How can you utilise strengths to resolve your frustrations?

Do you experience a lot of feelings of frustration? Frustration being the feeling of blocked goals…of spinning your metaphorical wheels and not getting anywhere.

There is an approach that might help you. Knowing and using your strengths on purpose.

Do you know what your strengths are? I do, and it has changed my life and how I feel about myself as an autistic and ADHD person.

When I got my autism diagnosis, my confidence was in the toilet for a while.

I felt like I didn’t know who I really was. I also became painfully aware of everything that I struggled with or everything that others seemed to find odd or difficult in me.

For a while, things felt pretty negative. My esteem was not good at all. I also felt frustrated about not being able to do certain things or achieve things I wanted.

However, any coach will tell you: your first coaching client is yourself…

Eventually, I thought: I’ve got to get to know myself properly and I also need to find out what I think and know is good and right about me…otherwise this is just going to go on.

In other words, I needed to integrate my autism diagnosis healthily into my view of myself and get to know who I am, what I need, what I want, and what my strengths profile is.

I took a strengths profiler and found out my strengths are
– humour
– curiosity
– creativity
– love of learning
– social intelligence

(Good strengths for a coach and reseacher, right?)

Knowing what I love and what I am good at and what is good and right with me inside me has been so helpful. In fact, it’s what encouraged me to spend more time doing coaching and research.

This is why one of the tools I use with ANY of my clients who want it is a strengths survey.

We then take what we learn about your strengths and use it in our coaching activities to help you feel better about things and make progress in your life.

Proyer et al (2015) says that coaching activities based around strengths are generally highly effective.

Knowing, deliberately working with and playing to your strengths can help with
– feelings of happiness
– satisfaction in help
– satisfaction in life
– satisfaction in work (Proyer et al, 2015)

That’s what the research says…

But what I say is that: knowing and using your strengths is like spraying a can of WD40 over your life. Things run smoother and easier, if you want my view.

If you are feeling frustrated right now, a way to feel better AND make progress is to think: how can I apply my strengths to help me in this situation?

If you’re an existing client and you don’t know your strengths yet, ask me and we’ll do the survey.

If you’re thinking of coaching, we can do your survey and have a conversation about how your strengths can help you once you’ve come on board.

It’s good to do this with a trained coach because they can contextualise the results for you and help you see what they mean.

Learning about your strengths is especially important for anyone experiencing frustration.

You don’t have to feel like that all the time, and if you want to avoid burnout, it’s advisable to see what you can do to deal with those feelings of frustration by making use of what is right with you to help.

Reach out to me if you have any questions at all about your strengths and how to use them to help with feelings of frustration. I will try to help.

Source: Proyer et al (2015) https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00456/full