The other day, I read one of the worst articles I’ve ever seen delivered through HBR.org.
“Strengths Based Coaching Can Weaken You”
If you want to read the article, clicking the article title above will take you to the article.
When others encouraged me to offer coaching services, I did what I had to do in order to train to deliver coaching and to become certified in several ways as a coach.
What I also did was to think for myself. When I found the Clifton StrengthsFinder assessment and learned about it, there was no doubt in my mind whatsoever that this tool belonged in my coaching practice. Rather than telling you all about my opinion, here are results from some of my coaching clients. If there aren't results to be achieved, I'm not interested.
All of the results mentioned above were achieved either through Strengths Coaching or a combination of Strengths Coaching and Emotional Intelligence Coaching.
After going through Strengths Coaching myself and after significant study in the realm of Strengths Coaching (and I'm not finished yet!), it seemed to me that while focusing on one’s natural strengths makes a lot of sense, it would be a mistake to ignore weaknesses thinking that they might just go away.
Weaknesses are those behaviors that are generally responsible for getting people in trouble personally and/or professionally.
For this reason, I kept searching for solutions. The solution that made complete sense to me when I found it was the study of Emotional Intelligence. I trained and became certified in Emotional Intelligence with Multi-Health Systems and I now use their extremely powerful EQi-2.0 assessment as part of my coaching practice. Again, if there aren't results, I'm not interested.
I believe that focusing on one’s strengths makes a lot of sense. Find out what you were built to be great at and do what it takes to reach greatness. At the same time, we all have weak spots. By learning about one’s Emotional Intelligence, a person can learn to build a strategy to manage their weaknesses so their weaknesses don’t get in the way of their strengths. Beyond just managing weaknesses, the skills that make up Emotional Intelligence can be adjusted through coaching.
This is what is measured by the EQi-2.0 Emotional Intelligence assessment I leverage with my coaching clients.
Now you know my point of view. What are most important are the results my clients are achieving through Emotional Intelligence Coaching.
Good luck in convincing my career coaching clients that the results they have reported are not real. I love the work I'm privileged to do with my coaching clients and my mission for 2016 is to do this work with more people around the globe.
