Donald Clifton’s original question was, “How can teams work better together?” The answer: “By getting to know me and others better.”
This works for individuals as well: By getting to know yourself better, you show up as a better version of yourself. And that in every situation, be it family, marriage, job, club, or church.
How does it work?
CliftonStrengths shows us how to do the things we do. This sounds banal at first, but it is not at all. It is about talents and patterns of behavior, thoughts, and emotions, but not motivations. I.e., it is about deeply rooted automatic programs that run within us.
Would you like an example from couple coaching?
In the descriptions of 4 of my strongest talents, it says, “When something is thought through, it’s as good as done.” My wife, on the other hand, has a strength called achiever. It says, “Something ain’t done until it’s done.” (Slang by me.)
As long as we didn’t have this information, we didn’t understand each other. My wife didn’t know for the life of her why I couldn’t get anything done, while I didn’t understand her reaction.
Quite an obvious recipe for conflict unless you know about it. Today, I can hand over the concepts to my wife for implementation. For example, we led a Sunday school together in a church. I planned the topics and broke them down into individual lessons, created a proposal for the staff schedule and a trial lesson. My wife implemented the whole thing. And I drew on her energy and took over individual Sundays with the children.
We both implemented the lesson according to our talents: I taught more, she did more handicrafts. She played the guitar in worship, I played the CD player.
But back to you.
What talents lay dormant in you? How can you awaken and strengthen them? Which strengths are already so pronounced that they seem normal to you? Every so often, we don’t even know how good we are at certain things.
And how can you deal with areas in which you fail repeatedly?
What coaching question is burning within you?
In addition, we will work out your worldview together. People evolve over their lifetime and continually adapt their worldviews to better deal with life’s circumstances. Thus, each person has an interesting mix of imprints and views we want to get to the bottom of.