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You can't do it all. Neither can we.
A Note from the Roots
If you're a newsletter subscriber who noticed August come and go without a word from us, you weren't imagining things. We skipped it. On purpose, kind of.
Here's the truth: August handed us the same thing it probably handed you. Kids heading back to school with lists a mile long. Client work that needed our full attention and couldn't wait. Not to mention the board meetings, volunteer work, and other life commitments that are ever-present. Somewhere in the middle of all of it, the newsletter kept getting put on the back burner. Not because we didn't care about sending it. But because we care enough to only send one when it is worthy of your inbox.
So we didn't send it.
That's the reality of where things are for some of us right now. It's actually the same thing we tell our clients every single day: you can't be excellent at everything, and trying to will make you mediocre at all of it. CliftonStrengths doesn't just tell you what you're good at. It gives you permission to stop pretending you have unlimited capacity for the things that feel like an uphill climb. We'd rather show up in September with something worth your time than show up in August with something rushed just to hit send.
Which, as it turns out, ties in nicely to what we actually wanted to talk to you about this month. It's funny how that works sometimes.
In growth & gratitude,
Amy & Sarah
Aspen Root Collective
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This month on the blog, Sarah's calling out her own "knower" mindset, and probably yours too.
Somewhere between your first job and today, you started rewarding yourself for having the answer instead of asking the question. It felt like confidence. Turns out it might be the exact thing quietly making you obsolete.
When's the last time you actually did something with your CliftonStrengths report, instead of just knowing what's in it?
Sarah's tracing her own nearly four-decade career, from retail management to property leasing to nonprofit fundraising to founding Aspen Root Collective, to unpack Gallup's distinction between knowing your strengths and growing them. It's the same four questions we walk students through, applied to the rest of us who assumed we were done asking them.
Spoiler alert: your top 5 strengths were never supposed to be the finish line. Treating them like one might be why you've plateaued and haven't noticed yet.
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Root Cause | FAQ'S You Can Use
Here's something we hear more than you'd think, quietly, almost apologetically: "We assumed this would be out of our budget."
It makes sense. Gallup tools have a premium reputation, and premium reputations come with premium price tag assumptions. Gallup offers the 'gold standard' in workplace assessments and surveys. That's why we love them.
Here's what we've seen play out in real life: one team came to us after being quoted around $30,000 to run their Q12 survey. We did it with them for under $10,000, and it came with something the bigger quote didn't: an in-person, hands-on approach from people who actually sat with their team, created a custom strategy, and guided them along the way. It wasn't just a report that landed in an inbox.
That's not a fluke. It's the advantage of working with a local Certified Gallup Global Strengths coach. You get the same tools, the same rigor, but customized to a team your size, without enterprise-level overhead built into the price.
If you're leading a team of under 100 people and have assumed this kind of work is out of reach, we'd genuinely like to talk you out of that assumption. A discovery call costs you nothing but 45 minutes, and it's the fastest way to find out what this would actually look like for your team and what it would actually cost. We work with teams of all sizes, and we'd love to share all the ways we can make your investment make an impact.
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Grounded Truth | Pause & Reflect
Remember permission slips? The ones your parents signed so you could go on the field trip, skip the assignment, or leave school early for a dentist appointment? There was something almost magical about them. One signature, and suddenly you had explicit, official permission to do the thing you were already allowed to do, but somehow needed someone else to say it first.
Turns out we never really outgrow needing one.
CliftonStrengths works the same way, if you let it. Knowing your top themes isn't just information about what you're good at. It's permission, in writing, to stop pretending you have to be good at everything. If Strategic or Ideation shows up in your top five, that's your permission slip to stop forcing yourself into the spreadsheet-and-detail work that drains you, and to hand it to someone who actually finds it energizing. If Woo or Communication is nowhere near your top ten, that's permission to stop feeling guilty that networking events leave you exhausted instead of inspired.
So this month, we're asking you the question we've been asking ourselves: what do you need a permission slip for?
What are you still doing out of obligation instead of strength? What could you let go of, delegate, or simply stop pretending you have to carry, if you gave yourself permission the way CliftonStrengths already has?
