Towards A StrengthsBased Education System

thank you very much

you’ve uh already been told my name it’s

amandy

you’ve already been told what i do i’m a

strengths coach and a learning and

development consultant

basically what i do is

i help individuals and organizations

become more successful

but that’s what i do today when i was in

school

i had a hard time being successful i was

called

what what is known as a struggling

student a poor student

and i would usually stand fourth in

class

in a class strength of four

that’s the four of us that’s me

head full of hair

that’s me now with all the wisdom and

experience that i’ve accumulated in my

head having pushed the hair out

but school wasn’t all bad i did end up

getting elected school captain by my

fellow students which just goes to show

that you can succeed in politics

even if you’re not good at anything else

when i was in school what i found really

really meaningful and joyful

was people i loved the opportunity to be

among people

to interact with them talk to them

listen to them

but the school system does not recognize

people talent

it is meant to measure success in math

and science

so while i was interested in people

what i was being asked to do was sit

down and focus

on the subjects that were being taught

in class

naturally i struggled i was labeled

inattentive distracted disruptive

lazy and well academically school wasn’t

all that great my self-esteem did take a

little beating

but i was saved by the fact that there

was no parental pressure

to do well at academics my mom

she took note of my strengths and my

talents and

pointed them out to me repeatedly it

helped that i did well in debating

elocution

general knowledge quizzes that the

school held some of this helped shore up

my self-esteem

uh the school also took part in a

nationwide

iq test in which i did reasonably well

quite well as a matter of fact

so it wasn’t that i hadn’t got the

brains it was just that the areas in

which i had talent

were not recognized by the school system

all of this changed once i started my

career

after i’d been working for a few years i

realized that there were roles

which required me to interact with

people

to listen to them to help them

the role of a team manager this is a

role

that i did well in it’s a role that i

enjoyed

it got to the point where people would

walk up to me from other teams

and they would say hey we’ve heard about

your team we want to be on your team

i’d basically built up the reputation of

being a manager who was calm

fun and who loved developing his people

but trouble was around the corner i was

ambitious

and i accepted promotion after promotion

until one day i found myself designated

head of operations

with a handsome salary but no motivation

to go into work

this was strange because till now i

really enjoyed my job

so i had to sit myself down and ask

myself what’s gone wrong

i realized that till now the roles i’d

been performing

had to do with people i had to focus on

people their well-being on their

performance and on helping them get

better

and now i was in a role which was about

numbers projects deadlines

stuff that i had no natural enthusiasm

for

as a result of which i just didn’t look

forward to going into work

i came to the conclusion that if i was

to have a successful

and an enjoyable career it had to be in

roles

that carried some meaning for me that i

felt energized by

because if i spend time in roles that

were not

energizing to me then i would feel

distracted demotivated and this was not

going to be a sustainable career

a few years later i realized that my

conclusions were actually supported by a

field called strength psychology

which said that all of us have some

qualities that we feel energized by

and other qualities that we feel

de-energized by

so strength psychology says that the

qualities that energize us

those that bring us joy that seem easy

or natural to us

these are called our strengths and those

qualities

that drain us of our energy those that

we struggle with

and those that seem unnatural to us are

called a non-strengths

i learned that my strengths were

things such as building relationships

developing others

and i learned that my non-strengths were

things such as focusing

thinking planning so naturally

if i was ever stuck in roles like that

i lacked the motivation and i would run

towards those roles which had something

to do with people

so the first point i want to leave you

with today is that strengths are the

difference between mediocrity

and excellence

i can be a mediocre project manager or

a mediocre financial analyst or i can be

an

excellent people leader or an excellent

coach and facilitator

imagine the nurse who is not energized

by compassion

imagine a teacher who isn’t energized by

developing others

imagine their state of mind when they

perform their roles and imagine the

impact they have on their job

if you feel that you’re struggling in

your role right now it may well be

because you’re performing a role that is

not in line with your natural strengths

and this is not new over 60 years ago

the famed management guru peter drucker

he said this

essentially what he’s saying is you’re

going to take all this energy

all this time all this effort and you’re

going to invest it in

going from low competence to average

wouldn’t it be better if you took all

that time and effort and energy

and motivation and invested it in going

from good to excellent

so strengths are the difference between

mediocrity and excellence

the second point i want to leave you

with today

is that strengths contribute to our

well-being and mental health

let me share with you how i discovered

that

a couple of years earlier i thought that

i’d become reasonably

good at coaching and facilitating but i

wanted to become better at my job

so i decided i should add a new skill

and the skill i zeroed in on

was designing better workshops so i went

to my teacher and i told him look

there’s an upcoming workshop i want your

help in designing it

and he said you’re going to have to be

committed and work hard without

complaining

and i said sure after all hard work is

the way to become better at something

right

we’ll find out so i spent the next three

days

steeped in the process of designing a

workshop

it involved thinking creating

assessing evaluating rethinking

recreating at the end of three days

when my teacher told me that the design

looked good to go

i thought i’d feel good

instead what i felt was as if somebody

had sucked the life force out of my body

i felt as if every ounce of my energy

had been drained from me

i felt depressed

