Know Your Strengths: What Knowing Your Wiring Changes About Everything
Most of us spend years trying to be well-rounded. We push hard in the areas where we’re weak and take our strengths for granted. But what if that’s exactly backwards? In Episode 202 of The Daron Earlewine Podcast, Daron sits down with his wife Julie — now a StrengthsFinder-certified coach — to talk about what happens when you stop apologizing for how you’re wired and start building from it. No two people on earth test exactly the same across all 34 strengths. That’s not a quirky stat. It’s the foundation of everything. When Julie finally saw herself clearly through the lens of StrengthsFinder, it didn’t just change how she understood herself — it changed how she understood her marriage, her kids, and her calling.
What your “weaknesses” are actually telling you
Julie’s top strengths are Discipline, Responsibility, Consistency, Includer, and Communication. Daron’s profile lives almost entirely in Strategic Thinking and Influencing. They share exactly one common strength. For years, that gap created friction — Julie bracing for ideas that might never happen, Daron feeling caged in by structure. The garage story says it all. Julie sent Daron out to organize the garage. He walked out, looked at everything, and started moving piles from one side to the other — no system, no decisions, just relocating the mess. Her response: “You cannot do this, can you?” His: “No. I have absolutely no idea where to start.” That moment wasn’t a failure. It was a revelation. When you understand that someone isn’t choosing to frustrate you — they’re simply wired differently — you stop fighting the person and start working with who they actually are. Julie’s certification process made that click in a whole new way. She learned more from her lower-strength areas than her top ones, because her strengths already felt natural. The gaps were where the real growth was waiting.
How this applies to your marriage, your team, and your kids
John Maxwell puts it plainly: you can grow about two points in any area. A three becomes a five with years of effort. Average. But a seven can become a ten. World-class. That changes everything about how you invest in people — including yourself. Daron and Julie apply this at home, too. Their son Cole has Competition as a top strength. It drives everything in him. Instead of reading that as excessive, they understand it as purposeful — and they’re helping guide him toward a path where that strength thrives. Their son Ty leads with Empathy, which shows up differently in college and relationships. Knowing your kids’ strengths shifts parenting from broadly raising children to intentionally developing the specific person in front of you. The same principle holds in business. Put the right people in the right positions. Stop expecting everyone to contribute equally in every area. Build a team where the pieces fit together — not a team of identical generalists. If you’re ready to do that kind of work, go to RogueCollectiveCoaching.com and book a discovery call. And if you want to be among the first to hear when Julie’s women’s coaching groups open, email daron@daronearlewine.com with “Julie” in the subject line.
Episode Summary:
Most people spend their whole lives trying to fix what they’re bad at. In this episode, Daron sits down with his wife Julie, a newly certified StrengthsFinder coach, to talk about what happens when you stop chasing well-rounded and start living from how God actually wired you. After 25 years of marriage, they finally have language for why they drove each other crazy. And that language is changing everything.
Key Takeaways:
- Your lowest strengths are not your failures. They are revealing something powerful about how God designed you, and understanding them can completely reframe your conflicts at home and at work.
- In marriage, opposites do not just attract. They complete. When you stop trying to make your spouse operate like you and start understanding their God-given wiring, grace becomes possible in a whole new way.
- You only get one shot at your two most important roles. You are your spouse’s first spouse and your children’s parent. Discovering who God made you to be in those roles is not optional. It’s urgent.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Julie: I had to learn this because I am so execution-driven and pretty linear in my thinking. I believe if you say something, it’s happening. So I had to learn that sometimes in the futuristic and belief space, you’re just dreaming. Like we all fall asleep at night and dream, and when you wake up you’re like, “Oh wait, this isn’t reality.” I’ve had to learn, “Oh okay, he is dreaming,” and he is not going to move me to Zimbabwe tomorrow to go live in a hut in Africa. That was the beginning of our marriage. So much dreaming that I didn’t understand. I just thought he was trying to ruin our lives.
Tagline: Created on purpose and for a purpose.
