Strengths-Based Approach to Academics – Achiever

“Knowledge consists of the facts and lessons learned. Skills are the steps of an activity. These three- talents, knowledge, and skills- combine to create your strengths.” –Donald O. Clifton, father of Strengths-based Psychology as well as the developer of the eponymous Clifton StrengthsFinder- Gallup’s online psychological assessment.

Do what you do best every day.

And that for a 15-year-old secondary school youth would mean excelling in school. The power of leveraging on one’s strengths to achieve his goals is that not only is he more engaged in his work, but more likely to be productive and obtain better performance.

StrengthsTransform™ Campus Excellence strives to develop confidence in students and maximise campus contribution through not only the discovery of one’s talents. In addition, it also aims to help students develop strategies and action plans to reach personal success in school. This series of posts would cover how one could leverage on his talents to achieve better performance in his academic life and in that experience, do what he does best every day!

Theme of the Week – Achiever

As a student with achiever talent theme, you often find yourself constantly needing academic achievements in order to feel good about yourself. This could be completing your school projects on time or achieving good results in your previous mid-term examinations. Your friends and teachers might frequently call you a workhorse, able to study for hours and days, sometimes without a day of rest. For you, every day is a fresh start and you need to achieve something tangible by the end of the day or you will feel dissatisfied. Your peers around you might not understand how you managed to revise or complete your school work for 6 hours straight. But to you, it is this power supply that defines your level of productivity and keeps you going.

Use your Achiever talent to its best!

To leverage your Achiever talent theme to excel in academics,

1. Take advantage of your self-motivation! Set monthly, weekly or even daily goals for your coming academic tasks. This process of setting goals allows you to know what you need to concentrate on. It also provides you with the long-term vision and short-term motivation. Remember, however, to set realistic goals that are measurable to keep your motivation high as an achiever! It will be greatly beneficial to set a fixed time every week to review your goals. You might want to refine them along the way or simply to track your progress.
2. Partner and form study groups with other hard workers to leverage on each others’ work productivity and see yourself accomplishing more in a team!
3. Your constant drive to accomplish and complete an academic goal might force you to sacrifice on your health. You might not feel that this is a problem because efficiency and productivity is your life’s benchmark. However, do take care of your physical health especially towards the examination periods. Having enough sleep and a balanced and nutritious diet would not only keep you at the top-notch performance in school but gives you more focus and help you become a better learner! There are many ways you could ensure that you get good quality rest.

Tune in next week to find out how you can leverage your talent theme – Activator, to achieve campus excellence!
For more information about using StrengthsFinder profile & the StrengthsTransform™ programme to achieve campus excellence, please check our website.