Lead Through Strengths

In this special season finale, we're closing out Season 10 with a fun, reflective conversation inspired by a few of our favorite things. As we take a short pause from the podcast, we share some of our favorite strengths-based questions, hands-on tools, and learning approaches that actually stick. This episode is full of ideas you can use right away, whether you're a coach, leader, or strengths enthusiast. 🌟 Work With Us! BREA Roper Communication | Woo | Activator | Futuristic | Connectedness If you need a Strengths Hype Girl for yourself or your team, connect with Brea at brearoper.com. She's ready to deliver an inspirational keynote, empowering training, or transformational workshop. If you're looking for an expert guide to support your internal Strengths efforts, reach out today! LISA Cummings Strategic | Maximizer | Positivity | Individualization | Woo To work with Lisa, check out her resources for independent coaches, trainers, and speakers. Get business tools and strategy support with her Tools for Coaches membership.     Takeaways ●      Turn existing team themes into Strengths conversations You don't need a brand-new initiative to apply strengths. Take whatever theme your organization is already focused on—innovation, change readiness, bravery—and ask how each person's strengths help them show up in that area. This simple shift creates deeper, more engaging conversations. ●      Start with the individual, not the Team Grid Team grids can be interesting, but they're not the magic. The real power comes from individuals knowing, owning, and intentionally using their strengths. A well-balanced grid doesn't matter if people aren't actually applying their talents. ●      Less can be more when learning Strengths  Focusing on just one strength at a time helps people learn faster and apply more confidently. Exploring domains, execution, and collaboration through a single theme makes strengths development feel accessible instead of overwhelming. ●      Engagement increases when learning is tactile Using tools like strengths card decks adds a physical, interactive element that draws people into the conversation. When participants can touch, move, and discuss strengths together, learning goes deeper and lasts longer.   Take Action ●      Try a Strengths Lens Question Take a theme your team is already talking about and ask: How do my strengths help me with this? Start with a short reflection or discussion and notice how the conversation shifts. ●      Choose One Strength to Focus On Pick one theme from your Top 5 and pay attention to how it shows up at work and in life. Name it, notice it, and practice using it with intention. ●      Experiment with a New Strengths Tool If you facilitate strengths conversations, try incorporating a card deck or prompt-based activity to create more engagement and deeper dialogue. ○      The CS Strengths Deck from StrengthsPlayground is a versatile, hands-on tool for strengths conversations, prompts, and exploration. 🎧 As we wrap Season 10, the podcast is taking a short pause—but we're still here and would love to stay connected. Reach out, explore the resources we shared, and keep strengths flowing while we're away! Let's Connect! ●      LISA: Website | LinkedIn | Facebook ●      BREA: Website | LinkedIn | Instagram   AI-Generated Transcript Lisa: I'm Lisa.   Brea: I'm Brea.   Lisa: and we are here in our moment to close out season 10. Brea, it's a wrap.   Brea: It's a wrap, and not a delicious spinach wrap or a tomato basil wrap, but wrap like we're just gonna take a pause, take a break. Yeah.   Lisa: So as a listener, you're going to hear a pause for a minute, and we thought we could wrap up the season and do a little bit of a favorite thing style. Brea: These are a few of my favorite things.   Lisa: Oh, that is such a perfect cue up for just the things that I adore, the best things. So we can talk about the best things in the strengths world. Oh, good setup. Good melody. Brea, yay.   Let's talk. Let's do just a best question, a favorite question, a question you love in that and when I say question, it can be a prompt question, a reflection, something that gets a great conversation going on the topic of strengths. Do you want to start? Or do you want me to start?   Brea: Go for it.   Lisa: Oh, okay. I love working with a team and getting a theme, because teams always have a thing, you know, they always have an initiative or a word or something that they're trying to get everyone to think about often. It could be something simple, like, oh, everyone is talking innovation. We want to be more innovative. It's our theme for the year. Or maybe they have a big change, and it's about being, change, ready. Change ready. Change ready. And it's the thing they're hearing all over the place, or something like, you know, the team has been talking about how to be brave during some difficult situation. So it's taking any theme and then using it with a lens of strengths to have a conversation. So if you took innovation, it would be like, how do your strengths help you be innovative? How do your strengths help you feel change ready? Or, how do your strengths allow you to feel brave, like you could take any of those examples and just turn it into a Strengths question, and it is amazing how well it goes over. And it's just really simple. It's taking something that the organization or the team is already trying to do, that bang, that drum, over and over and over again, and trying to get people to think. But because the strengths lens is so different from what, where they're usually thinking, it brings it into a whole different conversation. So I love that approach.   Brea: Yes, I love it. I mean, it's really the core of strength application, right? I mean, that's what it's all about, is looking at things through your particular unique lens of strengths, and that's where your superpower lies. You know? Why don't we do it more? I know we just don't. We don't. So what a practice to to engage in?   Lisa: Yeah, nice when it's simple and easy, also, like it's really easy to come up with questions like that based on what's already relevant. So a lot of times what's simple can be a lot of mental effort, but that doesn't take much to come up with this question, these kind of questions,   Brea I love it. I love it. Anyone can do it. And the beauty is, each individual person knows their own strengths the best if they don't have all of the knowledge that an expert would have, they still can, can ask those questions of themselves, and that exploration is really where the learning and the discovery happens. And that's the most important thing, not that you have all the right textbook answers, but that you're using your strengths and applying them with intention. So that's perfect.   Lisa  You're so right. That's so well said. That's perfect. That's what this is all about, is getting somebody to explore their own and remember that they have the superpower that they could aim at this thing, and they just hadn't been thinking about it like that. Yeah.   Brea You know, it reminds me of a lot of times when I'm invited to do a workshop or an activity with a team. They want to do all the things, you know, they ask for the moon, and I'm like, Okay, well, maybe we start with this grain of sand. You know, it's always, always difficult to try to manage expectations, but one of the things that people want is Team grids. They want to look at the team grid. They want to see where the talents lie, where the gaps are, where they should hire to fill gaps. You know, all these well intentioned thoughts about how to apply strengths, but what people forget is that it's not the talents that show up on the team grid. It's. The squares that are filled and not filled, that gives us the most incredible data, because the talent that's shown is actually a person, and if the person that's represented on the grid is not aware of their talents, if they don't know what their talents are, and use them with intention, then it doesn't matter what the grid shows, right? Yeah, people get so hung up on what, what does our grid look like, and what do we need to do to get a well represented grid when actually the data shows and common sense tells us, start with your people. Make sure that the talent that shows up on the grid is actually being well used, that people know what their strengths are and how to use them, and that's what makes a strong team. So that's where you start. You start with the individual   Lisa that would be an interesting activity there, looking at your grit, looking at your own and saying, if these represent my instincts and preferences in, what areas Am I not allowing those to come out in a productive way?   Brea Yeah, I just was having a conversation with a leader yesterday. He's in a regional management position and and I asked him to focus on empathy, so he had one talent to focus on in between our meetings. That was his homework, was to just kind of pay attention. Name it, claim it, aim it when you can, but just tell me where, where did it show up for you? Where did you notice it? Where was it helpful? Where was it not helpful? And he started off immediately saying, well, it doesn't really come up at work. I think it only works in my personal relationships. And then he gave me, like, a million examples of how he saw it at home. And so, of course, you know, the coach and me circles back around and like, okay, let's talk about work. Like you said, it doesn't really show up. This is what I heard. I heard that it actually was showing up a lot. He just didn't recognize it, and there weren't opportunities for him to use it, to lead with it, to be intentional abou