Daron: Hey, welcome back to The Daron Earlewine Podcast. Daron Earlewine, your host. Thanks for downloading this episode. We appreciate it. Thanks to our growing community. If you’re brand new, we’re glad you’re here.
Sitting down today with one of our most popular guests and one of my favorite women on earth. My wife, Julie. Welcome back.
Julie: Hi, Daron. Hi, everyone.
Daron: What do you think of the new studio?
Julie: I think this is the best space I’ve recorded in yet, and I’ve been in four different venues.
Daron: You’re stoked to be on the podcast.
Julie: I am today. Because I am the focus of the conversation.
Daron: Fair enough. So we always talk about here on the podcast, all 200-plus episodes, reminding you that you are created on purpose and for a purpose. We have the Spiritual DNA online course. Last year we started Rogue Collective Coaching, doing purpose and personal development coaching in businesses through a lot of assessment-based work.
Julie has been a part of that process with me for 25 years. I have been enthralled by this journey. In my early 20s, I genuinely did not know who I was. I didn’t fit in the world. The first assessment that gave me real insight was the book “Now Discover Your Strengths” and the StrengthsFinder assessment. At some point in those early seasons, you took it as well.
And I’ll be honest, being the “purpose guy,” you would think that you and I would have each other’s strengths memorized and would have been leveraging them for maximum impact in our marriage. But we did not. Not totally.
Julie: We’ve probably leaned into the Enneagram more in our marriage. And the Five Voices. We talked quite a bit about that. But two years ago, if someone had said, “What are Julie’s top five strengths?” I would have guessed and gotten in the zip code. But I’ll tell you, I was ashamed of myself.
Daron: And I don’t know that I always remembered mine either, honestly. It’s hard if you don’t have them in front of you. There are 34 of them.
Julie: And you can fluctuate a little. You aren’t really supposed to take the test twice, but you have six to ten that can also be highly impactful in how you respond to the world.
Daron: The book is called “Now Discover Your Strengths,” but I wanted to title this episode “Discover Your Strengths Now.” The thought behind that is in the past three months, you made the decision to go much further than just revisiting the book or listening to a podcast. You took the bold step and became a StrengthsFinder-certified coach, which was a real time investment and financial investment. What made you go from “I discovered my strengths 15 years ago” to “I’m going to discover them now, not just for me, but so I can help other people”?
Julie: Well, first, one of our fellow staff members named PJ put it on my Asana list. And if you know my strengths, once it’s on my to-do list, I really don’t have a choice anymore.
Daron: Coop, you hear that? I’m starting to put stuff on there.
Julie: That is definitely not happening. But I think being at a crossroads in this season of life is the real answer. My kids are older. I have much more space than I’ve had in years. Two of our boys are in college. We’re still deeply intertwined in their lives. We fly out to see Ty. When Cole’s playing football, we’re there. But right now it’s only Knox at home. And I’ve become curious about what I’ll do with myself in three more years.
Being their mom and running Earlewine Inc. has been my identity. It has been the best job I’ve ever had and it always will be. It’s just going to shift roles.
I’ve always been deeply interested in how people interact and what makes them work. And the interesting part about Daron and me is we have only one common strength. The rest are completely opposite. No two people in the entire world test exactly the same, in the same order, across all 34. That is fascinating to me.
One of my top strengths is Includer. And I think that’s part of why I’m passionate about this. If I can see who you are out of those 34 strengths, it gives me space to help you feel seen and included.
Daron: So walk us through some of the main discoveries for yourself during the certification process.
Julie: The certification was extensive. Mostly on Zoom for our family’s schedule, with Daron traveling quite a bit for ministries and leadership coaching. It was all-day sessions, eight to five, with only short breaks. A lot of information coming at me, which is challenging because I don’t do well with purely audible learning. I’m much more visual.
So the way I processed it was to text about ten significant people in my life and have their top five strengths in front of me as I was learning. I had the Blackbird staff, some close friends, my older boys, and some young women who had asked me to mentor them. When a particular strength came up in training, I could immediately look at a real person and see it in them. It helped me retain everything so much better.
