Taymour Miri
All human beings are wired uniquely, and that unique wiring has an opportunity whereby as a human being, we can get to know ourselves, and we call that our strengths. And by knowing ourselves, by being self aware of those, we have a intentional way of addressing what we have for the circumstances that bind us. Expanding possibilities, the mindset zone.
Ana Melikian
I’m your host, Ana Melikian. I’m here to support you, increase your impact while preventing burnout. The mindset zone is a place to pause, increase your self awareness, and embrace the experimentation mindset. Find more resources, including information about the Mindset Zone book and audiobook at mindset. Zone. Yes, instead of dot com, it’s .zone.
Ana Melikian
Today, our special guest is Taymor Mihiri. Taymor is an ICF master coach and Gallup strengths coach with more than 20 years of experience working with organizations in Europe, Middle East, and the US. Welcome to the mindset zone, Timur.
Taymour Miri
Thank you very much, Ana. Delighted to be here, and thank you for whoever is listening.
Ana Melikian
Yes. And, I really have to start with this question. What is strength based mindset?
Taymour Miri
Yeah. I think the easiest way I can describe this is it’s a philosophy, it’s a mindset, it’s a belief that all human beings are wired uniquely. And that unique wiring has an opportunity whereby, as a human being, we can get to know ourselves, and we call that our strengths. And by knowing ourselves, by being self aware of those, we have a conscious, or better still, intentional way of addressing what we can have for the circumstances that bind us.
Ana Melikian
Love it. Really love it. So you see the mindset as a core believer, and I love that as everybody’s different. Everybody has this unique wiring of that is important that we are aware of it, the knowing ourselves that is so old as Greek philosophy, at least. But it’s the self awareness that I’m always speaking about, the importance of being self aware, in this case, about this unique wiring that allow us to be agile and flexible, even life and professional circumstances, to be at our best in the moments that they are needed most.
Taymour Miri
Spot on.
Ana Melikian
And you have great exercise that you sometime do for people to experience the power of being on their strengths. Can you guide our listeners through it?
Taymour Miri
Sure. Sure. So if you’re driving, stop driving. If you’re not doing this while you’re driving. Yeah. So this exercise requires you to grab a piece of paper or something you can write on. It could be your pad if you have a pen and a electric pen that you can use. The the idea is that you’re going to write a sentence.
Taymour Miri
And the sentence you’re gonna write is I love podcasts. Now, before you start, if you’re ready, so what I’d like you to do is to take the pen and put it into the hand that you don’t normally write with. So it’s not your dominant writing hand. And then write. I love podcasts. Now for most of us because I know some of you might have the ability to write with both hands, but I would assert that one hand has a slight edge over the other, even in that case. So as you’re writing, what are you noticing? So, typically, you notice that you’re gonna have to take it a little bit slower. And then you notice that as you’re writing, you’re not writing as well as what you know you can write.
Taymour Miri
And if I asked you to then go and write that sentence again, again, with the same hand that you wrote the first time, now what happens typically is as you practice more, you will start to see improvements. But if you look at your performance when you’re writing with your dominant hand and you concentrated in writing I love podcast, you’ll probably write it once, twice, maybe 3 times, and you’ll get it really neat, beautiful. Whereas with your left hand, I’m a dominant right hand. So if you’re a right hander, if you started with your left hand, what you’ll find is gonna take it a lot longer for you to get anything near what you wrote with your dominant hand. So this exercise is a very simple way of saying, if your dominant hand are your dominant talents or the way you are wired naturally that makes you unique. Now, obviously, we have many talents. This is one example of, of it in writing. So if you wrote with your dominant hand, very quickly, you’ll become excellent if you focused and developed.
Taymour Miri
And if you went with the nondominant, which is a conditioning that a lot of us have learned over the years, that if we are not good at something, we must go and do that and become good at that too. And when we’re not typically good at something, when we go to become good at it, it takes a long time. It takes a lot more effort, and, generally, the results are not anywhere near excellence. So this is how I disc distinguish between the two.
Ana Melikian
I love this. And can I challenge you?
Taymour Miri
Of course.
Ana Melikian
Can I stress this concept? Because I think, yes, absolutely, we have this set of wiring, this set of talents that are nurtured in nature together, that when we arrive to the workforce, we can display our strengths. And, yes, we have always to keep learning, to keep improving, to keep growing, but the point of focus on our strengths, I agree. And at the same time, sometimes we have to be very creative on how you we use this. So I want to put a concrete case. So imagine a leader in a company Mhmm. That, maybe it doesn’t need to be even a baby boomer. Maybe it’s, generates an x or the technology is not their thing. They understand the importance of it.
