Helping students use their Key Strengths to stay motivated and on track with their home learning!

Working with students on identifying their Key Strengths to optimise motivation, resourcefulness and wellbeing, is a phenomenal activity to work on in academic coaching! In my online sessions with students, we do the Strengths Questionnaire to find their Natural Strengths. We then come up with creative ways to use each unique strength to optimise independent learning, goal setting, and performance. Helping students use their Key Strengths to keep them motivated and on task is essential now when we have moved to online learning. Recently, I worked with a home-schooled boy in Y11 who came up with the most fantastic ideas. We worked on finding ways to utilise his top strengths of ‘Perspective’, and he shared that he could using ‘self-coaching’ to keep motivated, ‘avoiding engaging in unhelpful thinking filters’ to keep him on task, and ‘seeing the examiners perspective’ when writing answers to maximise marks. For ‘Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence’, he wrote ‘acknowledge my own everyday successes’ and ‘knowing what’s good and what’s bad work’. Encourage your child to write down some of their Key Strengths and get them to think about how they can use them, every day! Such as simple, yet effective way to ‘start the day’, by focusing on ‘what’s strong, rather than what’s wrong’