In the wildly popular Discovery Channel program Dirty Jobs, producer and host Mike Rowe has found his true calling—traveling the United States in search of the dirtiest and smelliest jobs, and paying tribute to the unsung heroes who hold them. He apprentices under these experts and digs deep into the muck and filth to uncover the true value of each unique role. Rowe is perfect for this unusual show; he is personable, laughs easily, is anxious to learn, and eager to gain new perspectives that break old stereotypes. On the Discovery Channel Webpage, Rowe says, “Fun and hard work are two sides of the same coin,” and he claims to value sacrifice, good humor, and optimism. Well-known entertainment personalities say Rowe is all of this in real life—not just on camera. He’s compassionate, down-to-earth, and loves learning—and he has boosted Dirty Jobs to the number-1 position in Discovery Channel’s lineup. Calling on his strengths and passions, Rowe takes on the worst work in the world and generates personal pride from a job well done!

What if every person in your organization performed a job (dirty or clean) that was a perfect match with his or her unique strengths? Imagine what would happen to productivity and excellence in the organization. We know a janitor in a hospital who excels in all he does. Here’s what he says about his work: “I’m the janitor here, and the best janitor anywhere in any hospital. Our doctors, nurses, and visitors expect a clean hospital. Our patients need it to be clean. That’s what I give them.”

This chapter is for senior leaders responsible for the culture and systems of their organizations, human resource professionals at every level, and managers who want their influence to be felt organization-wide. We look at the levers you pull to create a strengths-based culture. We take a strategic view of how strengths, as a framework, can be infused in organizations, by peering into the organization’s people systems and its culture. When you “go all in” you hold nothing back. You have such a strong hand that you put everything on the table (literally!). Your “full house” is all your organizational systems working in concert to maximize the organization’s strengths. You already know that fewer than one out of five employees play to his strengths every day at work. There are ways to increase this percentage in your organization, perhaps to an astounding 100 percent!

Senior leaders must be the champions for such an effort, because they carry the responsibility and the power to build the most effective organization they can. If they have not profiled their organization for strengths, they have considerable untapped potential. Strengths are the key to unlocking it. As we saw in Chapter 7♠, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts when we use the strengths of individuals on a team and the strengths of the team overall. Multiply this effect by all the teams in your organization and just imagine the possibilities!

A 2001 study involving 160 hospitals compared a group of employees who completed various strengths-based interventions throughout a three-year period, with a control group that did not have strengths-based activities. The hospitals using strengths development interventions grew significantly in employee engagement throughout three years, as compared to the control group.¹

A study conducted in 2002 in the automobile industry generated similar data. Another study across 65 companies in manufacturing, retail, healthcare, and technology industries reproduced these results. One analysis showed that the difference in employee engagement as a result of utilizing strengths amounts to $1,000 in additional productivity per employee.² It strikes us that $1,000, while significant, is really quite low—especially for knowledge workers and leaders, who influence and affect so many people. Either way, there’s great potential when you make strategic, strengths-based shifts in systems and processes in your organization!

An office cleaner completes her work for the evening, noticing with satisfaction that the wastebaskets are empty, the floor vacuumed, and empty coffee cups gone. She leaves, pleased with her night’s work. Her colleague, working two floors up, takes a slightly different perspective. When she leaves 15 minutes later, the coffee cups and wastebaskets are clean and the floor vacuumed. However, she has also watered the plants of workers on vacation, put fresh water in cut flower arrangements, and rescued thrown-away plants, nursing them back to life and then putting them back on window ledges. Eventually, her manager notices her additional work, which is not in her job description. How her manager reacts to this extra work and commitment will determine if this woman continues to stay engaged and enthusiastic about her role—or if she cuts back and does only what is required of her.