Daron: What were some of the big personal takeaways? What landed as an epiphany or a moment of clarity?
Julie: There are four domains of strength: Execution, Strategic Thinking, Relationship Building, and Influencing. I am very high in Execution. Hence the reason something gets put on my to-do list and I’m signing up. I also have high Relationship Building.
What I learned, though, is that I am at around 30 to 34 in Strategic Thinking. I am not visionary. I don’t naturally look forward. I tend to manage the present. Daron, on the other hand, is all the way at the bottom in Execution. His entire profile lives in Strategic Thinking and Influencing.
So we are strong in completely opposite areas. Opposites attract, right?
That was one of the biggest takeaways. It clicked. “Oh, this is why when Daron is daydreaming about ideas, I start mentally making a to-do list.” What task can I do while someone is discussing something that might have a ten percent chance of happening six months from now? I would check out in those situations, and I always felt genuinely guilty about it. But now I feel more confident in understanding, “Okay, that’s not natural to me,” even while knowing I still have to engage.
A coach friend of mine who has worked with Blackbird told me that in any weaker area, you still have to attempt twenty percent. You still have to show up well enough to make your team work and to remain receptive. So I have had to be more open to strategic thinking, even knowing I probably won’t be the biggest contributor in that space. It doesn’t mean I have a free pass to check out.
Where I shine is Discipline, Responsibility, Consistency, Includer, and Communication. Daron and I actually share Communication, which is interesting.
But honestly, I learned more about my weaker areas than my strong areas. My strengths made perfect sense when I saw them. It was like, “Yes, this is obviously why I am the way I am.” But the lower areas were where I had to do some real looking in the mirror, especially when it came to being more open to Daron’s strategic thinking in our marriage.
Daron: It’s interesting. Opposites attract, but I think they initially repel. You naturally make fast friends with people who are similar to you. You get each other quickly. But most of us don’t naturally want to confront our weaknesses.
Looking back, people who fit your strength profile probably felt like they were trying to cage me in or hold me accountable. I’d think, “Eh, whatever.” But what’s interesting is, through tools like Spiritual DNA or the Four Core Questions with Rogue Collective Coaching, when you can get to a place of genuine humility and curiosity and real love for another person, not just romantic love but true appreciation for someone’s uniqueness, it changes the entire lens.
I think we’re in the best place we’ve ever been coming up on 25 years. But looking back at that first decade, I think it took me a full ten years to genuinely realize that Julie is God’s gift to me. Perfectly matched opposites.
And it probably took the next ten years for you to start thinking I might actually be a gift to you.
Julie: That is not entirely true. But the first ten years were harder. Fair.
Daron: Absolutely. Some of my chaos was just chaos. But I think the second decade is when you started to see some genius in it.
Julie: Yeah, maybe. And you still create chaos sometimes. I’m just used to it.
Daron: Fair. So what advice would you give someone who is maybe in their first couple years of career or their first decade of marriage, now that you have this deeper understanding?
Julie: I keep coming back to the fact that they kept reiterating throughout our training: no two people can ever be exactly the same. On our own staff, PJ and Daron actually share the same top five strengths, just in a different order, and then from there they diverge entirely.
So you can have the same strengths listed and still function very differently. When we learn to accept that nobody is going to be just like me and nobody is going to do it just like me, and that that is actually a very good thing, it changes everything. We wouldn’t have all the things in the world that we have if we were all identical.
I could not have dreamed up the ministry opportunities we have been given over 25 years. I could not have heard God’s call in that visionary way. But I can execute them. I can support them. I can build the foundation that makes them function. Now it all makes much more sense, knowing what I know about myself.
And when you understand how someone wakes up in the morning, what motivates them, it is so much easier to give them grace. To cheer them on. To believe in what they do, and for them to believe in what you do.
This applies to your marriage. And it absolutely applies to your business. If you can bring leadership development training into your organization and help your team understand how you all work best together, it is transformative. Especially if you contact RogueCollectiveCoaching.com and have us come in.
