Leveraging strengths for performance & fulfilment

 

Strengths are things which bring you energy, which come naturally to you and you use frequently, and which you have skill at.

Thinking of this, what’s one thing that comes to mind for you?

Working with strengths taps into helps you to create greater resilience in your life, as well as helping you to level up your performance while also working more effectively in your teams. Consciously leaning into these and energy, joy, connectivity and engagement - which are all important parts of performance and strongly linked to well-being.

For a simple, quick and free diagnostic tool to discover some of your top strengths, explore the VIA Strengths Survey here: https://www.viacharacter.org/

Identifying strengths can help you identify space for goal-setting through helping you to better understand where in work or life you’ve been able to gain traction, and what areas you might be looking to build greater capability in your thinking and behaviours.

Strengths can also help to give you insight into patterns - are you being too task or people focussed, and what are the impacts on your effectiveness or performance of this? What does that mean you’d like to modify? Looking at strengths can also help you to identify blind spots that you might not even think to bring into your goals or patterns of thinking to identify what the impacts of these are on performance.

Once you begin to identify some of your strengths, it’s tempting to zoom to the bottom of the list to work out what your ‘weaknesses’ might be - but I urge you to resist. While it can be an automatic response to try to build the areas which we see as opportunities for development, this isn’t the point of strengths work!

Instead, honing in the top 3-5 strengths can provide an achievable focus to begin to tap into ways that you can make the best use of who you are and what sparks your performance. It can be useful to take a moment to reflect upon where these strengths show up for you in your life, how you use them, and where there might be other opportunities to use them. For example, if creativity is one of your top strengths, you might find that as a technical analyst you use creativity in the way you design workflows, but that you could also use your creative inclinations to help refresh the way that you run meetings to prompt people to be more engaged and think in different ways. Or, if hope is a strength that you use prolifically with how you parent your children, you might also realise that you could bring this positivity and perspective to your project management to shift the way you lead to inspire and motivate people.

The dark side of strengths (and all diagnostic tools have dark sides) is that if we focus too strongly on them, we can be remiss in building other skills and exploring opportunities for development, limiting our growth in the medium to longer term. It’s important to be aware of what we’re overplaying and what the cost to our performance, productivity and personal well-being of this. Given that many of us are well-equipped with a critical (and self-critical) mindset, however, training yourself to appreciate your strengths is often harder to do than noticing where you might be over-using strengths or picking areas of development.

The benefits of working to identify and use our strengths more is that it can improve not only our performance, but also how fulfilled we are in the work we do and the way we live our life.

If you’re interested in working with your strenghts, or levelling up how you use your strengths to identify and achieve your strengths, reach out to us for a coaching session today!

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