Recognizing and leveraging clients' strengths is crucial for fostering clients’ motivation and commitment to achieving their health goals. This activity will help you identify possible strengths in your clients so that you can explore practical ways to encourage them to utilize these characteristics when pursuing lifestyle changes.

Identifying and Utilizing Client Strengths

In this activity, you will identify various strengths in clients and brainstorm strategies to encourage them to apply these strengths in pursuing lifestyle changes, such as eating healthily, sleeping better or adopting other positive habits.

1. First, make a list of 8-10 strengths that you might observe in a client. Here are some examples to get you started:
   • Compassionate
   • Creative
   • Hardworking
   • Able to see the big picture
   • Detail oriented
   • Patient
2. From your list, select two strengths that could be beneficial for supporting a client in achieving lifestyle-related goals. For each one, determine specific ways you could encourage your client to use that strength to achieve a goal related to eating healthily, sleeping better or another lifestyle-related goal (for example, leveraging a client’s compassionate nature to foster self-compassion; encouraging them to practice self-kindness and patience when they encounter setbacks in lifestyle changes; and helping them to stay motivated and reduce stress).

Note: This activity allows you to share clients’ strengths and how you would encourage them in a coaching session, but it does not require discussion.