Leveraging Your Strengths

Leverage your strengths to discover your full potential.
Photo by LOGAN WEAVER | @LGNWVR on Unsplash
Leverage your strengths to discover your full potential. When I was new to teaching, I used to think of strengths and weaknesses as two different things on opposite sides and disconnected from one another. Your strengths were in one silo and your weaknesses in another. As I gained more experience in life and as a teacher, I realized that our strengths can be used to leverage our areas of growth. Strengths and areas of growth are connected. This helped me immensely as a teacher of young children. Working with a student’s strengths builds confidence, a clear understanding of how they learn best, and a way to influence their areas of growth.
As a student this summer these ideas were reinforced when I completed my training as a Clifton Strengths Finder Coach. Before the course, I took the Clifton Strengths Assessment and learned about my top 10 strengths in depth. Throughout the course, we dug deep into our strengths, how they show up for us, and how we can use them to leverage some of our areas for growth. This last part was particularly interesting to me. Using your strengths to leverage other skills and areas that seemed inaccessible to me for so long was an amazing opportunity. I was no longer siloed into certain categories and now I could use these areas to access areas that seemed impossible to develop. For example, I discovered how I could use my ‘developer’ strength to build self-assurance (a strength that was less developed on my assessment).
As a coach, I have found working from a place of strength to be a powerful tool. Giving clients time to identify and reflect on their strengths, asking open-ended questions about how their strengths show up in their work, and creating goals around leveraging their strengths to gain more skills in other areas that before felt inaccessible are just some ways to build on strengths.
Understanding, building, and reflecting on strengths is an effective method for an educator, a learner, and a coach. This is a clear path to growth and discovering your and your client’s full potential.