In Positive Organizational Scholarship (Berrett, 2003), Amy Wrzesniewski writes about three orientations toward work. People who view work as a job focus on the material rewards of work, and not on meaning and fulfillment. They see their jobs as the means to providing enjoyment in areas outside of work, such as interests and hobbies. People with a career-orientation work for the increased pay, prestige, and status that comes through promotions and advancement. Advancement brings with it increased self-esteem, power, and social standing. Those with the third orientation, viewing their work as a calling, work for fulfillment. The work is an end to itself, along with the belief that their work makes the world a better place.³

While we might want all of our employees to see their work as a calling, that’s not realistic. These work orientations are not controlled by organizational practices or by the job itself, but by the individual in the job. In fact, in a study of job orientations, 24 administrative assistants were evenly divided, eight in each of the three orientations. Similar job descriptions supported all three orientations, though those with a calling orientation—here and in another study of 425 employees—reported higher job satisfaction, more commitment to their work teams, and more faith and trust in management.⁴

What if we, as leaders in organizations, created systems that nurtured all three orientations? What if, regardless of employee orientation, the work in your organization exactly met the desires, needs, and strengths of each employee? This is possible if we change organizational systems to focus on strengths and align individuals’ strengths and passions with their work. By leveraging its people systems and by directly influencing the culture, an organization will naturally begin to use its strengths in a bigger way. Systems and culture are the levers—and as leaders, we control them.

A few people systems are particularly relevant to building a strengths-based culture: systems that attract, acquire, and onboard employees; systems that manage performance; systems that develop capability; and the most powerful “people” system: leadership.

Flexible job design is the first system to maximize opportunities for employees to engage strengths. If, as with our office cleaner, the job can be flexible enough to allow her time, space, and even resources to integrate her passion for plants into her work, then the job may maximize her strengths. While job descriptions outline the work to be performed and the outcomes to be achieved, how can we tweak them to encourage more worker flexibility? You know how most job descriptions end with the final bullet: “Other duties as assigned?” What if that final bullet read, “Other responsibilities as determined by the worker’s to provide higher levels of customer delight than outlined above?”

It’s more than just the job description, of course, that drives flexibility in the work itself. If leaders view themselves as partners with employees, if they enable employees to work in a way that uses their strengths, they can build more flexibility into roles, inviting employees to craft their ideal jobs. Whether I view my role as a job, a career, or a calling, I could design what I do and how I do it, so that my job makes the best use of the talents I have to offer.

As we discussed in Chapter 5♠, attracting and acquiring employees can certainly be built on a foundation of strengths. Job postings can list crucial strengths that the ideal candidate would possess. Seeking skills and strengths raises the quality of new hires.

Managers can learn to interview for strengths. When they hear the candidate claim a skill or competency, they can probe with, “What is the talent or strength you possess that underlies your skill? How do you know you possess that strength?” Other useful questions to interview for strengths are, “At what do you naturally excel? What is easy for you? What do you enjoy? What are you passionate about? Tell me about a time when you were highly successful at…”

Because we’re talking about hiring, consider also your network of external contractors, vendors, suppliers, and consultants. What are the criteria you use today to hire from the temporary and flexible workforce? We purchase expertise when we hire external Website designers or computer engineers for specific skills we don’t possess. How might you use these resources to manage the weaknesses of your employees?

For example, many professionals with limited administrative and computer expertise spend untold well-compensated hours building their PowerPoint presentations or making travel arrangements. In a strengths-based organization, people with the right strengths to excel at these tasks complete them, not a leader who is serving other needs—needs better aligned with her strengths. If we understand both the strengths and the weaknesses of the organization and its employees, might we allocate resources differently? Off-loading work to the right people with the right strengths makes it easier for employees to concentrate on work that utilizes their own strengths.

If we are attracting and acquiring employees for their strengths, and not just for their skills and experience, we invite a level of uniqueness into how each person performs her job. The onboarding process should also leverage this uniqueness. Remember in Chapter 6♠ when Michael custom-tailored Anna’s onboarding at B2B Printers so that she could excel in using her strengths right from the start? An organization can endorse this practice for all managers. Tweak any onboarding process documentation that exists, and explicitly state the organization’s commitment to identifying and using strengths when you deliver new employee orientation programs. Affirm and confirm—in as many ways as possible—that your organization is truly interested in every individual identifying and applying her strengths at work.

To build a strengths-based organization, existing performance planning and review processes may also require changes. If your organization already has an effective process that creates performance goals between the manager and the employee, you’re on the right path! In a strengths-based culture, performance planning will also include a discussion about the opportunities the employee will have to apply her strengths. Such a focus increases commitment to achieving goals, because the employee better understands how to utilize her natural gifts.

More and more organizations are developing competency models for specific roles—for leaders, for customer service representatives, sometimes for the entire company. Competency models spell out what performance the organization desires and expects. A good model includes behavioral anchors that describe excellent, average, and poor performance in each competency. We have an opportunity to mine these models for strengths.

