There’s no one-size-fits-all recipe for helping your clients transform their lives.
As a coach, your job is to help your clients identify their unique strengths and educate them on how they can leverage these traits to achieve their goals.
By adopting a strengths-based coaching approach instead of focusing on what they are lacking, you can accelerate their growth.
Let’s explore this game-changing approach to coaching, built on what your client is best at.
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 this doesn’t always work.
It makes us concentrate our efforts on becoming better at something we’re naturally not good at, while we could leverage our best skills and traits more effortlessly.
As a coach, you help empower your clients and give them confidence. A great way to do this is by making them aware of what they are good at and what they are doing right.
When they are out in the real world, trying to follow the plan they committed to during the coaching sessions, they will find challenges along the way. If things go wrong, you will want them to fall back on their strengths to resolve their issues instead of being set back by their weaknesses and losing control of the situation.
Remind your client of their strengths so they can leverage them to overcome any challenge they might encounter.
An example of strengths-based coaching
How would a strengths-based coaching model unfold in real life? Let’s take a closer look:
Let’s say you have a client who is trying to lose 20 pounds and become a fitter, healthier, and more confident version of themselves. As part of their action plan, they must change their nutrition and eat a more balanced diet while exercising 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 they pick usually don’t have the healthiest options.
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.
With strengths-based coaching techniques and some positive reinforcement, you can bring awareness to their strengths so they can use them to their advantage.
The next time a friend or family member invites them to eat out, they can pick the place themselves to ensure it has healthy options. They can also ask the waiters to make some changes in the way their food is prepared.
This can ultimately help them approach life from a position of strength rather than weakness and set them up for success.
Benefits of strengths-based coaching
Some of the immediate and long-term benefits you can gain from strength-based coaching are that it:
- Amplifies self-awareness and personal growth.
- Fosters a positive mindset and motivation.
- Capitalizes on individual strengths for enhanced performance.
- Cultivates resilience and adaptability in challenging situations.
- Promotes collaboration and team cohesion.
- Facilitates goal achievement by leveraging innate talents.
- Encourages confidence and self-efficacy.
- Enhances overall well-being and satisfaction.
Learn more about strengths-based coaching in this 3-minute video:
Start Coaching Your Clients to Play to Their Strengths
The first step to applying strength-based coaching is to know what positive traits your client possesses. You can find this out from strengths assessments or personality tests that offer an insight into the strength profile of your client.
If you want to go deeper, you can also take strength-based coaching training to immerse yourself in this approach.
This way, you can create a personalized plan for your clients that leverages what they’re good at to improve every area of their lives.
And if you want to accelerate your coaching results even further, learn the proven framework to create massive breakthroughs for your clients in the Become a Mindvalley Certified Life Coach masterclass. It’s free!
