Let Your Strengths Be Your North Star

What charges your batteries?

That is a question nobody can answer for you.

The answer is often found in your strengths. You just have to learn to get out of their way.

Strengths based coaching.

Focusing on strengths is a critical factor in change methodology. When we primarily focus on what isn’t working we tend to shut down. Our processing ceases to find new possible solutions for us. Focusing on what is working causes our brain’s power center, our left frontal cortex, to take over. From this place, we begin to innovate our way through life rather than exist in a state of frozen inaction.

Broaden your view of what’s possible.

Human beings are built for resilience. We’re meant to thrive. Flourishing depends on a few principles which are:

1. One of the best strategies for helping a person succeed is to focus on where they’re already succeeding. Momentum fuels intention. 
2. What we focus on expands, and we can choose our focus.
3. Challenges aren’t always “problems”. Resilience makes us stronger.
4. Our inner strengths act as healing agents for us. In our greatest challenges live our greatest resources.

Focus on your strengths. 

Used frequently, the following four-step practice will become your go-to resource for navigating your way through any issue, large or small. Working through the four steps will reset your problem-solving muscles and act as a springboard for getting yourself out of a rut.

1. Reflect on your strengths: Connect with your gifts, (even if you think they’re unrelated to your current frustration) abilities and strengths. Do a full survey of what you’re good at. This is working to change the direction of your gears, fostering a new way of thinking.
2. Articulate the possibilities: State the best version of your potential (even if you’re feeling so low you have to pretend your way through this at the beginning). State your dreams for your future. And this can be partially fantasy. The goal is to get your dreams moving again. Take the word “realistic” and throw it out the window. There is no benefit to staying stuck in a cycle of what is currently “real” for you. The point is to launch into the possibility of something entirely new.
3. Direct attention & action: Start focusing on what needs to happen right now to get one step closer to your dreams. No excuses. Excuses are nothing more than a self-sabotaging strategy initiated by that part of you afraid to grow. Begin today with one or two action steps that will bring you a blip closer to feeling fulfilled, enough to power you into a place of possibility.
4. Feel your future: Sense in your body what it would feel like to have already accomplished your dreams. Imagine, what would it feel like to already be living the gifts of your self actualization as though you have already arrived there? Spend ten to twenty minutes every day visualizing this version of you, while connecting to how it feels in your body.

This strengths based focus exercise builds the resources necessary to refuel your creative resources. High performance can’t happen if we allow our energetic tanks to run dry. (Please also know that only you can define for yourself what high performance looks and feels like. Any external measure of this is potentially harmful.)

There is nothing that empties a tank faster than chronic feelings of powerlessness, which everyone feels at times. Shifting your focus to where you are feeling able, and articulating the potential of that, will bring you the energy to move forward.

One final idea. 

Think of a memory where your strengths really shone. A time when you were at your best. Verbalize the memory out loud to yourself, in ten seconds or less. (The timing is important.) 

Now, describe the qualities of that memory you felt at the time with three words.

Three words which best embody how you felt. (I recommend you use an emotions word list for this.) 

Now, use these words as your guide.

Seek experiences that evoke these same feelings and qualities. Think of them as your strengths North Star. They’ll point the way to your most fulfilled growth. 

Much Love, 

Kristy