A happenstance meeting of the human resources department's Crystal Nevins and medical student Jocelyn Mattoon is giving every member of this year's class of new students the chance to learn more about their talents and how to successfully apply them. 

Two years ago Nevins, who works in staff development and employee relations at KU School of Medicine-Wichita, trained to become a coach for Gallup's Clifton StrengthsFinder^®, an assessment that Mattoon had been exposed to and taken while in graduate school to become a school and career counselor. The assessment uses 187 questions to identify up to 34 characteristics - with names like achiever, activator, arranger, relator - in four umbrella groups - influencing, relationship building, executing, strategic thinking.

It's based on the belief that people should use the talents - strengths - they already have instead of devoting great energy to fix their weaknesses. Fixing flaws, StrengthsFinder author Tom Rath writes, is "the path of most resistance."  

Helping students embrace their strengths   

"It's not so much that participants say, 'I never knew I was good at that,'" Nevins said. "Instead, it validates them to say, 'This is who I am, and that's a good thing' as opposed to, 'I wish I was more outgoing or creative.'"

Nevins has given a common form of the assessment - one revealing the top five of the 34 possible strengths - and provided coaching to all new employees, interested departments and faculty, and to pediatric residents. But before Mattoon happened to walk into her office last fall, Nevins had not yet worked with medical students.  

"My transition to medical school was really stressful. Seeing that she was a strengths coach was almost a light bulb moment," Mattoon said. "It was a wonderful coping mechanism and gave me a framework for thinking about how I got here and where I find success. When you come to medical school, I think every student wonders, 'Have I got what it takes?' Revisiting my strengths reminded me that ... yeah ... I did."  

Mattoon, whose top five strengths are "input, communication, consistency, competition, and restorative," said it was a natural progression to want to share the program with other students and to pitch its wider use to the school's Department of Academic and Student Affairs (ASA).  

Part of medical school orientation  

"We put this program together using Crystal's subject expertise and my experience as a student. We presented it to ASA and they were incredibly enthusiastic about it," she said.  

ASA will cover the cost of StrengthFinders for any first- or second-year student who would like to take it, Mattoon said. "We offer that during orientation. We'll do an introductory session learning about their strengths and those of their classmates. Later we will talk about how you apply it to a problem, or solve conflicts."  

Baked goods or steak?   

In coaching, Nevins sits down with each person to learn more about them and their experiences and get their reactions to their results. In a second session, they'll explore strengths in depth, how each is valuable and, for example, how they play out in a group setting. Sometimes they'll discuss how two or more talents can work together.  

"If you have five ingredients, do you want to make pancakes, a cake, or a pie? If your strengths are ingredients for baked goods, you're not going to end up with a steak dinner. So don't try to be a steak dinner; you're the baked goods person," Nevins said.  

"The last session is where the rubber meets the road," she said. "What are you going to do, how are you going to apply this?" That can be at work or in personal life.  

"I try to get participants to come up with one setting or environment where they can apply their talents to improve their performance or their relationship, so it wasn't just, 'Oh, it was a nice conversation about me. I'll just put that on the shelf and go back to what I was doing," she said.  

Putting strengths to work  

For students, coaching often focuses on academics, Nevins said. "One person said, 'I really need to have other people to bounce ideas off of when I study.' Other people are going to say, 'I don't want distractions, so don't ask me to come to a study group.'"  

Mattoon, applying her strength of communication, now summarizes lecture content using words that she best understands and can retain. Her strength of consistency, she now knows, covers not only a daily desire for structure but is also "a big part of what motivates me to be a doctor," she said. "The coaching with Crystal brought me back to the reason that I want to help people."  

Nevins said she would frame coaching with such questions as: "What kind of doctor are you going to be? Are you going to be somebody whose trademark is that relational piece? Are you going to be more of the get-it-done executor type? Are you going to be the big thinker who plans things out into the future? What's going to set you apart from everybody else?"  

In medicine, many people "have the talent of being a learner," Nevins said. "But they run the gamut as to whether they're thinkers, or doers, or relationship people, influencers of others. They're all over the map and it's interesting in the sense that any type can be a doctor. Somebody else will be successful because they're the outgoing type-A personality, but you'll be successful because you have strong relationship skills."  

"What this has taught me," Mattoon said, "is that there isn't just one 'doctor mold.'"