But it also goes down to the personal level. I can see it in my own kids. Cole has Competition as a top strength. It motivates everything in him. I’m at around 27 in Competition. Understanding that allows me to understand why he operates the way he does rather than being frustrated by it. And with Ty, I can see Empathy so clearly in him, especially now as he navigates college and new relationships. Knowing this allows me to look at us as a family of five and think about what all of us could do together in ministry and in our community.
Daron: I took both our older boys through Spiritual DNA in high school. Knowing what we’ve discovered about them has deeply informed our parenting. Instead of just broadly raising kids, we’re trying to develop Cole. We’re trying to develop Ty. We’re trying to develop Knox. And when someone needs to feel loved, they need to be seen, known, affirmed, and blessed. Having this kind of knowledge of the people you are parenting or working alongside gives you the ability to do those four things with intention.
Cole’s Competition could easily be misread as something negative or excessive. But it is not a negative strength. It’s powerful and purposeful when it’s used well. Every strength works that way. It’s not that a strength is bad. It just may not be yours.
Julie: It gives you a truly beautiful view of someone. And in a very personal relationship, it helps you guide your kids toward careers and paths that are actually suited for who they are. Cole is going to need a role with built-in competition, where he can push against himself and others. That understanding helped guide him. And in your business, it will help you set your team up to win. Put the right people in the right positions. Like building the right football team. You are not putting a safety on the offensive line.
Daron: All of this, knowing our strengths, knowing the boys’ strengths, applying it in the business context, gives you the ability to set someone up for success. It’s the purpose and the design behind what we do at Rogue Collective Coaching.
[Mid-Episode CTA]
Daron: If you’re curious, or if you’re past curious and you know it’s time to take action, here’s what to do. Go to RogueCollectiveCoaching.com. Click “Book a Discovery Call.” Jump on a 30-minute conversation with me. We’ll talk about where you are and whether Rogue Collective Coaching is your next step to help you become who you were born to be. RogueCollectiveCoaching.com. Book a discovery call. I can’t wait to chat with you.
[Resuming]
Daron: I think there’s also something worth naming. As we’ve worked together over these years and turned a corner, you have been able to use your Communication strength to actually explain why Execution matters to you. To communicate why when you see me come through in Responsibility and Consistency, it genuinely makes you feel valued. That was a corner turn for us.
Because it used to be very hard for me to receive that. I would bristle against it. I would think you were just being critical or being hard on me.
Julie: You absolutely thought that.
Daron: One hundred percent. But now I can understand it. I know Consistency and Responsibility are strengths for Julie. And when I think about Futuristic and Belief, which are core for me, if you told me I could not operate in that space it would feel like you were unplugging my soul. I truly cannot conceive of being motivated primarily by consistency and responsibility. But knowing that you are, I understand now that when I am being inconsistent or irresponsible toward you, it lands on you the exact same way it lands on me when you won’t enter a dreaming conversation or when a new idea gets shut down immediately.
Our counselor Holly told me something that genuinely changed my perspective. She said that in conflict, in an argument, you can develop the ability to hold two perspectives or two emotions at the same time. I had never thought about it that way before. Usually in conflict, I am holding my own perspective with everything I have. I am not really entering the other person’s emotional reality. But if you can hold both without discounting your own experience, and give equal attention to where they are, you move from combat to understanding. And from understanding, you can have peace.
Understanding someone’s strengths is what makes that possible. Because it’s more than just, “Well, I have this opinion.” It is how God hardwired your brain. You have hundreds of millions of synaptic connections between the hemispheres of your brain from the moment you are born. By around age sixteen, about two-thirds of that neural network has dissipated. What remains are these six-lane superhighways. For Julie, that’s Consistency, Responsibility, and Includer. For me, it’s Communication and Woo. That is how our brains function at their highest capacity.
So it is not, “Julie is just having a bad day,” or “Daron is just being flighty.” This is how each of us operates at our best. To understand that for yourself, to realize there are things you are not just decent at but genuinely world-class at, and then to have that same appreciation for someone else’s wiring, that is what changes a relationship.
