When Nils started working with Jackie, he sensed her frustration and distraction during team meetings. Read on to find out how they broke through this barrier by diving into her strengths.

To Jackie, meetings were frustrating and pointless. Internal meetings. Team meetings. Company meetings. Apart from talking to customers, she felt that all meeting sessions were a monumental waste of time. She would avoid scheduling or reply to meeting requests as much as she could.

When we dove into her strengths profile, we recognized that her number one strength was Activator. The activator strength description says, "people exceptionally talented in the activator theme can make things happen by turning thoughts into action. They are often impatient." Impatience was an accurate description of how Jackie behaved.

She liked to say, "When can we start?" and she knew that action equals results. As an activator, she would miss opportunities to bring others along with her. Her focus was on getting started and moving forward. She would leave people in the dust, and that hurt her personal and professional relationships. Her dominant strength was firing all the time.

Her second strength was Adaptability, which means she would go with the flow. There was a contrast between the top two strengths because the Activator says "Let's get going now", yet she was OK when a project went off the rails because she knew she could find a solution to whatever was going wrong.

She had another strength in her profile called Ideation. The description for this theme says "People who are exceptionally talented in the Ideation theme are fascinated by ideas. They're able to find connections between seemingly disparate phenomena." For Jackie, this was 100% accurate. We talked through some scenarios for how her strengths could work for and against her.

If her Activator took over, then she would leave people behind. If Adaptability were to take over, she would become impatient. If Ideation went into overdrive, she would create a lot of ideas but feel stuck because she wouldn't be making any progress. There is a delicate balance to strengths, so we explored the different ways she could flex them in various situations, in both her personal and professional life.

Jackie realized that Ideation would help her overcome her meeting-rage. She said "You know, I should write down my ideas. I think that would help a lot. If I spend time ideating and finding the patterns, finding the connections, then, when I use the Activator, I can get the project off the ground. If something goes wrong, I can use my Adaptability strength to take care of it."

Jackie was clear on how to move forward. She created a regular, weekly one-on-one (a meeting!) to write, plan and check in. Jackie also dedicated a chunk of time to ideation. She knew that if she spent time on ideation, then her other strengths could be relied on when the time was right. By the end of this process, she understood the importance of allowing ideation to happen, for her as well as other people in meetings.