Your Coaching Goal: Build Resilience
Everyone can benefit from working with a coach, but not everyone knows how to make the most of one. While knowing your strengths is interesting, it becomes transformative when you apply them to real-life challenges and goals. Without a clear objective, discussions about strengths can remain abstract and lead to coaching sessions that lack impact.
Have you identified your strengths but find it difficult to use them effectively? You're not alone. Many people, including some executives, struggle to set clear, actionable goals and define the outcomes they want to achieve.
In this post, I aim to demonstrate how building resilience can be a tangible coaching goal using a strengths-based approach. If work stress has become a chronic issue for you, to the point where even your go-to self-care practices aren't helping, then this goal might resonate with you.
Why Resilience Matters
It's normal to experience stress; in fact, some stress can be beneficial, even if it occurs daily. However, stress turns into burnout when stress-related feelings, thoughts, and behaviors don't subside after a day ends or even after standard self-care practices.
Gallup has identified five key factors that highly correlate with employee burnout:
Unfair treatment at work
Unmanageable workload
Lack of support
Unclear communication
Unreasonable time pressure
If you're leading a team, this information should hopefully motivate you to examine your practices and address these root causes to ensure that your team has the best chance of thriving. It’s also important to consider how you might be contributing to these issues, as sometimes these root causes can be a result of a leader who is experiencing burnout themselves. If you're a team member, this information should hopefully empower you to speak with your leaders, advocate for your needs, and push for necessary changes in your workplace.
Building Resilience
Burnout gradually undermines performance and satisfaction, which can also deteriorate health, happiness, and engagement over time. Addressing burnout means facing it head-on—recognizing the root causes in your workplace, identifying early signs within yourself, understanding which of your talents might be overextended, and addressing your needs to help manage or prevent burnout.
Coaching Strategy & Tools
Working with a Gallup Certified Strengths Coach to understand and use your strengths can effectively prevent burnout and build resilience in yourself and others. Here's what it might look like if we were to use the 6-sessions of the Shine Your Brightest Coaching Package to tackle this goal together:
Take the CliftonStrengths Assessment: We would start by identifying your dominant and lesser strengths with the CliftonStrengths assessment. This step is essential as it sets the foundation for our work together, helping to engage your strengths effectively to prevent burnout.
Identify Your 'Tells': Together, we'll pinpoint the early signs of stress, referred to as your 'tells.' Understanding these signs is crucial for managing stress before it turns into burnout. For instance, if 'Activator' is a dominant strength, signs such as increased impatience and creating unreasonable time pressure for others might be tells. If 'Achiever' is in your top 10, signs might include diminished satisfaction from completing tasks or presenting others with an unmanageable workload.
Understand and Adjust for Blind Spots or Overextended Talents: We will explore how sometimes your strongest talents can inadvertently lead to burnout if they are overextended. Identifying any blind spots and learning to balance your talents will help us determine whether burnout is more influenced by external factors or by your own actions.
Develop Strategies to Nourish Your Talents: Based on our discussions and the insights from the assessment, we will create personalized strategies to nourish and balance your strengths. Each strength has unique needs; for example, if you have the 'Learner' talent high, you likely need continual exposure to new knowledge, while those with 'Relator' in their top 10 need deep, personal interactions frequenty.
By engaging in this coaching process, you'll gain the tools to effectively use your strengths and recognize early signs of burnout. This proactive approach ensures that your talents are nurtured in a way that promotes overall well-being and success, while also helping to minimize and manage burnout for you and those you lead.
Wrap Up
Are you ready to harness your strengths to build resilience and combat burnout for yourself or your team? Sign up for a free 30-minute discovery call with me to explore how strengths coaching can make a big difference.
