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It’s been a very hard few weeks for many people financially, and I’m sorry to say that I’ve gotten emails and phone calls from at least a half-dozen association people now looking for work unexpectedly. A transition period can be a time of panic, but it also can be a good time to pause and look around.

Are you really using the skills you like to use—the ones that really jazz you--or just the ones you’re paid to perform? Are the strengths and weaknesses you stuck on your resume during the last job hunt still the same?

In career coach Marcus Buckingham’s new book, The Truth About You: Your Secret to Success (Thomas Nelson, September 2008), he uses an interactive notebook, DVD, and less than 100 pages of text to help professionals abandon all previous notions of their strengths and weaknesses. He instead redefines “strengths” as activities or traits that energize and fulfill you, that make you stronger in terms of your level of satisfaction and joy in executing them. These may not be the same capabilities at which you excel in your current workplace.

Indeed, you may be the world’s best association finance director, but if your duties are making you feel dread or drained, a la “weak,” then perhaps money management is not a “strength” after all. The perspective is worth pondering while you’re breathing in and out of that brown paper bag.

Note that Buckingham says that this book was written with the younger worker in mind, folks perhaps in their first or second job. However, it didn’t read as too Gen Y to me, except that it is much shorter than the other books and uses a multi-media approach. You’ll find other insights in two of his earlier excellent books, Now, Discover Your Strengths (2001) and First, Break All the Rules (1999).