Squiggly Career Summer School: Strengths

As part of our commitment to making careers better for everyone, this year we’ve opened up our Squiggly Career Summer School and we’re running a series of live sessions on Instagram to share tool and tips to support career development.

Week 1 was all about knowing your values and putting them into action. You can catch up here.

Week 2 was all about strengths and how you can make sure what you want to be known for is showing-up and standing out through your work.

There are 4 actions we’d recommend focusing on to achieve this:

• Practice sharing your strengths stories – this can help you talk about your strengths in an authentic way. Focus on how your strengths have helped others rather than what your strengths are. Examples of your strengths in action tend to feel easier to share! The STAR framework can help you structure your story:
  • Situation
  • Task
  • Action
  • Result

• Stretch Your Strengths – Squiggly Careers don’t stay still and neither do your strengths! Creating your own strengths curriculum is one way you can invest in your strengths and strength them further. There are 3 Es to consider in creating your curriculum:
  • Experience – how can you use your strengths differently in your day to day work?
  • Exposure – who or what could you be exposed to in order to develop your strengths further?
  • Education – what could you read, watch, listen to or learn to gain new insight on or expertise in your strength?

• Strengths Pull vs. Push – put yourself in other people’s shoes and think about how your strengths could be helpful for them. Be proactive in sharing your thoughts on how your strengths could be support them and specific about the actions you could take. This is much more likely to create ‘pull’ and invite a conversation than when you talk about your strengths in a disconnected way and expected someone else to have all of the answers.
  • Pull sounds like – I know you’re kicking off a new project, one of the things that energises me is planning. If I could support with some of the project planning meetings and team documents do let me know. I’d love to help.
  • Push sounds like – I really enjoy project management. What more could I do in the team?

• Strengths Problem Solving – spotting issues in your team or organisation and matching them up with your strengths is a really great way to increase your impact. Lots of people avoid these types of challenges and being proactive about problem solving can make you and your strengths stand out. Start by listing 5 problems you can see in your team / organisation e.g. stalled project, cut budget, low morale, siloed worked, lack of creativity. Think about how you could use the strengths you want to be known for to make progress on those problems. Discuss your ideas with the ‘problem owner’ and see how you can get started with your strengths!

If you’d like some more support with your strengths, it’s a topic we’ve covered a few times on the Squiggly Careers podcast and would recommend these specific episodes:

We’ve also created this Squiggly Careers PodSheet on how to find out your strengths which might be useful for your reflections.

We hope you find these resources helpful for your development,

Helen & Sarah