Coaching a client to prove a strength with a story
This is for you if a capable client can list their strengths but goes blank when the room asks them to prove one.
When a client freezes on proof, the strength is usually there. What is missing is a scene to reach for. A label like "I'm good with people" has no scene attached, so when you ask for a moment, your client reaches into an empty drawer.
So build each strength back into a scene, in their own voice, and proof is ready before the question comes.
Open your client's Discovering Your Strengths in their Career Discovery report and pick the three worth proving for the roles they are chasing.
A rare strength is worth its own story. One each. Plan for about sixty minutes.
Their report marks the rarest strengths with a ✦. The Superpower profile goes deeper: it ranks every strength by rarity and names the rare combinations only they have.
Build each story in four beats. This is STAR, recast so the last one does more.
- Setting. One line of context. When, where, what was going on.
- Tension. What was hard, and what was at stake. No stakes, no story.
- Action. What your client did, in the first person. Catch the "we" that hides them. The interviewer is hiring the "I."
- Realization. How it turned out, and one line on what it showed. The story names the strength, so your client never has to claim it.
The freeze breaks when you ask for the moment, not the trait. Do not accept "I am collaborative." Ask, "When did that decide something?" Push past the first tidy answer to a real day.
Then make it sound like them. Open their Understanding Styles and read how they naturally communicate: fast and blunt, careful, or warm. A borrowed script cracks; their own voice holds.
When your client drops from the adjective into the scene, stop pushing. The story almost tells itself.
By the end, your client holds three written stories, one per strength, each a scene they can tell in sixty seconds.
Your client owns the proof. You own the shape that made it easy to find.
Coaching questions
This is not a worksheet to run top to bottom. Once your client is in a real moment, pull what fits and follow where it goes.
Pulling out the scene
- When did this last decide something real?
- Who else was there, and what was on the line?
- What would have gone wrong if you had not stepped in?
Sharpening it
- What did you do that someone in your seat might not have?
- Where are you in this story, and where does the "we" hide you?
- If you had sixty seconds, what has to stay?
Making it sound like you
- Tell it the way you would tell a friend, not a panel.
- What is the one line you want them to remember?