An excellent model identifies what strengths underpin performance for each competency. Unfortunately, we tend to consider these models through the lens of, “Where do we need to improve? “What if we first explore Where do we excel, and how can we do more of that?” When we make this shift, we’ll begin to utilize the full power and scope of the competency model!

Assessing and rewarding performance in a strengths-based culture calls forth the best coaching skills of your organization’s managers and leaders. A powerful motivational practice is to “catch people doing things right.” In a strengths-based organization, the trick is not only to catch them doing it right, but also to acknowledge the demonstrated strength, noting who the employee is being when she is doing what she does so well.

To illustrate, imagine your employee Bob is very creative. When Bob facilitates an innovative solution to a problem, a good manager knows to thank and acknowledge him for the great solution. Looking through the lens of strengths, you would also acknowledge Bob’s innate creativity that led to the solution. This builds his confidence and competence in this strength, and helps Bob see how he applied it in this instance. Of course, the next step with Bob is to seek out other opportunities crying for his creativity!

Organizations’ typical reward and recognition practices tend to focus on specific goal or task accomplishment. This, of course, is still important! However, we would like to see organizations add a criterion into the process—one that rewards specifically for applying a strength. In addition to the rewards that accrue to the team that designed an innovative solution, a performance reward can also be given to Bob for his excellent use of creativity.

This isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. Many excellent organizations with well-developed reward processes have recognition events to acknowledge corporate values in action, such as demonstrating “teamwork” or “flexibility.” Creating awards for a consistent, excellent application of strength is a small, but effective, addition to the reward and recognition process, and reinforces the organization’s continued commitment to strengths while highlighting the shift to a strengths-based organization.

People-development systems are the primary lever for increasing an organization’s competence in managing and building strengths. An easy system to change is development planning. In Chapter 4♠ we gave you a sample of a strengths development template we use with many of our clients. (You can also find it on our Website.) In addition to setting specific performance goals, employees also set strength development goals. This simple yet sweeping change can begin to alter the conversation between employees and their managers.

When you make such a change in the development process, you also have to equip the leaders for important discussions with their employees about strength development. Our client, Maggie, vice president of learning in a hospital system, first equipped the hospitals’ leaders with strengths knowledge and understanding before encouraging employees to discuss strengths with their boss. Every leader engaged in a process to discover her strengths, and received individualized coaching to further clarify them; she wrote her own strength development plan before she began to coach others on their strengths. This cost the hospital a little more than simply changing the development planning form; however, relatively quickly, “strengths” conversations could be heard throughout the organization.

To create a strengths-based culture, you’ll want to alter the mission of the training and development function, too. We’re accustomed to deficit-based development in our organizations, focused on improving weaknesses. In fact, there is a huge industry that provides training films, Webinars, CDs, workbooks, seminars, and courses designed to reduce weaknesses and deficiencies in our employees. Unfortunately, today, there are very few resources, tools, consultants, or materials designed to maximize strengths. (That’s why we wrote this book!) It is important to consider, strategically, how we allocate training dollars in the organization. While weakness-based training may not disappear from organizations overnight—because we are so firmly grounded in our old paradigm of development—the key strategic question for training and development is, “How can we begin to replace deficit training with strength development?”

Planning development for potential successors to key leadership roles—succession planning—is another lever to imbue the organization with strengths awareness. Many organizations are retooling their succession planning processes to focus on strengths. FedEx, for example, places strengths front and center in the succession planning process. Heather D’Alesandro, manager of leadership development and succession at FedEx Ground, told us in a 2007 interview:

When Andrea ran the Employee and Organization Development function at Novell, her clients would tell her, “We need to train our managers to lead.” When she asked them what good leaders did and how they behaved, she drew blank stares. Finally, she went to the CEO with the question, “What does excellent leadership look like here at Novell?” Together, Andrea and the CEO began the process of creating a leadership competency model to answer it.

Noel Tichy, noted University of Michigan professor of business administration, described General Electric’s (GE) Leadership Development Institute in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, as a “staging ground for corporate revolutions.” He says it is a “key lever for radical transformation of GE’s culture.”⁵ Leadership development is a fertile ground to plant the seeds of a strengths revolution!