Ana Melikian
They have the organization with all the technology, but they have somebody that takes care of that. And now everybody is speaking about artificial intelligence this, artificial intelligence that, and they go, oh my gosh. I everything is running well. So there is not their strength learning new technology, but they are facing these circumstances that is pushing their organization, okay, at least to be aware of it and to learn how to so in a case like this for a leader, when how they can maneuver and navigate this set of circumstances.
Taymour Miri
Yeah. Great great example and great scenario. So before we dive into this scenario, Ana, let’s just step one one step back, and let’s just look at what talent is from a perspective of how do we spot it. Okay? So there are assessments you can do to help you identify what what your talents are. But here’s a definition I like. It says talents are your innate, your autopilot, subconscious way of thinking, feeling, and behaving. So if you just take that sentence, as a coach or a team leader, what do we do? We ask questions. We ask questions to see who is sitting on the other side.
Taymour Miri
Because what we wanna do is we wanna identify behind the who, what are their dominant muscles in an environment that they’re gonna work or, you know, if they’ve come to see you about their personal life, irrespective of where it is. So I’m listening. I’m asking the question. So I may say, okay. The the person is challenged with art artificial intelligence coming into the company, and the company is demanding that we we embrace it and bring it into pretty much everything we’ve got. Okay. And so I ask, how do you feel about that? And I’m not talking about 1 person. If I have a team of 10 people or if I have one client that’s specifically having an issue with this at work, I’m asking, how do you feel about that? And they may say, I hate it.
Taymour Miri
I just I’m not drawn towards technology. Technology and me just don’t get on. Okay. So now I know how how they feel. So, you know, what do you do and what have you done in the past? So I’m talking about actions now. What have you done when you had to learn? So your mobile, do you have a smartphone? Yes. I do. So what have you done when you first got involved with that? So they’ll talk about their behavior and what they were doing.
Taymour Miri
So what were you thinking in that process? That first time you saw it, and then as the process went on, what how did your thinking change? So all I’m doing is I am inviting them to really tap into what talents they have because as they express themselves, they are telling me the characteristics that drives them. So talents are really those personality traits. Right? That’s what we’re talking about. And they come out in the sense of how do I feel, how do I think, and what do I do. Right? So when I listen, I’m listening for what is the characteristic that motivates, that drives that person. What do they typically have that they’ve used before and they’ve been successful? So I’m not asking about failure. I’m asking about success. Very clear focus on strength because strength brings success.
Taymour Miri
So I’m I’m looking for successes, and they’ll tell me they’ll tell me how they became successful with their smartphone. And those successes are the talents they use in order to manage that. So what I’d like to do then is to help support them to use more of those and develop more of those. That’s the core of spotting talent and then assisting so that they work on that. So, you know, the dominant fans, if they repeat that, it’ll become ex excellent quicker. Now, Ana, you mentioned one thing that kind of there’s a flip side. So what if I was in a job that I hated sitting behind the computer? I loved being out and about talking to everyone. Now those are 2 talents.
Taymour Miri
If I’m if I love being behind the computer, I’m I’m a thinker. I’ve got certain characteristics. Right? If I wanna be out there, I’m social, I’m outgoing, another set of characteristics. Now you can have both, but what if one person was really one geared towards being out there as opposed to behind the computer? So what if their job demanded that, I don’t know, 30% of their job, they had to be behind the computer to do reports and all that stuff? Here’s the thing. Life throws circumstances where you will find yourself that you don’t actually wanna do that thing, which means, really, your talents aren’t at play. Right? You have to manage that. You can’t ignore it because then it’s gonna cause a problem. So the idea is how do you focus on your strengths most of the time? And then if you are being challenged, how do you manage that? And your work, anyone at work, really, this is a beautiful formula for strength based development.
Taymour Miri
If you are at work every day and you’re spending roughly about 60, 70, 80% of your time doing things where you are playing to your strengths, you are gonna be super engaged. Your performance is gonna be amazing. The flip side is you will have some challenges. If they’re around 20, 30%, you’ll manage them, and there are strategies to do that. Your manager’s job is to look for that.
Ana Melikian
And I love this nuance and this because you are speaking shows the experience that you have working with real companies and real teams here because, yeah, it’s there is always this mix. And sometimes the issue is that you have that amazing doer that is doing, or they say, maybe it’s a salesperson that is really great in what they do, but they have to do the reports. But if it’s within that 20, 30%, that part of the reports, they can learn strategies to be effective. Wonderful. But if their manager then starts to demand and change the balance, now inverts the equation just 30% of interaction and 70% of computer, that will change the dynamic totally.
