Have you ever wondered the kind of results we could create as coaches if we used a strengths-based coaching approach instead of trying to improve a client’s weaknesses?
Opposed to common belief, there’s no one-size-fits-all recipe to help your clients transform their lives.
As a coach, your job is to help your clients identify their strengths and educate them on how they can leverage these strengths to achieve their goals and dreams.
This is the essence of a game-changing approach to coaching: strengths-based coaching.
What is strengths-based coaching?
As the name suggests, this coaching approach is about bringing awareness to a client’s strengths instead of focusing on their weaknesses.
As human beings, we tend to focus on what is wrong, what is not enough, and what we are not good at. We think the best way to unlock our potential is to improve our weaknesses.
But in reality, this doesn’t make any sense because it makes us triple our efforts to be better at something we’re naturally not good at, while we could improve what we are really good at and leverage that over our weaknesses—effortlessly.
As coaches, it’s our job to empower our clients and give them confidence. And a great way to do this is by making our clients aware of what they are really good at and what they are doing right.
Because when they are out in the real world, trying to follow the plan they committed to during the coaching sessions, they will find challenges on their way, and if things go wrong, you will want them to fall back on their strengths to resolve that roadblock instead of falling back to their weaknesses and losing control of the situation.
Remind your client of their strengths so they can leverage them and use them to help them overcome any challenge they might encounter.
Focus on their power.
This will set them up for success every single time.
Strengths-based coaching example
Let’s see how a strengths-based coaching approach would unfold in real life.
Let’s say you have a client who is trying to lose 20 pounds and become a fitter, healthier, more confident version of themselves. As part of their action plan, they must change their nutrition and eat a more balanced diet while doing exercise every other day.
Now, in your last coaching session, your client revealed to you that they have a weakness for eating out with friends and family, and the places that are usually picked don’t have the healthiest options.
But as their coach, you’ve also identified that your client is great at adapting and has a very supportive community that is rooting for them to achieve their health goals.
A strengths-based coaching approach would be for you to coach them into bringing awareness to their strengths and using them as leverage.
If a friend or family member invites them to eat out and they know they can’t say ‘no’ to that, what they can do is pick the place themselves to ensure it is somewhere that has some healthy options they can eat. Or adapt to the current menu a place offers, and pick and choose the best options even if they aren’t the same exact meals from the meal plan.
There are many different scenarios of what could happen once they learn how to fall back to their strength instead of falling into their weakness.
Remember that the ultimate goal is for people to approach life from a position of strength, rather than one of weakness, so that they are ultimately set up for success.