If you want to radically change your organization to one that talks about strengths, identifies and applies strengths, and develops the strengths of individuals, teams, and the organization in its entirety, teach the organization’s leaders to lead. Create a vision of what excellent leadership looks like in your organization, and work together with your leaders and managers to achieve the vision. Determine what strengths are needed to accomplish the vision and clarify the link between leaders’ existing strengths and the desired leadership competence. In this way, leaders not only see what their leadership can accomplish, they also learn how to play to their strengths in the process. An excellent foundation to begin the leadership competency discussion is James M. Kouzes’s and Barry Z. Posner’s well-respected and often-applied leadership model found in their inspiring book, The Leadership Challenge (John Wiley & Sons, 2002). They identify the 5 Practices of Exemplary Leadership as:

Teach your leaders to be authentic. Authentic leaders want to do what’s right for their followers. Fred Luthans and Bruce Avolio, management scholars and research scientists, describe in detail the characteristics of authentic leaders. Their model is strong, vibrant, and presents a powerful vision for authentic leaders. Here’s our summary of their six characteristics:

Teach your leaders to discover and apply their own strengths and the strengths of others. If you don’t want merely 20 percent of your people using their strengths every day, you surely can’t tolerate only 20 percent of your leaders using their strengths every day!

Changing the culture in any organization is “slow burn” work. Culture takes years to create. It takes even longer to change, because leaders have been hiring, rewarding, and developing people in the same ways—consistent with the defined culture—perhaps for decades. You can’t change in a moment what took years to create.

Take, for example, the World Series of Poker (WSOP) Tournament. Amarillo Slim stood at the leader board of the 2000 WSOP Championship Round in Las Vegas and saw the name Kathy Liebert at the top. Amarillo Slim (real name: Preston Thomas) was a four-time WSOP winner, a lifelong professional gambler with a decidedly unsavory reputation, and a fixture at the tournament from its inception. A reporter reminded Amarillo that he once threatened to cut his own throat if a woman ever won the championship event.

The WSOP began in 1970 with a core of Texas professional gamblers—all men and all good old boys. Since 1970, the WSOP has had to adjust the culture of the tournament to embrace the ethnic and gender diversity of poker enthusiasts. For some folks, such as Amarillo Slim, this shift in the game was hard to accept. Gone are the days of the old gamblers club. Howard Greenbaum, vice president of Harrah’s, said, in tribute to the diversity of the tournament, “Everybody wants to play in the World Series of Poker. It’s dying and going to heaven for any poker player.”⁷

Culture is defined by Kathy Ohm in her article “Leadership and Culture” as “the often hidden sets of norms and expectations that underlie what people ‘expect’ and see as ‘expected of them’ when they come to work. It is the set of often unspoken interactions, relationships, and expectations that spell out ‘how we do business around here.’”

Business leaders may assume that their company’s vision, values, and strategic priorities are synonymous with their company’s culture. Unfortunately, too often the vision, strategy, and shared values may only be words hanging on a plaque on the wall. They too soon suffer “death by lamination”!

While employees can see and experience elements of culture that include artifacts (such as corporate logowear and Successories plaques on many desktops) or rituals (such as casual Fridays and bagels for team meetings), the far more powerful aspects of corporate culture are invisible. The cultural core is comprised of the beliefs, values, standards, paradigms, worldviews, moods, and private conversations of the people. Culture is the foundation for all actions and decisions within a team, department, or organization.

Culture is complex and can be “mushy.” The keys to changing a culture to actively build strengths are:

Because you’re this far in our book, you know what this means. Playing to your strengths begins with discovering and applying your own strengths, then doing the same with your followers. It includes aligning and building the strengths in your teams, and clarifying and articulating the organization’s strengths. Shine your light on the strengths of the organization. Look deeper than the best skills of the organization or your market niche. Look at who you are as an organization—those inherent strengths that make your organization so capable.

Is your organization’s strength its employees’ love for fun? Picture Disney and Columbia Sportswear! Is it unbounded innovation? Imagine Toyota’s design center or Google’s new business channels team. Is it analysis? Think RAND Corporation or the Brookings Institute. What strengths create your organization’s unique differentiator?

