In yesterday’s post I wrote about my love of teaching. In the work I do, there are two areas of learning I love facilitating most. One is helping students learn ways to build effective teams and foster an environment where everyone understands how each member can best contribute to the team. I’ve previously written a three-part series about some of the most important ways to help teams build this environment (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).

The second is in the area of helping students learn about their strengths, and specifically their Top 5 themes that come from taking CliftonStrengths for Students. One of the activities I use to help students connect to and in turn explain how their themes work together comes from the incredible resources I have access to from Gallup because of my training.

The activity is called your Strengths Image and is a great example of an activity that is both interactive and in tune to visual learning. I ask participants to choose two to three images they feel represent who they are as a person, and how those images describe what it looks like when their talent themes work together. In person this can be done with a series of image cards, and online can be done by having participants Google images. As an example, this is my description.

The image I feel acts as a visual representation of me and my Top 5 talent themes is the clock face of Big Ben. I chose this image because of the significance of its geographic location. Being born in England, and with both sides of my family originating from the United Kingdom – visiting London has always held significant meaning for me. Each time I am in London, the area where Big Ben stands it is one of my favorite places to go, and I will often go to the Westminster area to hear the clock chime at Midnight.

In the same way that the middle of the clock face acts as the clock’s compass, so too does my Individualization strength. For me, Individualization forms the core of who I am, how I get to know the people that are in my life, and the way in which I interact with them.

At the 3:00 o’clock position is my Relator theme – this is the next step moving from Individualization and how I use the knowledge I have of those in my life to build environments that are team and collaboration focused.

At the 6:00 o’clock position is my Positivity theme – I try as much as possible to approach life in a glass half-full kind of way, with the knowledge that there is always a positive in every situation.

At the 9:00 o’clock position is my Adaptability theme. Representing the 3/4 way point on the clock face, Adaptability is a key feature of how I approach my work and life as I am able to switch gears quickly, solve problems and work well under pressure.

Last but not least is my Learner theme which is at the 12:00 o’clock position – to me this signifies that each day, I learn something new and the that the like the clock face itself, learning is part of a cycle.

As a question to leave you with today, if you were going to choose images to represent how your strengths work together, what might you choose?