Julie: I always think back to the garage story.
Daron: Tell it.
Julie: I had to learn that I am so execution-driven, so linear in my thinking, that when someone says something I assume it’s happening. So I had to learn that in the Futuristic and Belief space, sometimes Daron is just dreaming. Like when you wake up from a dream and realize, “Oh, that wasn’t real.” I had to get there with him. He is dreaming. He is not moving us to Zimbabwe tomorrow to live in a hut. That was the beginning of our marriage. Just so much dreaming that I did not understand, and I just thought he was trying to ruin our lives.
But then about ten years in, I realized: all these ideas are happening. Not every one, but the ones that truly matter, the ones aligned with what the Lord actually has for our family, those are the ones that come to fruition. And those are the ones where my strengths line up and go into action to support them.
A lot of our early conflict came from this: Daron would have an idea that to him was worth a penny. But to me it felt like everything was on the line. And I would immediately start organizing and bracing for something that was maybe only a ten percent idea.
But back to the garage. One day, with the kids still young so there were definitely more freak-outs back then, I said, “The garage is a disaster. Go out there and organize the garage right now.” For the record, this happened every three to six months.
So I send Daron outside. He goes out, and he is completely overwhelmed. He has absolutely no idea what to do. So he starts moving piles of junk from one side of the garage to another. Not throwing anything away. Not creating a system. Just relocating the mess.
I walk out and I see this happening, and I am literally not even angry. I just look at him and say, “You cannot do this, can you?”
And he says, “No. I absolutely cannot do this. I have no idea where to start.”
So I now know I will never say to him for the rest of our marriage, “Go organize the fill-in-the-blank.” Because what that actually sounded like to him was, “Hey, could you go out there and feel stupid for two hours?” He would walk out, look at everything, know how well I organize, and just stare and have nowhere to begin.
Now we just know. And there is genuine appreciation. When I finish an organizational project, he walks through and says, “Wow. Look at this. We could eat in here.” And I am very happy to bring him alongside and say, “Lift this, move that, sweep here.” Because he actually does love to check things off a completed list. He just cannot create the list. He loves when an idea reaches completion. He just cannot start the idea.
So we meet on opposite sides of the same goal. Everything around this table came from his spiritual leading, his dreaming, his passion for ministry. Probably 500 ideas. Maybe 15 have become reality. But in that, it’s usually the right ones that create the right space for us to support each other, and that’s how we know they’re right.
That was incredibly affirming when I went through all the training. I realized it is genuinely okay that I do not think strategically. I do not need to. If we both thought strategically all the time, nothing would ever get done. And if we only executed, we would miss every great opportunity God has given us to serve Him.
So what did I get the most from? I got the most from recognizing my lower areas, because my stronger areas just felt natural. If you have not taken the assessment, your natural strengths will feel like a homecoming. Your lower ones will feel just as revelatory, in the best way. Because you will think, “Oh, that is why I have never woken up excited to do that.” It gives you permission to stop beating yourself up.
Daron: What I say to people in coaching is this. John Maxwell talks about how humans can grow by about two points on a scale of one to ten. If you are a three at something, you can take every course, read every book, spend ten years working on it, and you will be a five. Average. But if you find out you are already a seven at something, you can reach ten. World-class. That changes the entire calculus.
Reject the myth of being well-rounded. You are not a well-rounded person. You are all edges. But if you can become a piece of a pie, part of a team, then together you have something complete. That gives you genuine grace for yourself. “It makes sense that I’m not going to be great at that.” And then it gives you a new kind of appreciation for others. “If I can find someone who is exceptional in that area, together we can really get something done.”
Julie: And that is exactly the 20% principle. You still have to push yourself a little in your weaker areas. You still have to show up. But it does not mean you are going to be the one who contributes the most there, and that is okay.
In our meetings now, I do not always attend the dreaming meetings. But I have been working on genuinely listening when Daron talks about his vision for our family or what’s coming. I have to be willing to engage with the future, not just manage the present. Even if I lean in on two ideas out of ten in a given week, it will help him be a better him. And it will probably motivate him when I need help with two out of ten tasks on my list.