Taymour Miri
Burnout. That’s the ultimate thing. It will lead to burnout. People leave companies because of that.
Ana Melikian
Yeah. And let’s go to another example because this is fascinating when we give concrete examples. So you have the manager or the team leader or the leader of the organization that now in this scenario, they are they love technology. They love new things. They are always it’s like, oh my gosh. We have to bring this. But their teams are a little bit not because they go, oh my this is the flavor of the month kind of thing. How can this leader focus on their strengths, first of all, and then help their team focus on their strengths to to make sure that the company is successful and they have a great impact?
Taymour Miri
Yeah. Another great scenario, Ana. I love these. My first focus when I hear this is, what do I hear about the characteristics of this manager? So they love technology. K. Loving technology is not a talent. So what is it that they love, and what are other patterns are showing up? So what I heard was this manager is is it’s got a a typical characteristic where they wanna try new things, and they wanna always optimize. They wanna maximize and increase productivity, and they’re sometimes, they overdo it.
Taymour Miri
It it’s a talent. Right? So it shows up naturally. And so if they’re not aware, their their their mind is telling them, oh, there’s a new thing. I can do this differently. Oh, we can increase per so as a team sitting to listen to that, you you get overwhelmed, you get lost. What is the priority here? So let’s just go back to basics. Talents are neutral. Right? So what I mean by that, we’re born with or nurtured or a combination of 2, but after a certain age, these are the dominant talents we have, the way we think, the way we behave, the way we feel.
Taymour Miri
Now, they’re neutral. You can’t blame them. What the thing is that we have a conscious mind and the ability to understand ourselves. So once we understand what talents we have and where it could go way off track and cause problems, we learn to draw it in and manage it. So if that particular manager, if they know that they’re, like, they’re very quick at getting new ideas and wanting to implement, if they look at their team, just all they had to do was just look at the faces of the team. Right? And as they’re talking, they’ll know their eyes are gonna go up and people are lost. So they need to understand that certain so in every single circumstance, us human beings, if it’s an important meeting, that manager needs to go into the meeting with an intentional way of managing that talent. That means he will go step by step, establish what the team’s capable of, establish what the current situation is, and then come up with the idea and allow the team to ponder over it, talk about it, and do one thing at a time until the team’s bought into it, and then they go to the next thing.
Taymour Miri
Inside that manager, there is this activity going like, I wanna I wanna tell them all at the same time. He needs to control. He needs to manage those talents. The talents are neutral. It’s us that makes them good or bad in any circumstance.
know in this meeting, I have to go one step at a time rather than rush in and give all the detail. I know that. Okay? I’m gonna go consciously into this meeting like that.
Ana Melikian
Again, love that. And is going back to where you start, it’s this, yes, it’s this unique wiring, nurturing of that wiring, and knowing ourselves. So that leader, they have to develop that self awareness about their innate characteristics and, knowing when that they can get very energized with a with an idea, but sometimes they have to pay stem cells in order to be effective and learn how also to be aware of their environment and the strengths of their team to be able to they are almost, I think, a leader many times. It’s like the master of orchestra that you have to bring the best out of each. You don’t ask the pianist to play the violin or the violin to play the piano. Usually, when you are at that level, you have your instrument. You have your strength. So but knowing that from your team, then you can make a beautiful composition come alive and really have an incredible impact out there in the world.
Taymour Miri
Absolutely right. And that example you mentioned about that manager in that particular meeting, now if they’ve gone in with the awareness that they have this tendency so how do you convert that beautiful talent that they have in that particular circumstance where the team needs to buy in and be managed? How do they take that talent and then in that meeting, become an an effective manager, which means that while they are conducting the meeting, they are at their strength. So how do we take that talent at to a strength in the task of conducting a meeting? So the the idea here is that talent is available. It’s there. Right? It’s there. So if you sit behind that talent and say, I’m I
Taymour Miri
What else could become a strength of that talent? So very simple formula is your talents invested become your strength. What is that what do I mean? So if that manager has learned coaching conversation skills, listening, asking, requesting, being affirmative, being acknowledging, if they’ve learned those skills, they’re learnable. The talent’s not learnable. The talent is there. So they’ve got the ability to go and learn some skills so that when they’re in a manager when they’re in a meeting as a manager conducting it, what they do is they’ve developed themselves and the talent to be able to conduct the meeting. The meeting is the task. So when they go in there, they will, you know, they’ll slow down because that’s their minds they’ve control the mindset because they’re self aware, and then they’ll ask, how many of you are aware of this particular technology that’s coming to the into the public? And people say, no. I didn’t know.
