What am I great at?

I was challenged, in a good-natured conversation, to define what I am great at.

These are my thoughts.

Purpose

I feel I have a strong sense of values and purpose, always aiming ‘to leave it better’ in everything I do.

‘Don’t fence me in’ — I value freedom and flexibility in how I approach challenges and solutions.

Emotional Intelligence

I consider one of my strengths to be my emotional intelligence — my self-awareness is the foundation that enables my awareness of others.

I also trust my intuition to guide me, especially when it comes to sensitivity in understanding others.

What I believe makes me useful as a coach and mentor, is where I can use these skills to help others see that their own answers are often hidden in plain sight.

Listening

Listening is at the heart of how I operate as I bring genuine curiosity and interest to my interactions with coachees and mentees.

Creating

My value is in collating, synthesizing, and creating - bringing together different pieces of information, creating understanding, and sparking creativity by using my facilitation skills to help coachees and mentees resolve their problems effectively.

My approach is often breadth over depth, stretching to connect concepts from different areas, to broaden others’ perspectives and in so doing, helping them to grow.

Guidance

Recognising the stress-inducing impact of uncompleted actions, unresolved decisions, or conflicting priorities on my own capacity and quality of decision-making, I aim to guide people through the challenges of their uncertainty or overwhelm with clarity and focus.

Decision making

My decision-making is grounded in balance and pragmatism which I recognise can tend towards perfectionism, but ‘reality’ and the pace of change require a pragmatic approach —sometimes ‘good enough is good enough!’ My focus is always on getting things to work efficiently and effectively.

Resilience

In terms of making things happen, I feel experience has shown that I respond appropriately to a given situation, being strategic, action-oriented, and agile. I pride myself on my resilience and my ability to see tasks through to a conclusion. I aim to deliver appropriate outcomes, whilst remaining trusted, flexible, and capable in my role.

Agility

Agility is important to me — so I find it natural to explore new ideas, experiment and push the boundaries. For me, trying new things is about excitement - perhaps being ‘edgy’, not about being fearful. I am open to what’s new, constantly evolving my approach and always learning as a result.

Enabling Others

Finally, I find it hugely rewarding to enable others. Whether through coaching and mentoring, facilitating my peer advisory groups, or supporting other coaches and mentors through supervision, I enjoy helping people work through their challenges and achieve their goals. Seeing others succeed is very fulfilling, I work to create an environment in which people thrive.

If you are interested to prepare your own version of this, please message me. I can share the process, and work through it with you, if you think it might be helpful.