Strengths Coaching

This is a summary of our previous podcast episode which you can listen to in full here: https://yourcoachingjourney.com/project/147-coaching-approach-the-strengths-approach-to-coaching/

What is a Strength?

Leading positive psychology and strengths researcher, Professor Alex Linley says,

‘A strength is a pre-existing capacity for a particular way of behaving, thinking, or feeling that is authentic and energising to the user.’ and enables optimal functioning, development, and performance.’

We like this description of a strength because he’s saying it’s about more than performance or achieving goals. He also mentions that idea of being authentic and your strengths being energising.

We’ve all got strengths, but how good are we at acknowledging them?

How good are we at being proud and putting our strengths out there, celebrating them and putting our non-strengths / weaknesses to one side?

Generally, we can quite happily share their weaknesses, but we’re not so good at the strengths side of things.

Focusing on those weaknesses, or the problems associated with them, the things we can’t do very well, could lead to self doubt, self-limiting beliefs, which come up a lot in coaching.

The Benefits of Working With Strengths

There’s a lot of positive psychology research that shows us that focusing on strengths increases our sense of well-being, boosts performance, increases our confidence, and is generally more energising than focusing on weaknesses. And it’s said that if you have an active awareness of your personal strengths, you’re 9 times more likely to be flourishing. (sorry, we can’t remember where we read this statistic!)

As a coach, it changes the conversation from:

How can you get better at something that might not excite or energise you, and that perhaps you won’t ever make huge progress with?

To

What are you good at already that energises and excites you, and how can you do more of that?

Or

How can you use what you’re good at to move towards that desired outcome that you have?

It’s just a better conversation.

If someone’s stuck, then we can focus on their strengths to help them think about the options they have available to them, work on their confidence, their self-limiting beliefs and their self-efficacy to help them move forward, and help them find their own way.

In the bigger picture, if someone’s feeling less than fulfilled, like in their work life or in life in general, perhaps they’re not feeling as positive as they could about themselves, we can focus on strengths.

What Are Strengths?

There are different types of strengths:

• Skills
• Interests
• Talents
• Character strengths, (from positive psychology)
• Resources

Skills are specific proficiencies that are developed over time, with practise and progression, such as, learning to play tennis or learning to coach, or to speak a foreign language.

Interests are those areas, or topics that a person is passionate about. Playing football, for example, or tennis again – there’s some crossover here.

Talents are innate abilities or natural aptitude that we have.  It’s worth bearing in mind that you can have a talent in something, but not have an interest, and therefore you don’t develop the skill. Tom had to play rugby at school, and was good at it, so was always picked for the team. But he never really wanted to play, he wasn’t enthused by playing and was quite relieved not to have to play once he left school. Whereas other people obviously found an interest in it and would go on to develop it further.

Equally, there will be lots of people who perhaps have learned something because they’re good at it, but it doesn’t energise or enthuse them, so it’s not really a strength. It might be classed as a learned strength.

Character Strengths can be a bit trickier to get your head around because they seem to have a lot of crossover with values. These come from positive psychology, and they’re positive personality traits that contribute to fulfilment and benefit for others and for yourself, and for the greater good. They relate to who you are, your identity, but also what you do in the world. So perhaps being a patient person, having creativity, being hopeful.

Martin Seligman and Chris Peterson started set out to identify these character strengths, these valuable sort of ways of being. They looked at culture and at religions throughout history and drew out what people and society recognise as being virtues. Another phrase they use to describe them is ‘values in action’. They wanted to identify, organise, and measure aspects of character, which they defined as traits that are mostly constant and stable over time but could be impacted by the environment and what’s going on.

They created a profiling tool which has become an online resource (more on that later) where you rank 24 different character strengths in order of what’s most important to you and what isn’t. It’s not necessarily that it’s your strongest character strength, but just it’s important, and more in your awareness.

Resources are slightly different because this is more of about external strengths that support us. Things like family support, good friendships, a safe community, a network around you, having a mentor or a coach. It’s really important to have both internal resources, e.g. being able to find your own way, but also be able to call on others for help. Sometimes people sit with whatever the problem is and say or think, “Well, I can’t do anything about this,” but they haven’t actually explored what support might be available to them. Being able to look for the resources that you need and call upon other people, to call upon support mechanisms that could help you is definitely a strength. Within coaching, quite often we’re focused on the internal resources of the coachee and what they could be doing, but sometimes the answer may be to look outside of themselves. To find resources elsewhere that can support them.

Focussing on Strengths in the Coaching Room

An Online Tool – Values in Action

The Values in Action Character Strengths profiling tool or report can be a useful place to start. You can find it online here: https://www.viacharacter.org/

It’s a free resource, with paid for upgraded reports. It comes from a well-grounded bed of research in positive psychology.

