Chris Mance II - Mental Skills Coach

It’s a fact that a person’s true potential is impossible to know. It’s also a fact that the longer, harder, and more focus you put into improving something, the more you will improve.

Given that, optimizing potential is a product of one’s capacity to grind. By grind I mean toil for long hours with focus and effort directed at improving. Deciding whether or not to apply this grind to an area of strength or weakness is the question strengths based coaching seeks to answer.

Undoubtedly, the answer is to apply your grind to your strengths. Your strengths are found in what you truly love to do, your areas of natural talents and passions. When you have self-motivation because you love to do something, it’s by far easier to grind. Therefore, it’s far more likely to reach your potential grinding in an area of strength vs. grinding in a area of weakness.

Creating a Plan To Optimize Your Child’s Potential

If your child is pursuing one or more difficult goals, then they deserve help. Help that’s centered around taking advantage of their innate strengths and using those strengths to optimize their potential for inevitable success.

This is what I do and this is what I’m passionate about. My approach is threefold:

1) Explore Strengths

Your children are at their best when they’re doing what they’re best at, and that’s using their strengths. Depending on your child’s age, I will use one of the three methods below to identify your child’s areas of strength.

1. For children under the age of 10, I will use Strengths Spotting to observe your child’s talents by using the 4 categories of behavior clues.
2. For children ages 10-14, I will use the Clifton’s Youth Strengths Explorer, an assessment to identify areas where your child’s greatest potential for building strengths exists
3. For children 15 and older, I will use the Clifton’s Strengths Finder assessment.

2) Identify the Passions that Drives Innate Self-Motivation

Once strengths are explored, the next step is to identify the passions and motivations that are innate or come effortlessly. Using a custom assessment, we will answer the following questions:

• What activities or environments is your child repeatedly drawn to or eager to try?
• What new skills or activities does your child pick up quickly and easily?
• When is your child most enthusiastic and fulfilled?
• Which activities is he or she excited about doing again and again?
• When does your child become so engrossed that he or she seems to lose track of time?

3) Define the Vision, Goals and Action Items

In this final step, I will help you put pen to paper and map out a concrete plan.

1. What’s the dream? Not some pie in the sky dream. A measurable, time-bound dream that your child can work to achieve by checking off action items.
2. What are the non-sports dreams? The fact is that athletic careers are by nature temporary. For this reason your child must plan for what will be next. Is it coaching, sports psychology, starting a business, teaching, physical therapy, or something else?
3. What’s your plan for bouncing back from failure? Failure is part of the process. Therefore, your child must face failure head on. If you know failure is going to happen, then it’s irresponsible not to plan for it.

If you are interested in finding out more about my strengths based coaching, contact me here.