Taymour Miri
Okay. So this one idea, guys, listen to this idea. Tell me what you think. And then he starts to have a conversation using his skills. So his talent is there functioning, but the the investment in himself is where it’s made the talent convert into a task that is done at excellence.
Ana Melikian
Love it. And the the importance and how they can accelerate that or catalyze that working with a coach for themselves and to know their teams. And that allows them to be able not just to guess, but to have a much better idea where the talents are.
Taymour Miri
Absolutely right. Absolutely right. And by the way, we as human beings, we are complex. Right? It’s we have multiple talents, and talents come together to create our uniqueness. So it’s the best example I have I have a chemistry background, so I I could use this example. So if you look at oxygen as an element, well, oxygen has certain characteristics. Right? It’s a gas, right, and it it’s got certain benefits. Hydrogen is also a gas, and it’s got certain benefits at room temperature, right, in normal conditions.
Taymour Miri
Now if you change the conditions and put these two things together, they become water, completely different. Right? It’s a liquid, has very different functionality. Talents work like that. Our combination of talents makes us unique. So, if we understand what the talents are and how they combine to make us unique, then we’ve got this multiple effect. So, if I go to a meeting and that meeting, as a conductor of that meeting, I know that decision has to be made really fast. I am going to use the talent that drives decision making. It’s a very different talent to the talent where I’m listening and holding back and building relationships.
Taymour Miri
Right? It’s about knowing what circumstances I’m going into, the self-awareness of what I’ve got, and then the development around it of how do I conduct this to get great results in in any particular circumstance.
Ana Melikian
I love this because this is really how we can leverage all these, we are using the word your strength, the word balance, but how can we use all these to create a bigger impact while preventing burnout? That is my big thing because I really believe that if we do the right combination of things, we can have our workforce engaged, energized, even in the flow of high performance with the breaks, with the rest, with energy, and preventing being overextended or preventing being disengaged and, ultimately, preventing the burnout?
Taymour Miri
It’s absolutely spot on. There’s plenty of data worldwide. So, it’s not countries, your culture, or male, female. It’s across the world. And it what it says is if you are playing to your talents, if you’re doing tasks at work that make you feel strong, that word. Right? If you feel strong doing a particular task, there are talents at play. You have dominant talents that are at play. That’s why you feel strong.
Taymour Miri
It’s the way our mind is connected to the way we think and how we feel. So, one of the biggest clues is if you’re doing the tasks that you are going into energized, while you’re in it, you’re energized, while you come out, you’re energized and you’re thinking about it, then your talents are at play. So, what better way as a manager to have to ask people the simple question, how do you feel when you’re doing that task? How do you feel about this task that I’m about to give you, the new task? Now, if the response is, oh, I’m excited. It sounds really good. Right? That excitement comes from the fact that they think they’re going to use their talents to do that task. And utilizing your talents while you’re doing your task will lift your engagement. There is a direct relationship between playing to your strengths, being engaged at work, and performance. There is an absolute direct relationship, and we’ve got the data to support it.
Taymour Miri
Right? Higher for the profitability, higher at pretty much whatever indicator you look at.
Ana Melikian
And you can ask that question to yourself when you are doing a task. How do I feel about this? Do I feel energized? And that is that development of the self-awareness. Woah. So how can people learn more about you, about your work, about strengths, and about your organization, the International Coaching Education, ICE?
Taymour Miri
So, Ana, we’ve got a website, icoachingeducation.com. If you go in there, we have a series of coaching programs that are accredited by International Coaching Federation. Every single program we do has the strength-based development incorporated in it. It’s just part of the way we run those. And they’re designed for team leaders, professionals, and those who want to start their coaching business and develop a unique business in coaching.
Ana Melikian
Love that. And I will make sure that I will put the link in the show notes, and I presume that to connect with you, will be through LinkedIn or through the website.
Taymour Miri
Either way works.
Ana Melikian
Wonderful. Thank you so much for your time today.
Taymour Miri
Thank you, Ana. Thank you, everybody, for listening.
Ana Melikian
If you can think of a person who will find this episode helpful, please share it. Spreading the word about the Mindset Zone Podcast is very powerful. For extra resources, including information about the book and audiobook, Mindset Zone, actualize your human potential, Go to mindset. Zone. Yes, instead of dotcom, it’s dot zone. As always, I am so grateful that you are here. Expand what’s possible for you, for the ones around you, for the world.
Taymour Miri is an ICF master coach and a Gallup certified strengths coach and more recently one of the first 136 coaches worldwide to be awarded an Advanced Certificate in Team Coaching. He has 30 years’ experience in leadership roles and 20 years of experience in coaching. Taymour has trained over 1,500 coaches across five continents and is the founder of International Coaching Education (ICE).