Strength Based Mentoring

With Holiday celebrations on the horizon, today's featured strengths activity centers on gifts. The most memorable gifts one gives and receives can often be an indicator of our natural talents. In the 2017 holiday edition of Genn and Mille, Ally and Tess discussed this question together, sharing about their favorite gifts. You can watch/listen to the episode by   clicking HERE.   Ally's favorite gift of a filing cabinet was a strong indicator of her #1 Input talent. Tess' favorite gift of a desk was an indicator of her #4 theme of Learner. Next time you meet with your mentee, ask them about the best gift they have ever received. Spot their top 3 or 5 in their response. Then, ask them about the best gift (or an act of kindness) they have ever given to another and strengths spot their response. Then, be willing to do the same: offer your favorite gift received and given then strengths spot the results. My Favorite Gifts:  What is the best gift you have ever...

CliftonStrengths talent themes are innately neutral. It is up to us to apply them in productive ways for success. While we all aim to apply our strengths productively for the world around us, I am sure we can think of times where our strengths were actually the things that got in the way of our success. Today's activity takes a look at some of the most common challenges to affirming strengths: I was blind to my talents.  My talents threatened others.  I was in a position or role that did not fit my talents.  I was fearful of being proud or arrogant.  I didn't see how my talents would help me reach my goals.  This activity comes from Gallup's Strengths Quest resources, designed for high schoolers. Gallup recommends thinking of the following questions to facilitate discussion around these challenges: Can you think of challenges or roadblocks we face when attempting to affirm our talents? Do our strengths take care of them?  Do you talents need...

Gallup's meta analysis of CliftonStrengths has proven that our strengths really do not change over time. Our innate talent themes have been a part of how we have been wired from a young age. The featured strengths activity today allows us to first look back to our younger selves to recognize our strengths in the past, and secondly, to look forward to the ways we will use our strengths in the future.  This activity, Past and Future, is from the Clifton StrengthExplorer resource booklet, but can be used with all ages of students and adults alike! The worksheet asks you and your mentee to reflect on the following questions:  Thinking back to your younger self, were there times in your life when you used your talents?  Picturing your future self, do you think there will be times or places in which you might use these talents?  Reflect on these questions with your mentee, and use the worksheet provided to jot down these examples. The power of strengths happens w...

The featured activity this week has become a recent favorite of the TeamMates Strengths Team. I learned of it by attending the Green Hills AEA Conference this past summer. The breakout presenter, Louise El Yafoori, taught on mitigating culturally sensitive trauma. This activity comes from the practice of Dialectical Behavior Therapy. While it can be used in very targeted ways for working with certain groups of kids, we found it a powerful reflective exercise that we all could benefit from. We facilitated this activity at our annual strengths day at the Gallup campus this year and the results of this learning and self reflection were highly impactful. Consider doing this activity with your mentee as a way to deepen the conversation around strengths and talent by incorporating discussions of values, role models, support systems, and more. Activity Instructions:  On a blank piece of paper, sketch out a house. Your house should include: a foundation, walls, windows, a door, roof...

The start of the school year and mentoring is upon us and with it comes the opportunity to invest further in your strengths! Get caught up on all things TeamMates strengths by checking out the Genn and Millie Podcast episodes from this summer. You can listen by access our Genn and Millie Podbean site below, or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher. 

Gallup shared an awesome resource with us many years ago called the "The Bill of Rights for All Students." Their proclamations in this bill of rights is based off of their years of researching the classroom through their Gallup Student Poll. Through this tool, Gallup has studied the engagement, hope, and well-being of students in schools across the country. Through their decades of research, they have found that students need three things: someone who cares about their development to do what they like to do each day to do what they are best at every day But how can we as a mentor meet these needs of students?  First, and most readily, we are that someone who cares about their development. We get to show up each week aiming to bring about our mentee's full potential. We do not show up to fix, to judge, or to question our mentee, their teacher, or their parent. We show up with unconditional love and acceptance, ready to point out their success. I remember t...

