Strength Based Mentoring

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...