5 ways to play to your strength

Mind Chi Chat – play to your strength

The Change Maker Profile – is a unique profiling tool which identifies your impact in change, enables identification of where you have the most potent contribution and how to best play to your strength.

In today’s complex environment organisations need everyone to play to their strengths.  The Change Maker Profile will identify how you best influence the success in change.  It will also help you recognise collaborators who will support the project to be sustainable and future proof.

A unique combination

Nicky Carew continues with building team and individual resilience by observing the unique combination of each of the proclivities illustrated here.  There are five of these: the Game Changer; Strategist; Implementer; Polisher and Playmaker. It is likely that you will have a particular inclination to one or two of them. 

When you are working at your best a Game Changer may have some great ideas for change and will probably value someone with a strong Strategist preference to clarify how and if these ideas are driving the purpose and keeping that vision.  The Play Maker preference will naturally energise the teams and orchestrate them to be effective.  The Implementer really knows how to drive a project through and can hand over to the Polisher who will pay attention to the final perfection to delivery.

5 ways to play to your strength
5 ways to play to your strength

Which one are you?

You are able to play a role in each of these proclivities. However when you play to your absolute strengths most of the time, your resilience is super charged because it does not feel like work. It does not drain your energy as much as operating primarily in a proclivity that is intrinsically lower in your preference.  Moreover, if you are forced to operate in a mode that is not your preferred proclivity it contributes to stress and therefore compromises your resilience and that of the team.

The Change Maker Profile creates the lexicon to make challenge safe. Knowing your proclivity and valuing the impact of others helps teams to embrace diversity and to work at their best. 

Strike before adversity does!

Whilst you know that you can be more effective working with others, you do not always have the clarity to know how to work more effectively together. Often adversity strikes before we have embedded a resilient culture. