Strengths Explorer: Caring

In your heart, helping other people is very important. You want to make the world better by helping people in small ways or big ways.

Clifton Strengths Explorer

Youth with Caring in their Top 3 SE themes, possess a heart for others. They love to give of their time to help others. The smallest act of kindness, they believe, can make a world of difference. Youth with this theme go above and beyond, not because of obligation or because of finishing a task, but because they know that in doing so, they are helping another person. These youths have big hearts; they notice when someone is in a bad mood or when someone is left out of the group. They make it their mission to encourage others around them.

One wonderful depiction of Caring is from a mentee in the Omaha metro area. At one Academy Session, the mentor brought a picture frame to Ally and showed her two wonderful drawings her mentee had made. The drawings were of the mentor and mentee together, and in one, a heart was drawn around the pair. The mentor shared with Ally that her mentee had drawn these to show her love and appreciation for her as a mentor. For mentees with Caring, nothing is too small to show encouragement and appreciation. Like this mentee, a simple drawing served the purpose of sharing the impact this mentor has had on her life.

32.7% of our mentees who have taken Strengths Explorer have Caring in their Top 5. Our mentees naturally want to help others. Encourage and build up your mentee’s Caring theme by implementing a helpful nature into your mentoring time. Find one thing to do each time you are together to help someone else out. Model this behavior for your mentee. Pick up trash if you see if on the floor. Push in your chair. Say thank you. Consider doing a random acts of kindness challenge, like this one, where you track random acts of serving others. Report back to each other on how these tasks went. Ask your mentee to pick someone they might normally not get along with, and ask them to think of one way they can serve that person. By reframing interactions as opportunities to help others, your mentee will be developing their Caring talent and will walk away with a more positive and hopeful outlook on the world around them.

Tess

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