This month Dr. Ryan Niemiec and Danielle Casioppo published the debut article for the newly launched peer-reviewed Journal of Positive Psychology Coaching. Their article, Coaching and Character Strengths — An Essential, Inextricable Interconnection: Core Practices and New Science includes useful insights for coaching with character strengths.
Understanding and harnessing character strengths is crucial for effective coaching. These strengths contribute to well-being, strong relationships, and resilience. Despite limited research in this area, the study’s authors have taken two approaches to address this gap. First, they examined existing studies and practical applications, outlining key strengths and strategies for coaches. Second, they conducted a large-scale study involving over 27,000 individuals, including coaches and clients, to explore perceptions of character strengths in coaching.
Their findings confirm the importance of character strengths in coaching, with six strengths consistently emerging as vital: perspective, honesty, creativity, social intelligence, perseverance, and judgment. These strengths are fundamental for coaches to cultivate in themselves and encourage in their clients. The authors also identified key aspects of the coaching process where character strengths play a significant role, such as deepening self-understanding and facilitating goal achievement.
Perspective from the authors
“We argue that character strengths are not only essential to coaching but are both the ingredients of impactful coaching and are the expression of good coaching itself. While character strengths are not always conscious for the coach or the client, they are ever-present in them and their interactions. This is because character strengths “live” in relationships. They live in positivity, empowerment, and well-being. They live in adversity, rising from suffering and the struggle itself. Coaching is usually about all of those things – developing and deepening a coach-client relationship, empowering a client toward new understandings and aspirations, and supporting the client in overcoming vexing habits and handling life’s difficulties.”
