My Strengths Journey

These last few weeks I have had a lot of opportunities to interact with people who are new to the strengths philosophy. Some are faculty, some are researchers, some are career counselors, some are administrators. It has reminded me of my own "strengths journey," as I have seen myself in some of the persons I've encountered.

When I was first introduced to the strengths philosophy by Chip Anderson almost ten years ago, I guess you could say I was a skeptic. It sounded too touchy-feely, Pollyannish, and seemed way too similar to some of the things that came out of the ill-fated self-esteem movement from the 80's. I remember asking Don Clifton what the coefficient alphas were for each of the scales--and in fact I really wanted to see all of the StrengthsFinder factor analysis results! Give me empirical evidence that it works--that was what would convince me (and I don't even have Analytical in my top five!).

At the time, StrengthsFinder had just been piloted (it even had 35 themes then) and the empirical evidence was sketchy. Promising, but sketchy. So I joined with some other universities in collecting some evidence over the next couple of years. One thing about higher education is that it is difficult to randomly assign students to conditions--or even to have a control group. So the evidence we collected was quasi-experimental at best. But it, too, was promising. First-year students appeared to be more confident, got better grades, enjoyed their classes more, and even were more likely to stick around for a second year when they had participated in a strengths-based first-year seminar.

But it was the student focus groups that changed my own view of the power of the strengths approach. Hearing students' voices articulating how they saw life differently--how they saw themselves and others differently--was what eventually "sold" me on the strengths philosophy. Even though Chip had distributed those wacky "strengths-colored glasses" to remind us that the strengths approach was a different lens through which to view the world, it was hearing students talk about how they saw their relationships, their majors, and their academic goals in a whole new light that was most convincing for me.

And I suppose that's connected to why I'm a faculty member. I live for those "aha" moments when students' eyes light up, when they really get it in a whole new way. That's what makes my job rewarding and meaningful--knowing I've opened a door for students. As Sonja Gravett from South Africa says, "informative learning changes WHAT students know; transformative learning changes HOW they know and WHO they are." That's what I've always wanted to happen in my classroom--I want to change students from the inside out in ways that are valuable and important to them. And the strengths approach does just that. Watching their eyes light up when they realize they have the seeds of success already inside them, that they have something to contribute to our mutual learning, that what college will add is the knowledge and skills to move them to levels of excellence--THAT is why I use a strengths approach to teaching. It energizes me; it makes my job much more fun and rewarding--and it changes my students in ways that matter for a lifetime.

It took me about three years to really get this idea (I'm a slow learner!). I still want the empirical evidence, I still love to read about coefficient alphas and principal components analysis, and I still push universities to randomly assign students to a control or experimental group when they are starting to using StrengthsQuest on their campus. But the bottom line is that I've seen lives changed--and in fact, my own approach to teaching has changed as a result. And that is what makes all the difference.