We built a free reflection worksheet to help you actually sit with that question instead of just nodding along and closing this email.
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Branching Out | Real Talk From the Stage in Indy
Mark your calendars: on October 7th, 8:30 AM to 4:45 PM, we're headed to the Indiana Convention Center in Indianapolis for the Indiana Chamber's Emerging Leaders Forum, a day built for Indiana's next generation of leaders.
If you know an early-career professional building their path forward (or if that's you), this one's worth the trip. The Forum is built around leadership development, networking, and the kind of honest conversations about resilience and authenticity that don't usually make it into a typical training session.
We're leading a session called "Let's Get Real About Resilience: Strength in Authenticity," and it aligns perfectly with what we've discussed this month. To be a learner, not a knower, we must actively seek out ways to find strength in who we were meant to be. No more faking it to make it.
View the agenda and consider sending your team.
And if you've ever thought it would be great to bring that same energy into your own team, conference, or leadership retreat, that's something we do too. Keynote speaking and workshop facilitation are part of how we work with organizations, alongside individual coaching and longer-term engagements. We have a list of topics we love to discuss and can work with your team to customize a keynote to meet the moment. If that's something you're exploring, reply to this email for more information.
Registration for the Emerging Leaders Forum is still open. Get your tickets today!
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What We're Loving This Month!
Ted Lasso, Season 4 | Apple TV
Full confession: Sarah is not really what we would call "sportsy". She couldn't tell you the offside rule if her life depended on it. And yet, somehow, Ted Lasso has had her fully invested since season one. Amy, on the other hand, comes to this one honestly; she's got a soccer-loving household and has been all in since the pilot.
Season 4 is in full swing, and this time Ted's coaching a women's team starting from the bottom of the league. New team, new dynamics, new challenges, and somehow, the same heart at the center of it all.
That's actually what we love most about this season, looking at it through a strengths lens. Different players, different obstacles, a different game entirely in a lot of ways. But Ted's core belief in people hasn't moved an inch. He's never been the guy who knows the most about the game. He's the guy who believes in people before they believe in themselves and adjusts how he shows up depending on who's in front of him.
That's the same thing that can happen when you get to lead your team using their strengths. Your team is going to shift. The challenges will change. What should stay grounded is the belief that people, once they understand what they do best, can rise to meet almost anything.
If you need a show that'll make you laugh, tear up once or twice, and reflect on how you lead the people around you, add this one to the list. It's a binge-worthy must-see!
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🌱 Are you ready to see your team through a new lens? We can help!
This month we're celebrating a workshop we ran with the Ball State University Foundation team, digging into how our CliftonStrengths domains shape not just how we see our own work, but how we see (and sometimes misread) each other.
We split the team into clusters based on their dominant strengths domains and asked them to name some things out loud: what they naturally bring to the team because of how they're wired, and what can quietly get in their own way if that same strength goes unchecked. It's one thing to know your top themes. It's another to sit in a room with people who lead differently than you and hear, in real time, how your strength can look like a blind spot to someone wired the opposite way.
It was one of those sessions that reminded us why we love this work. Real conversations, a few honest laughs, and a team that walked away seeing each other, and themselves, a little differently. Bonus: A few fun, star-shaped glasses team photos were included!
We're always building new content and new ways to bring strengths to life for a team, so if it's been a while since your team's last strengths refresh, we'd love to talk about what a new session could look like for you.
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'Today has inspired me to lean in and learn the intricacies of each strength and how each team member uses their top 5 in their daily work'
-Anonymous Ball State Foundation Team Member
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P.S.
You hit the numbers. Got the promotion. Built the team. And somehow, life still doesn't feel the way you thought it would. If that gap sounds familiar and you're looking for something that isn't networking, isn't a mastermind, and isn't performative anything, email us. We're quietly building something for guys who feel like they've hit every goal on this list, but still feel like something's missing.
If that's landing for you, shoot us an email, and we'll tell you more.
Sarah@aspenrootcollective.com | Amy@aspenrootcollective.com
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