but i had a workshop to start so i

dragged myself to it

and i spent the next two and a half days

facilitating that workshop

interacting with people answering their

questions helping them arrive at

insights

at the end of the two and a half days i

found that my energy had been restored

i felt better

raise your hand if you know you’ve

experienced something like that

i can’t see your hands anyway but this

doesn’t only happen to you and me

about a year ago uh the founder of a

startup she came to me for some coaching

and she revealed that

she had recently noticed that she had no

energy

to get anything done anymore there were

a lot of items on her plate but he just

couldn’t get to it

so i put it through a strengths

assessment and we looked at the results

and we found

that she had been spending too much time

working on her non-strength areas

remember non-strengths

are those things that drain you of your

energy strengths are the things that

replenish

that energy for you so she’d been

spending every day

working on her non-strength areas and

she’d been ending each day at an energy

deficit

done over months this had actually led

to her feeling burnt out

through the process of coaching she

realized that what she needed to do was

work more on a strength areas

and delegate some of the non-strength

work to a team

right now these feelings are you know

are very universal these days they’re

not uncommon

and i’ve discovered that

working on your weaknesses slaving away

at your weaknesses

is actually bad advice peter drucker

marcus buckingham

james brooke paul brewerton you know

experts in this field they’ve been

saying it for years

you know it’s it’s a mistake to believe

that you can slave away at a weakness

and one day excel at it actually what

happens is

it drains you of your natural energy and

enthusiasm

to a point where life becomes

meaningless instead

if you work in your strength areas what

happens is that you gain energy

you feel a sense of flow you

actually feel charged up and these are

the things that you need

in order to become excellent

so apart from excellence and apart from

mental well-being there are two other

reasons to focus on strengths

strengths lead to high performing

organizations

i know some leaders in corporates

who are essentially private people they

would much

rather perform roles with respect to

creating in products or

art or design or crunching numbers or

writing algorithms

but they’re in people facing roles and

as a result of which they procrastinate

or delay

or entirely avoid the people-facing

aspect

and as a result of which they become

ineffective in these roles

a strength-based organization will take

these people and allow them

to do roles related to number crunching

or

creating designer art or products or to

write code

and it will give roles of people leaders

to people who are enthused by that

that will give every individual in the

organization a chance to become

excellent

thereby driving the whole organization

and making it a high performing

organization

the fourth point i want to leave you

with today

is this all of humanity has this one

struggle

do i do what i want to do or do i do

what i’m being asked to do

whether you’re a child or an adult

whether you’re a student

or a professional we all have this

dilemma should i do what is naturally

meaningful to me what calls to me

or should i do what the world is asking

of me

abraham maslow said that

self-actualization

you know discovering what is meaningful

to me

and you know doing more of that and

becoming that

self-actualization maslow said was

something which was the pinnacle

need among all human beings strengths

allow us to discover what is energizing

and meaningful to us

and if we do it we become that so

strengths

are the way to self-actualization

now there’s there are some challenges

that exist in organizations and in

academic institutions also i’m assuming

right people are actually struggling

with issues such as

engagement motivation performance

and you know mental health etc

and a lot of these challenges i’m going

to invite you to look at the studies

or these are the four things right so

look at these studies

one in america found that seven

percent and more children had struggled

with anxiety

over three percent had struggled with

depression in india

a study among employees found that 80

plus had struggled with

anxiety 55 percent had actually

struggled with

depression this is a pandemic that has a

higher

impact rate than kovid a lot of this

happens because we prioritize

achievement over well-being and i say

that it’s time that we disrupted our

institutions

how long are we going to be content to

be mere

service providers mere centers of profit

making

isn’t it a more worthy goal to become

centers of human flourishing

isn’t it a more worthy goal to create

individuals that can thrive in life

so i’m going to urge you to aspire to be

institutions

and create systems which are more

inclusive

of the strengths and talent diversity

that exists in humanity

every student every professional has a

bunch of different strengths and if we

ask them to choose only from two or

three streams or professions

we are not allowing them to blossom and

become who they can really be

i’m going to invite you to give them

more options

in line with their strengths

right so that what can happen is that

apart from just having a career stream

available to them when they

graduate or when they go out in the

world they also have the skills

to be held to be sorry happy healthy

and well in life to flourish in life

here’s how that can be achieved

one start doing strengths assessments

with every child over the age of 10

which is around the time

people’s strengths start getting formed

and eventually get solidified later on

encourage students and professionals to

spend time in their areas of strength

and look for career streams related to

those

put all teachers and professionals

through strengths assessments too

so that they can understand the language

and the underlying principles

and apply them well and

get the top leadership of your

organizations to work with strengths

consultants

so that for your organization a strength

strategy

can be developed and executed of course

we can continue to use the updated

method if you want

which is around fixing people’s

weaknesses

in which case i’m actually going to

leave you with a quote from coach dan

sullivan

who said if you spend your life

working on your weaknesses at the end of

your life you’re going to have

very strong weaknesses

i wish you will build strength based

lives for yourselves and others

thank you

you