Strengths Discovery
A visual strengths assessment your client completes on their own, with optional 360° feedback and a report you debrief together on the whiteboard.
Quick Facts
- Your client places 64 everyday behaviors by how much energy each one gives and how often they get to use it. It takes about a quarter of an hour.
- Results come as five strength roles with memorable names, plus a radar and landscape across all sixteen roles.
- Four categories: Signature Strengths, Hidden Gems, Energy Drains and Weaknesses.
- Optional 360° feedback: people who know your client answer a short survey through a share link, no account needed.
- One click turns the result into a debrief on the whiteboard, either as a full report deck or as the sailboat metaphor.
The Strengths Discovery gives your client a strengths profile they can actually talk about. They do the assessment on their own time, and you spend the session on what the results mean for them. In this five-minute video Tobi from metaFox walks through both sides:
How to use this tool
Create a session for your client
Open Strengths Discovery in the sidebar and create a session. Pick an existing client or enter a name and email. You can send the invite by email or copy the assessment link and send it yourself.
Your client maps their strengths
Each behavior lands on a simple grid: how much energy it gives and how often your client gets to use it. The profile is ready the moment they finish. You decide whether they see the full report right away.
Bring in the outside view (optional)
After the self-assessment your client can invite colleagues, friends or family to a short feedback survey. The report places their view next to your client's self-image.
Start the debrief on the whiteboard
On the result, choose "Start strengths debrief". Pick the full report, spread across a deck of boards, or the sailboat metaphor. From there you work with sticky notes, strengths cards and every other whiteboard tool.
The four categories
Energy and use are the two axes of the assessment. Together they sort every role into one of four categories, and each category asks a different coaching question:
Signature Strengths
High energy, high use. What your client is good at and enjoys doing. How can they use these even more deliberately?
Hidden Gems
High energy, low use. Strengths that give energy but rarely get room. Where could they show up more often?
Energy Drains
Low energy, high use. Learned behaviors your client does well but that cost energy. Can some of this be reduced, shared or handed off?
Weaknesses
Low energy, low use. Usually fine to leave alone, unless one of them gets in the way of a goal.
Psychological grounding
The model follows the strengths tradition of positive psychology, in particular Alex Linley's work on realized and unrealized strengths. The core idea is that a strength is more than something you do well. It is something you do well that also gives you energy. That is why the assessment asks about energy first and does not stop at performance.
Start with Hidden Gems
Signature Strengths rarely surprise clients. Hidden Gems often do, and they tend to lead straight to concrete next steps: where could this strength get more room in the coming weeks?
Researchers in psychological diagnostics at Ruhr University Bochum accompany the development of the model, and each validation round works only with anonymized data.
Further reading
- Linley, A. (2008). Average to A+: Realising Strengths in Yourself and Others. CAPP Press. The book behind the realized and unrealized strengths distinction.
- Linley, A., Willars, J., & Biswas-Diener, R. (2010). The Strengths Book. CAPP Press.
- On metaFox: the Sailboat Metaphor guide shows the second way to debrief a Strengths Discovery result.