HARMONY: What Harmony Is All About
StrengthsFinder Theme / CliftonStrengths Theme: HARMONY
What Is the HARMONY Theme
Those with the Strength of Harmony are the people in our lives who naturally seek peace in situations and consistently find common ground with others. It is their instinct to look for and focus on areas of agreement and overlap, with the aim of creating win/win situations. They work toward stability, transparency, and order because they know that more can be accomplished if all parties move ahead cooperatively. People with Harmony have a heightened sensitivity to tension, friction, and dissonance, and they will go out of their way to create conversations and solutions that end conflict. For them, disagreement, power-struggles, and confrontation are tremendous wastes of time and energy—they see the cycles of anger and retribution as wholly futile. In that way, their need for consensus is more about productivity, efficiency, and moving forward than it is about simple peace-making. In fact, Harmony is a value for them, it is something seated at their core and they are always operating from that place. They bring us together by focusing on our similarities not our differences, and their very presence can lift the vibe of a room or shift the tone of a conversation from stagnant to striding forward. In them we feel supported, heard, and calm—we feel quietly more alive.
Why Should We Care
People with Harmony are simultaneously intuitive and practical. When it comes to conflict resolution, they can navigate masterfully between opposing viewpoints without getting sucked into any one side. In that way, they are great at walking a tightrope in tense situations—they can keep their cool and, generally, do not take things personally while peace is being made. More than that, they are able to get to the root of what is being left unsaid and drive to the core of the issue at hand, which is often times buried under layers. What makes them unique is their deep desire to appreciate where others are coming from—for them, the act of understanding is an essential inroad to peace. They may even temporarily suspend their own views and personal comfort in order to get a better understanding of the person or situation. By cultivating a mindset that focuses on connection, agreement, and common ground, people with Harmony change the ways that we see ourselves, others, and the world. They teach us how to open our minds, quiet our egos, and use our voices for action.
Ten Things to Know About People with HARMONY
1. Creative. They are often quietly imaginative, brilliant, and visionary people, especially when finding the ways and means to resolve a conflict. Their ability to hold multiple points-of-view and simultaneously map one perspective over the other requires a substantial amount of creative energy— even though they do this seemingly effortlessly.
2. Binary. For them, there may not just be two sides to every story, there may be millions. So, resolution means going forward, not right vs. wrong. They will ask themselves, “How can we reach an agreement so that things get moving along?” Conflicts are not black and white to them.
3. Elephants. If there is an elephant in the room, folks with Harmony might not be shy to point it out and address it. For them, the tension of the unspoken can outweigh the tension of the spoken, even if it leads momentarily to a confrontation. A problem cannot be solved when it is being hidden or avoided.
4. Devil’s Advocate. They are likely repulsed by people who are argumentative for the sake of being argumentative. In their mind: There are enough actual conflicts in the world, why create more artificially.
5. Awareness. Those with Harmony have extremely fine-tuned radars and can sense the mood of a room as it shifts. While they are good a brokering peace in times of disharmony, part of their art, too, is preventing conflicts before they even start. For that reason, they are apt to be very alert in social situations and to track they various on-goings of the room.
6. Sacred Anger. For them, getting angry and confronting another person might be terrifying, but they are willing to do it when absolutely necessary. As they are rare, such moments may have a particular significance for them. If someone with Harmony is sounding off, they are more than likely justified in doing so.
7. Sleeping Dogs. Where some people like to poke the beehive just to see what happens, folks with Harmony have zero interest in that. Their curiosity is not disruptive in that way; it is, instead, constructive asking, “Where do the two circles intersect?”
8. Openness. Folks with Harmony can hear and hold several conflicting perspectives in mind at once without agreeing or disagreeing with any one party. They are capable of listening carefully and simply seeing where others are coming from—even if they don’t necessarily agree with them fundamentally.
9. Impatience. They have little to no patience for people who are prescriptively old school, stuck-in- their-ways, or opinionated. Arrogance has a particularly insufferable presence for them as does closed- mindedness, tyranny, and those who force their views upon others.
10. Love. Because their greatest tool is language and presence, they will likely be responsive to those who are self-aware and who use words consciously and conscientiously. Phrases of affirmation and spending quiet time together are often great acts of love for those with Harmony.
If you are interested in reading more or diving more deeply into your Strengths, I’ve got some books available on Amazon here.