When most people think of strength, their mind goes to the physical domain of strength. The kind of Strengths Coaching delivered at Jeff Snyder Coaching has to do with the mind and behavior.
I didn’t do the initial research on strengths psychology. However, when the results of this research were presented to me and applied directly to me, what I learned quickly made sense and changed my life.
All of a sudden, I began to understand why I saw the world in certain ways, why I did what I did and why my actions and behaviors came across to others the way they did. It wasn’t just a light bulb moment for me. It was more like someone had turned on all the lights in a stadium and I was standing at the center on the 50 yard line.
Don Clifton (who is now deceased) and his team determined after studying millions of successful people that each one of us is built with a group of themes. To be specific, in the Clifton StrengthsFinder, available through the Gallup Strengths Center, you can take an assessment and purchase a report that shows you all 34 of your themes in your unique order.
By unique I mean that your list of 34 themes will show up in a different order than my list of 34 themes. Your list of 34 themes will show up in a different order than the list that describes your boss and your co-workers.
The themes near the top of your list are the ones that are generally considered to be your Strengths. When you first read about your Strengths, you may or may not know that you have the Strengths you have. This is what the coaching process is all about.
They’re not Strengths just because they show up at the top of your list. A Strength as defined by the StrengthsFinder as a consistent, near perfect performance in an activity you love doing. If you're not consistently delivering a near perfect performance, it is because you didn't know you had a particular theme near the top of your list.
Research shows that successful people in all walks of life understand their Strengths. I’ll go one step further to suggest that successful people not only know their Strengths, they take action to understand their Strengths so they know how to leverage the unique Strengths they have. It's now just about knowing, it's about leveraging.
This is the journey I walk my coaching clients through when I refer to Strengths Coaching. I don’t stop there. As I was learning about Strengths and the domain of Strengths Psychology, it seemed to me that I couldn’t simply ignore my weaknesses and pretend that they didn’t exist.
We all have weaknesses. My weaknesses have almost always been the root cause for the relational trouble I’ve gotten myself into throughout life. To address the issue of weaknesses, I went on a journey to find a solution that would allow me to help my coaching clients to clearly identify their weaknesses and then to build a strategy around their weaknesses so they don’t get in the way of their Strengths.
The topic I discovered that identifies weaknesses is Emotional Intelligence. A few years ago, I went through training and certification to become a Certified Emotional Intelligence Coach.
Now my clients don’t just find out what they have potential to be great at when they learn to leverage their Strengths. They also discover what characteristics, traits and behaviors exist within them that might be holding them back.
Here are a couple of the reported results of my combined Strengths Coaching and Emotional Intelligence Coaching.
When you get tired of settling for what you "Can" do and you want to find out what you really "Should" do based on how you are uniquely built, call me. Jeff Snyder, 719.686.8810