Daron: Perfect segue. As we’re coming to the close here, I want to ask you to lean into that twenty percent and think a little futuristically. You’ve got all this new knowledge, new affirmation, new understanding. What do you want to do with it going forward?
Julie: You’re making me dream, which is hard for me.
Right after the training, I met with my friend Tracy, who has been a strengths coach for a long time. She is genuinely gifted at speaking truth over someone, at affirming you for who you are. She said she really believes I will be used to coach women who are behind me in seasons of life. Younger women who need to learn who they are.
I wish I had truly known who I was twenty years ago. If I had known me and allowed myself to accept me twenty-five years sooner, I think the past five years have been the first time I have really understood myself at that level. But if I can sit across from younger women before they spend a decade bumping into the walls of who they are not, whether they are heading into a career, a marriage, or parenting, and allow them to know their strengths and their Enneagram and all the different assessments we use with Rogue Collective, I feel like it would set them up to be so much more gracious to themselves.
I wish I had been more gracious to myself. That is the heartbeat. If I can allow women to receive grace for themselves sooner, they will be able to give grace to others sooner. And I think that matters.
Daron: What’s interesting is that in a lot of my Rogue Collective Coaching work right now, I’m predominantly working with men because of our connections in construction and blue-collar industries. And what I hear time and again is that these guys go home and tell their wives what they’ve been learning about themselves. And the wives say, “Duh. I have been telling you that for a decade. Why didn’t you listen to me?” One of my Oklahoma clients came in last month and said, “I don’t know why, but the way you framed some things just clicked for me. And I realized this is everything my wife has been saying for ten years.”
That is how it always works. We hear things from someone else before we hear them from our spouse. But what I am hearing is the wives saying, “I want this too.” So if you want to be among the first to know when Julie’s coaching groups open, email me at daron@daronearlewine.com and just put “Julie” in the subject line. We’ll put you on the wait list.
I am genuinely inspired, Jules. What I have seen you bring to our family, the genius you carry, most times we do not realize how exceptional we are. But watching your strengths shape what our family has become and is becoming, I am excited about what you are going to make available to other women.
Here’s what I’ll leave you with. Andy Stanley said it best, I think. Every person has exactly two unique roles that no one else can ever fill: being your spouse’s only first spouse, and being your children’s parent. Everything else, you can be replaced. But those two roles? No one else can do them for you.
So if you do not know who God created you to be in those two roles, discover it today. This is your life. You are living it right now. And when you can live it knowing you were created on purpose and for a purpose, knowing God is near you in this and for you in this, it does not make life easy. But I think it makes life livable. And it makes it possible to live your life the best way you possibly could.
Email daron@daronearlewine.com if you want on the wait list for Julie’s groups.
Julie, any final thoughts?
Julie: Just this: what are my strengths are mine, and what are yours are yours. No two people are the same. So you do not have to do it like someone else. I always hear people say “super mom.” Everybody is a super mom because you are doing it the way you are made to do it. Know your strengths. Allow that space. Be a super wife, a super friend, a super career woman, whatever your supers are. Figure them out. It gives you space to be at your highest platform, to see yourself for who you are, and to give yourself grace for the things you are not. You just need to know what your supers are.Daron: That is a closing bar if I have ever heard one. Hey, if you have comments or questions, email me at daron@daronearlewine.com. If you haven’t subscribed yet, we’d love for you to. A big thank you to everyone who supports Blackbird Mission financially. Your donations make our nonprofit work around the world completely possible. You can learn more at daronearlewine.com and blackbirdmission.com. Thank you to our monthly sponsors. If this episode encouraged you, share it with somebody. Maybe a burgeoning super mom who needs to hear it. We appreciate you. Love being in this podcast community with you. Until next time, remember: you were created on purpose and for a purpose. He is near you, not far away. He is for you, not against you. See you next time on The Daron Earlewine Podcast.