Knowing vs. Growing: What My Own Career Path Taught Me About Strengths

It's back-to-school season, and this year that phrase applies to more than just the kids.

Every fall, I watch my own children head back with new backpacks and new expectations, and I'm reminded that learning doesn't stop once you have a diploma and a job title. The truth is, it never will. The pace of change in most workplaces keeps raising the bar on what you need to know, and the volume of information means growing isn’t optional.  

This is the difference between knowing your strengths and growing them. Knowing means you've got the information. You took the assessment, you have the report, and you can rattle off your top five in a meeting. Growing means you're actually doing something with the information; you’re using it for self-reflection, goal-setting, and letting it change how you respond to a setback instead of just how you describe yourself at a networking event.

Here's where I think it gets dangerous for a lot of us as we get older. Somewhere along the way, adulthood (and climbing the corporate ladder) starts rewarding the appearance of already knowing things. You're supposed to have it figured out by now. You're supposed to be the one with the answer in the room, not the one still asking questions. So we quietly slide into what I'd call a "knower" mindset, more focused on proving we're competent than on actually getting better. We mistake this for confidence, but in the process, we miss out on staying relevant. In a workplace that's changing this fast, that's not a small mistake. It's the difference between staying in the know and slowly becoming obsolete.  

I didn't figure this out from theory. I figured it out by living it.

After college, I landed a role in retail management, which was a perfect fit for my Sales Management and Retail Management degrees. I loved it. I had a professor once describe it as being an entrepreneur with someone else’s money, and the thrill of it was electric. I also didn’t have the language yet for why it fit so well, because Don Clifton was still a few years away from finishing the StrengthsFinder assessment. I just knew I was good at it, and I liked doing it.

I didn't stay there. My process, then and now, has always been the same: keep my eyes and ears open, keep talking to people, keep paying attention to what opportunities are actually out there, instead of assuming the one I'm in is the only one available to me. That process led me into property management and leasing, where I worked alongside store owners and managers for a decade as they navigated the challenges of owning a business in a mall setting. That's also where I was first introduced to CliftonStrengths, which changed how I understood everything I'd already been doing instinctively.

Then life did what life does. My own kids were growing faster than I'd planned for, and a season of personal curveballs pushed me toward the nonprofit sector. I remember thinking of it as the flip side of the sales coin. Instead of selling a product, I was selling a mission, asking donors to invest in something bigger than a transaction. I did that work in a few different roles, and in each of them, I brought CliftonStrengths with me, using it with my teams and boards to get more out of what we already had.

In 2024, another curveball made something clear that had probably been true the whole time: the work of strengths wasn't just something I used well. It was my actual passion. That's when Aspen Root Collective became real.

Looking back, every one of those moves came from the same four questions we now walk students through using the framework Amy and I built with the Region 8 Educational Service Center (you can see it at www.discoveryournext.org): What do I do well and enjoy doing? Where do I want to go? How do I get there? Why is this my next step? I didn't have those questions written out when I was 22 and taking a retail management job. But I was answering them anyway, over and over, at every turn.

That's the part I want you to hear if you're further along in your career and quietly wondering if it's too late to keep growing. It isn't. Gallup lays out career development in three phases that map almost exactly onto my own path: figuring out your natural strengths, then investing in them on purpose through real coaching and feedback, and finally shifting from a paycheck mentality to a career built around doing what you actually do best. That last shift doesn't mean you need a new job. It usually means choosing different projects, different rooms, different roles within the room you're already in that let you use what you're good at more often.

Careers were never supposed to be a single decision made once in your twenties (or earlier) if you’re lucky! It's a continuous process of lining up who you are with what you're doing, over and over, for as long as you're working. That was true for me through very different chapters of my career. It's true for the students we work with today. And it's true for you, whether you're twelve years into a career or forty.

Don't stop at knowing what you're good at, and always keep growing it.

If you’re ready to keep digging into what you’re good at, send me an email at sarah@aspenrootcollective.com. I’d love to hear more about it. 

with growth & gratitude — Sarah