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