Beyond identifying your organization’s natural strengths, it’s important to nurture them to truly support a strengths-based culture. In every conversation, in every meeting, and in every process, leaders in the organization must capitalize on strengths. To illustrate, every year, a nonprofit organization in Carol’s community sells raffle tickets to win a Porsche. This is an important fundraiser for the organization. Last year, they sold fewer raffle tickets than the year before, and the committee planned a meeting to discuss “what went wrong.” While the session started as a depressing conversation about all sorts of things outside the fundraising committee’s control, fortunately it turned around when the leader asked, “Okay, what went right?” Soon they discovered patterns of when the most tickets sold, in what settings, and with what audiences. The committee developed actions for next year targeted toward increasing these successful circumstances. Shortly thereafter, the committee’s energy returned and they were committed to a plan of action.

Internal-change agents can further the organization-wide strengths agenda with effective processes like these and an attentive, powerful mind set. Whether they are organization development consultants, quality professionals, HR reps, or meeting facilitators in your organization, urge them to begin—and continue—asking, “What went right? Now, how do we create more of that?”

As we write this, we are working with leaders in a major corporation that is changing its culture. A new CEO has been a driving force in this work, although the team itself, before the new CEO arrived, saw how the culture was slowing down the organization. Efforts bubbled to the surface throughout the last year to make the culture more innovative, nimble, and high performing, while building on the strengths of the organization’s brands, history, and employees.

Of all the processes this organization is using to drive changes in the culture—training, management meetings, gathering input and ideas, posting new concepts on its intranet, and adapting structures and systems—nothing has been as powerful as the new CEO championing his own view of the desired culture. This particular CEO talks in terms of the characteristics that every employee should possess and demonstrate. Unique characteristics such as humility, compassion, and curiosity are among the traits he touts as vital to the organization going forward. As soon as the CEO began using these words, the corporate lore took over. Stories began to shape themselves and spread like wildfire. “He’s talking about humility! What does that mean? How do we do it?” These stories intrigue employees, and encourage them to see and experience not only a new way of “being” at work, but also the incredible new possibilities that come with it.

Likewise, another client firm is changing its culture, though less consciously. The new CEO is creating a shift in focus from a very “customer-focused, do-the-right-thing” kind of culture to a culture driven by measurement and the bottom line. Unfortunately, this shift in corporate culture has closed people down. It’s scary for folks—it seems less about them and their passion for their work, and more about some impersonal measurements.

Senior leadership’s power to change the culture, by just a few words and actions, is a force to be reckoned with! It is still a slow burn; deep change takes time. The organization can and will help accelerate adoption of the strengths-based culture change if senior leadership states a compelling vision that aligns with the values of organization members.

Good leaders begin to shift the culture by speaking to a vision that engages and persuades others. Powerful visions are shaped by senior executives and developed through widespread conversation with the workforce. We urge you to capture your organization’s culture as clearly as you can through a powerful story—your vision of the desired future. Base it upon shared values to achieve maximum commitment to it—especially if the new vision requires a change that feels jarring.

A visionary leader can be transformational. Visions make membership in an organization special, enriching, and meaningful. According to Aristotle, there are three compelling elements to persuasion, and thus, to an engaging vision: logos, ethos, and pathos.

There is a direct link between meaningful work and focusing on strengths. When we apply our strengths, we have the potential to create work—and a way of working—that enhances personal success, fulfillment, and meaning, whether we perceive our work as a job, a career, or a calling. When we have the opportunity to apply our strengths every day, we are more engaged.

There are two ways to increase meaning at work. The first is to promote the shared values, vision, and strategic goals of the organization. Having a clear understanding of what is valued by the organization helps employees align their work with the organization’s goals. If they hear consistently that “do the right thing,” “delightful customer experience,” “curiosity,” or “make the best use of our strengths” is a value commonly shared across the organization, they will find harmony between their internally held values and the values of the organization—or they will experience dissonance and leave. Either way, you are creating greater alignment between the employees who stay and the goals of the organization. Reinforce the shared values, vision, and strategic goals frequently—in written documents, in presentations, and speeches, and on the organization’s intranet. Most importantly, ensure that all leaders and managers know how to help individuals align their own performance goals with the organization’s goals, creating meaning and purpose in the work they do.