An article came out from the strengths blogger Chris Heinz several days ago. He wrote short sentences about how each of the 34 themes might go about choosing names for their babies. Several people tagged me in the post of the blog asking my thoughts. We also had several conversations about it among the TeamMates staff. I found myself reading through the list thinking, wow, this seems fairly accurate. Now I do not have kids or kids on the horizon, but when my friends have children and they share the name prior to birth, I find myself wondering, why would someone name a baby before they meet them? For me, I found myself thinking I would not want to put a child into a predetermined box prior to getting to know them a bit. I laughed when I read the description about Adaptability naming babies. Chris wrote about Adaptability saying, " You wait until the baby is born to “try on names”. It is funny that even in this quirky blog post, I was reminded that the different ways we go about t...

Conversations have the power to bring our strengths to the next level. This week's strengths activity has curated conversation starters to help you and your mentee recognize talent and therefore develop your strengths. When answering these questions together, be sure to have your top 5 and top 3 strengths at the forefront. As you answer the starter questions, spot each other's strengths in the responses. At the end of the discussion, list 1-2 actions you could each take to develop your strengths further and keep each other accountable by checking in on these actions next time you meet.

Conversations are a great way to recognize, own, and develop our strengths. But sometimes, I find my mentee and I have the best dialogues when we are doing something kinetic. This week's featured strengths activity is hands on!  In the picture above, you see a great example of this week's activity, a strengths collage! Our own words and descriptions of our strengths are powerful, just like strengths conversations, but sometimes, when we look to other's words, we can help expand our understanding of our talent. In addition, sometimes our words just don't "cut it", and pictures or images might evoke a more accurate feeling regarding your talents. Through this activity, you and your mentee will look to magazines, newspapers, and advertisements in order expand your strengths language as well as practice strengths spotting.  What you will need:  A piece of card stock or journal page Various magazines, newspapers, or advertisements.  Glue Scissors  ...

I was reminded recently of a common phrase, "back to basics." This week, I chose to highlight the activity Gallup teaches us to do first after we have discovered our top 5 strengths. It is an activity I have gone back to time and time again because sometimes going back to basics is the best thing we can do in our own development.  The activity I will challenge you to do is a reflection on your signature theme report. Log back into www.strengthsquest.com and scroll down to find your report. See here:  Download this report and print it. Yours will look a bit like this, with your name and top 5 listed:  This report gives the longer definition for each of your top 5 strengths. Your mentee, if they are in high school will be able to generate the same report as you have by logging into their own strengthsquest page. If your mentee is in elementary or middle, you will be able to access the longer report for strengths explorer by going to the strengths explorer...

It is National Mentoring Month, and part of that celebration is taking time to deliberately recognize and express gratitude for our mentors. Recognition is an important part of strengths development. It could be easy to take the assessment, read the results, and then not do anything with it. This pattern happens all too often in the strengths world. Gallup compels us to take our results further by instructing us to first share our results with someone close to us. It is in this process, where others recognize the strengths in us, that we begin to see a clearer picture of our talents. When we take time to call out the strengths in other people, we are adding value to their lives and assisting them in their ownership of strengths.  In this video, we see people recognizing the mentors and influencers in their lives. We challenge those that go through new mentor training to do this. Take time with your mentee to share about a person that has influenced each of you. Utilize stren...

It's the new year, which for many, means resolutions and goals to improve your life. Setting goals for personal improvement is a good idea, but in reality, many people fall short of achieving them. A frequently-cited Harvard Business School study found that of their students, only 16% had set goals for their time in graduate school. Of that 16%, only 3% of those goal-setters actually wrote down their goals and had concrete plans. When the study followed up with these students 10 years later, they found that the 3% of the class with written goals with a plan were much more successful, making 10 times as much as the other 97% of the class. We know from Gallup's research that people who have a focus on strengths are 6x more likely to be engaged (in their work, school, life, etc) and report a quality of life that is 3x higher than those who are not focused on strengths. A focus on strengths also leads to greater measurements success as well as a higher sense of hope. So, let...