The You at Your Best Exercise is an engaging activity designed to help individuals and teams find and evaluate their strengths.
Team members are tasked with posing two questions to 8 to 12 individuals from their personal and professional circles and then gathering the responses.
The questions are as follows:
A. “When have you seen me at my best? Please describe a specific situation or activity.”
B. “What can you learn with or from me?”
The You at Your Best exercise serves as an excellent starting point for delving into the significance and impact of strengths on learning, teamwork, and talent development. Often, individuals may feel hesitant or self-conscious about inquiring into their strengths and positive attributes, fearing that they may come across as fishing for compliments or seeking attention. It is essential to guide them in overcoming these feelings, fostering openness to acknowledging and exploring their strengths and those of their teams, thereby paving the way for “strength-based learning.”
Numerous research studies underscore the profound impact of strengths on enhancing performance and expanding areas of growth. Moreover, leveraging strengths can also aid in addressing weaknesses. For instance, consider a child struggling with mathematics but excelling in natural science and biology. By reinforcing their strengths and providing science and biology projects and experiments aligned with their abilities, the child is likely to experience a boost in self-confidence, motivation, and energy, subsequently enabling them to approach math challenges with renewed vigor, step by step. This holds true for adults as well.
Subsequently, it is advisable to introduce the ACE process (Address, Create, Execute) in pairs, aiming to identify opportunties and solutions for integrating one’s best self and strengths in the workplace.