The second lever to create meaningful work may surprise you a bit. To foster meaningfulness at work, build intentional communities. As individuals, we have a need to belong to and be part of a community. You can encourage communities of practice, cross-functional teams, or high-performing workgroups to form and develop as communities. Why these affinity groups gather is based on any number of reasons—common goals, interests, backgrounds, projects, areas of specialization, and so on. We know of communities in organizations gathering around a plethora of topics, from dog rescue to quality improvement, from women in leadership to internal change agents to one community that calls itself “geeks.” Shared common interests will naturally lead people to share their strengths, while making the content of the work itself more meaningful.

Give employees the power to shape their roles and apply their strengths. Power sharing, power shifting, and empowering employees to make decisions about how they design their role and perform their work builds a greater reliance on strengths, and increases opportunities for strengths to show up.

All of these components of culture link together, of course. Creating a strong vision, strategy, and shared values—as well as increasing the meaningfulness of work and sharing power—builds the organization’s capacity and its vitality, its ability and eagerness to act.

Leaders in any organization have power, in part, because they have formal authority. But power isn’t a finite resource. When leaders share power with their employees, by giving them the appropriate authority and autonomy to make decisions about their work, they redefine the relationships and increase the total amount of power in the organization. Sharing power like this increases the total vitality across the organization as well. This, of course, is good for employees, leaders, and the capacity of the organization overall. Managers and leaders at all levels can shift their power orientation from one of “power over” to one of “power with,” and increase the organization’s total power.

Organization design is also a lever for changing power dynamics. Organizations with strong hierarchies can hold all the power near the top of the organization, requiring decisions about resources or goals or tactics to rise up in the organization for approval, and then filter back down for execution. Historically, we think of organization design as the structure for information flow and decision-making. What if we designed organizations not only in light of how information and decisions travel, but also to build strong communities, high-quality relationships, and excellence in communication (not just information sharing)? The structure of the organization can foster or inhibit connections among employees. With good connection, people respond positively to one another and share ideas—essential when their work is interdependent.

Another client of ours, a transportation firm, is redesigning its organization. The business units are shifting from a geographic to a service-based focus. Now, instead of one business unit serving a major geography, there will be three business units offering three unique services to a wider geography. This shift makes a lot of sense to the organization and to the employees, because it aligns employee skills and strengths while establishing relationships among those employees who offer similar services.

Managers can redesign at all levels of the organization, if the leadership shares the power! For example, human resource functions in recent years have aligned to the internal customers they serve, rather than being isolated as an administrative service, as in the traditional model of HR. The role of the HR business partner is to understand the internal client so well that she can broker services such as recruiting, compensation, or training as needed. An interesting outcome of this popular structure, in addition to internal clients receiving better service, is that the HR professionals are able to say, “I don’t have that skill—but I can bring in someone who does,” thereby increasing reliance on their own strengths, and counting on the strengths of colleagues to fill in the gaps.

Charter a team to champion and lead the change to a strengths-based culture. Consider the strengths you need to lead change effectively, and the strengths in the hands of the players in your organization. Ignore job titles; look at strengths. Perhaps Joe from HR holds the J♠, and Christine, your CFO, has the ace. Maybe Rafael, a manager from sales, holds the 10♠, while Beth and George from engineering bring the K♠ and Q♠. You’ve combined five disparate individuals with the requisite strengths, formed a cross-functional team, and created a royal flush!

A major package transportation firm, a sizeable healthcare organization, a revered high technology company, a transit company lauded for its innovation...these are examples of the many companies among our clients whose leaders are applying the concepts of strengths in their organizations. They have chosen to make significant shifts in their processes to engage strengths—a new imperative that crosses industries, technologies, companies, and nonprofit organizations as well.

The challenge for all of us is that strength-based development is cutting-edge work! We haven’t always been able to reveal the organization names of our clients because, for them, this work is proprietary—a differentiator and a strategic advantage in the marketplace. And yet, the Strengths Revolution is happening everywhere! With more than 2 million people completing the Clifton StrengthsFinder, and 850,000 more completing the VIA Signature Strengths tool, we know the concepts have spread far and wide among individuals. Our job is to capitalize on this groundswell.

We look forward to academics, practitioners, and organizations publishing their learning and their results when they strategically apply strengths in their organizations. We would like to house a repository for such exciting stories of change! Now that you know your own strengths, and how to commit your “full house” to receive spectacular results for yourself and others, please visit our Website and add your wisdom and your story to the dialogue!