Strengths-Based Approach

It all starts with talent. Everyone has talents, defined as naturally recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behaviour that can be productively applied. Examples of talent include:

  • Recognizing patterns in data
  • Thinking in an orderly or timely manner
  • Maintaining a positive outlook
  • Effortlessly starting conversations

The CliftonStrengths assessment--an online self-assessment tool--was designed by Dr. Don Clifton and Gallup Inc. in order to help people identify their talents. The assessment is based in the field of positive psychology, and is backed by decades of research.

"What would happen if we studied what is right with people versus what's wrong with people?"

This was question that Don Clifton asked, sparking decades of research into what people are like and how they develop. What he found was that a person's most direct path to individual growth and improvement begins with a primary investment in his or her greatest talents.

When Clifton studied human behavior, he noted hundreds of positive characteristics and saw that many of those characteristics had commonalities. Based on those common traits, he distilled them down into 34 talent themes, sorted into 4 broad categories or "domains".

Click here to find a list of all 34 talent themes, and here to find out more about the 4 domains of talent.

To turn your talents into strengths, you must invest in them--practice using them and add knowledge and skills to them.

Talent (A natural way of thinking, feeling, or behaving) multiplied by Investment (Time spent practicing, developing your skills, and building your knowledge base.) equals Strength (The ability to consistently provide near-perfect performance in a specific task.)

Taking the CliftonStrengths assessment at Western will help you:

  • Improve self-awareness by discovering what you naturally do best
  • Thrive in and out of school by applying your talents to every area of your life
  • Improve performance in the classroom, at work, and everywhere else, thanks to proven advice and ideas for applying CliftonStrengths in different settings
  • Explain in a positive way who you are to peers, friends, and family using a common language of CliftonStrengths shared by more than 30 million people
  • Succeed in spite of your weaknesses using concepts and strategies that help you focus time and energy on your areas of greatest potential