Today I am speaking with Anne Koopmann about understanding your unique strengths.  Anne is a Leadership Coach, Lecturer and Speaker that works with individuals and organisations to empower courageous leaders to inspire others and create impact. Through her work, Anne equips individuals with the key skills needed to become Courageous Leaders that embrace vulnerability, appreciate their unique strengths, celebrate diversity and take action outside their comfort zone.

The Power of Strengths-Development

I am so passionate about strengths-development. It is my belief and vision that everyone should do their CliftonStrengths assessment once in their life because I know that it has the potential to change your life.

What is Strengths-Development?

A strengths-based approach focuses on what is right with people and not what is wrong. It focuses on each person's strengths and manages strategies around their weaknesses.

Do you ever wonder why some things come naturally to you?

Why you are drawn to certain things that energize you and make you forget time? And other tasks drag on forever, and you keep procrastinating and procrastinating …

The answer lies in your strengths. Your strengths are your natural talents that are already there within you. Your natural talents define who you are, how you perceive the world and how you best operate.

Your talents are your potential.

Benefits of Strengths-Development

The most significant benefit of strengths development is to learn to accept yourself for who you are; To appreciate your uniqueness, quirks and all.

We are often our own worst critics. We compare ourselves to colleagues, friends or even “strangers” on social media and start to criticize what we do, what we look like or what we say.

If we look at ourselves through the lens of strengths, we finally learn to appreciate all our quirks and all of our unique traits and competencies.

You will worry less about your “weaknesses” and the judgment or opinions of others.

Research by Gallup (www.gallupstrengthscenter.com) shows that our greatest room for overall improvement does not lie in our weaknesses, but where we are the strongest.

We feel more confident when we focus on our strengths. If we get to use our strengths every day in our life, we can achieve high performance and a lower level of stress. We feel more aligned with ourselves.

Also, teams that spend some time on understanding and developing each other's strength can actually boost their performance and engagement significantly.

If we only focus on our weaknesses and spend all of our time to improve in those areas, everyone will end up being average at everything. This would create a truly boring world.

Instead, we have to manage our weaknesses just enough so they don't hold us back – but truly nurture our talents to transform them into our own unique superpowers.

Just like an instrument, we have to learn to play our strengths, refine it, learn to use it intentionally every day and aim it towards our goals and challenges.

How can you develop your Strengths?

1. The Gallup Strengths-Development Framework: Name it, Claim it, Aim it

To get know your strengths, I recommend to do the CliftonStrengths Assessment. Otherwise you can start by exploring these self-awareness questions:

• What tasks or activities do you pick up quicker than anyone else?
• What do others come to you for help?
• What activities make you lose track of time?

To name it, really start to understand the words that resonate most about the strengths.

To claim it, you can ask these two questions:

When has this strength helped me be successful in the past?

How does this strength help me be successful in my role?

To aim it, ask yourself, in what two ways could I start using this strength more intentionally tomorrow?

The key to success is to build on your talents and learn to apply them in your everyday life.

Therefore, it is essential that you genuinely engage with your strengths and spend time to reflect. A CliftonStrengths Assessment or working with a strengths coach will help you to truly understand, nurture and fall in love with your strengths.

 2. Do your Gallup CliftonStrengths Assessment 

You can engage a strengths coach or purchase the assessment yourself on www.gallup.com.

The report will give you a great understanding of your strengths, some ideas for development actions and potential blind spots to look out for.

Be prepared to be amazed and fall in love with who you are. You will see that things you have taken for granted, actually are our strengths.

And btw, chances that someone else has the same top 5 combinations as you are 1 in 33mio. That's how unique you are!

 3. Unleash your full potential by engaging a Strengths Coach

If you want to unleash your full potential truly, it can be beneficial to work with a strengths coach.

A strengths coach can help you to see past the self-doubt and focus on what is right about you, your unique sets of talents that are ready to be unlocked.

A strengths coach challenges the traditional way of self-development – the belief that “fixing” our weaknesses leads to success.

Instead, a strengths coach will help you to focus on your natural talents as a pathway to your goals.

In more detail, a strengths coach can help you to:

• Understand your talents and how they show up for you in your everyday life at home and work. The way one strength show up for you might be different to how they show up for someone else.
• Draw out the unique combination and connections between your strengths profile. There is so much gold in there that you might miss otherwise.
• Explore and define practical strategies on how to use your strengths to reach your goals.
• Build your confidence, self-belief and resilience.
• Help you to overcome obstacles, blind spots and barriers to ensure you are using your strengths intentionally.
• Support you to use strengths to enrich your relationships.
• Explain your unique strengths within the context of a team/ others.
• Provides you as a manager with strengths-based strategies to manage your team and overcome specific team-related issues.
• Help teams to develop and utilize their unique, combined talent profile for greater team engagement and productivity.

About Anne

Anne is a Leadership Coach, Lecturer and Speaker that works with individuals and organisations to empower courageous leaders to inspire others and create impact. Through her work, Anne equips individuals with the key skills needed to become Courageous Leaders that embrace vulnerability, appreciate their unique strengths, celebrate diversity and take action outside their comfort zone.

As a certified CliftonStrengths, Emotional intelligence and NLP Coach, Anne offers a variety of programs including 1:1 Coaching, Group and Team Programs, Workshops and Masterclasses all around building your authentic leadership brand, setting up your leadership tool box and leading with strengths, courage and emotional intelligence. Her programs are for Leaders who want to make a difference and are ready to step into their full potential.

Connect with Anne

• Website
• Instagram
• Strengths Group Program
• Strengths 1:1 Coaching

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