If you are working with a client they could do the survey/profile before they come to coaching and  start to give some thought to their strengths before they arrive. You also then have the report to stimulate a discussion around their strengths.

There are other strengths profiling tools online, mostly they are paid for, but it’s worth exploring which one you like and would find best to use in the coaching room. Often other resources focus on more practical strengths such as planning or strategy, maybe critical thinking, being competitive, And also they tend to be commissioned by organisations to help employees with their roles. The VIA character strengths profiling tool is different because it’s more about who someone is rather than what they might be good at. But there’ll always be some overlap and it can lead to interesting conversations. Whilst it might not fulfil the brief of, ‘this is what I do well’, perhaps in terms of the workplace, it tells us something. It’s a can opener to get someone talking about themselves and to think, to bring it into their consciousness, perhaps even to give them a confidence boost.

Strengths Cards

For example, Tom’s ‘This Is Me’ Strengths and Values Cards,

These are a set of 60 cards. Strengths on one side, Values on the other. (Two in one!)

Tom says:

“ I actually did a bit of research around the different strengths tools that were out there and looked at what came up consistently across them all and just pulled out what I thought were the most useful 60. I’m not sure I got it all right. And obviously for someone going through them, they might say wonder why something is missing that they do have or value. But working with them starts the conversation. There is one word and a picture on each card. You can go through and you pick out the ones that you think best represent your strengths. People will generally identify strengths that they’ve not even thought of before. So that can be really useful in building their confidence, giving them a bit of self-efficacy.

It’s a little bit more playful than just asking, ‘what are your strengths?”

How to use the cards

Simply take a set of cards and ask your coachee to sort through them and identify their strengths, pick them out, put them in one pile. Put the ones that are definitely not their strengths in another pile. Maybe have a middling pile where they could potentially be a strength.

Those cards in the middle, could be learned strengths; those things that we have a natural aptitude for but perhaps don’t excite or energise us. It could be linked with those things that we might get the job of doing because we’re good at them, but we might not enjoy. Perhaps a conversation about these and how they could be delegated, or reduced would be useful.

It’s a bit of fun, and great if you’re working face-to-face with clients. You can find more about the cards, and if you scroll to the bottom of the page, some exercises to use them for here: https://yourcoachingjourney.com/discovery

Simply Coaching

Asking questions of our coachee around their strengths, like

• What are the things that you do best?
• How do you know when you’re at your best?
• What might you be doing when you’re at your best?
• When you are at your best, you are…? (ask them to fill in the blanks.)
• What are the key strengths and resources you can draw upon to find a solution to this situation?
• What are your key strengths here?

If someone’s stuck in this scenario, asking about how they’ve navigated previous scenarios:

• Tell me about a time when you were successful.
• Tell me about a time when you used your strengths to move through a problem.
• What could you take from that experience in the past?
• What strengths were you using when you were successful?

Really tapping into the person’s strengths can help to make someone feel more resourced, have more confidence about their ability to handle that situation and to move through it. Building an increased sense of self-efficacy, because If you have self-efficacy in one area, then potentially it can come through in other areas.

Also asking questions of your coachee about what resources or support they have available to them can be really helpful;

• Who do you know who’s good at this that could support you?
• Who do you know that’s been successful with this in the past?
• Where could you get more information about this?

Sometimes there is a knowledge gap and you need to work out how to fill it. Not all the resources, are going to be within you, some might be external.

What About The Weaknesses?

Some people can be a bit disheartened when something is perceived as a weakness. Positive psychology research has indicated that while using strengths more and differently is known to boost well-being or sense of well-being, having an awareness of our non-strengths, unstrengths, weaknesses, whatever you want to call them, but finding a different way to use them, a novel way, has also been shown to have a positive impact on well-being.

So if a coachee says, “Oh, I’m not so great at this, but I kind of want to be,” and that’s jarring or disappointing for them, perhaps you can coach them around taking that weakness and using it in a different way, exploring it and finding a way to express it perhaps. This can help them to feel good about themselves and increase their sense of wellbeing.

We don’t need to move all the weaknesses to one side and ignore them because some people will be disappointed in that and they’ll want to work on them. And in some situations you don’t have a choice about whether you work on them or not.

We talk about playing to your strengths and trying to eliminate the weaknesses, but in some roles there are things that you have to do. Perhaps reframing that thing that they’re not so good at into something that feels more positive would be useful.

More information: Working with strengths is very much part of the solution-focused approach to coaching, which we discussed in episode 8 of our podcast. And also comes into positive psychology coaching, which we talked about in episode 25 of our podcast. You will also find blogposts on both of these topic.

Our Doctors’ Transformational Coaching Diploma  explore working with strengths, as well as positive psychology and the solution focussed approach to coaching. Take a look and get in touch if you have any questions about either.