Further subdivided into 34 “themes,” each of which is associated with its umbrella “domain,” such that an individual quiz-taker might find herself to be Influence-loaded with a booster shot of Execution, with several themes predominating in both categories.

Say, for example, that you’re an incoming freshman at Azusa Pacific University (“More processing Christ-units per square inch than the rest of the San Gabriel Valley combined”) majoring in Gospel Finance/Rapid Advancement with a minor in servant leadership who’s fluent in several love languages, including German and Trustbuilding. You might expect to see results such as: Situationality, Mention, Contributionism, Doing, Optics (Strategic Thinking), Dialed-In, Relevantricy, Catalyst (Influencing), and For Sure (Executing). Additional Strengths include:

Strategic Thinking

• Notes During Meetings

• Christian Assessment

• Organizatialysis

• Successfullness

• Mindful of Customer

• Traits

• Viewpoint Unitement

• Goal Climatology

Relationship Building

• Coffee Suggesting

• Commonsensus

• Bagels for Whole Office

• Joining Mary Kay

• Haircut Encouragement

• Three-models Level Model

• Insightation

• Carpool

Influencing

• Initiatement

• Foundationer

• Podium

• Consequential

• Forward

• Becoming Authentic

• Self-Most

• Walking the Walk

Executing

• BCC’ing

• Example-driven lead-by-example

• Spreadsheet Audacity

• Helping you with that email over-the-shoulder

• Experiencements

• Divisionality

• Cultivatrix

• Restorative Indexing

Completion of today’s newsletter is a mandatory requirement towards graduation. Scholarships not available; balance must be paid in full at all seven of the Registrar’s Offices of the Cross before Strengthsfinding can be marked complete. Please direct further questions to the Maximizing Behaviors Center.

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