Your Coaching Goal: Better Time Management
To perform at your best, you need a coach. You have everything inside you to succeed, but strengths only develop in relationship with other people. Understanding your talents is a start, but the real magic happens when you intentionally apply them every day. A Gallup Certified Strengths coach has the knowledge and skills to help you turn talent into strength and strength into desired outcomes.
Have you identified your strengths but find it difficult to use them effectively? You're not alone. Many people, even leaders, struggle to set clear, actionable goals and direct their strengths toward them.
In this post, I aim to show how better time management can be a tangible coaching goal using a strengths-based approach. If you struggle to know what to prioritize and how to organize your day for maximum productivity, this goal might resonate with you.
How Strengths Affect Time Management
There’s an activity I do with teams to help them understand strengths and weaknesses. I ask them to write a phrase three times with their dominant hand and three times with their non-dominant hand, then compare the two on factors such as time, quality, and perceived exertion.
As you might predict, using the non-dominant hand is always slower, sloppier, and harder than using the dominant one. This exercise demonstrates the difference between using strengths versus weaknesses to accomplish the same task and highlights another important point: by leveraging your strengths, you can shape time, bending it to your advantage to achieve greater efficiency and impact.
We all have the same 24 hours in a day, but how and when you tackle tasks can greatly influence the quality, pace, and emotional impact of your day. This can mean the difference between a day that feels slow and exhausting with little to show for it, and a day that’s dynamic, energizing, and highly productive.
Einstein understood this with his theory of relativity. Time management isn’t just about allocating time for tasks; it’s about understanding how to do those tasks and in what order—playing to our strengths as often as we can—so that tasks are energizing, completed more quickly, and with better quality.
For instance, if “Communication” is a lesser talent for you and you need to give a big presentation at 11 am, which is likely to be draining, you might leverage your “Relator” talent to chat with a friend at 10 am to get some energy. Practically speaking, this may not seem like a good use of time to others, but for you, it is a very intentional and beneficial use of it.
Alternatively, if you have “Adaptability” or “Strategic” in your top 10, you probably don’t need to do a lot of prep or planning ahead of time. You are likely to be at your best and feel most energized when you’re responding to things as they occur on the fly.
What This Means for Time Management
I’ve read many productivity books, tried numerous planner systems, and tested various hacks, but nothing moved the needle on my productivity like knowing my strengths and leveraging them every day.
Think about a recent day that just flew by. You felt energized, in flow, effective, and in a great mental and emotional state. What were you doing? How were you doing it? What strengths were you using?
These types of questions can reveal insights into how to manage your time better, all based on your own successes.
Coaching Strategy & Tools
Working with a Gallup Certified Strengths Coach to understand your strength and how to leverage them intentionally to help you get more done in less time. Here's what it might look like if we tackled that 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 you engage your strengths for maximum vitality, quality, and productivity.
Assess Which Strengths Help and Hinder: Together, we’ll look through your strengths sequence to understand which strengths are helping or hindering your productivity. Whether you have “Achiever” and are naturally driven to accomplish tasks and set daily goals but struggle to prioritize, or high “Adaptability” and are great at taking each day as it comes but struggle with long-term planning, we can start to uncover how your strengths are working for and against you.
Develop a Strengths-Based Time Management Plan: Then, we’ll create a strategy that leverages your strengths more intentionally. For example, if you have high “Adaptability,” incorporate flexibility into your schedule to accommodate changes, and perhaps partner with others who are great at future planning. Or, if you have high “Achiever,” it might be as simple as adding “prioritize the top 1-3 tasks for the day” as the first action item on your list.
By engaging in this coaching process, you'll gain the tools to effectively use your strengths and manage your time better. This proactive approach ensures that your days have a higher chance of being productive and feeling easier and more energizing.
Wrap Up
Are you ready to harness your strengths to better manage your or your team’s time? Sign up for a free 30-minute discovery call with me to explore how strengths coaching can make a big difference.
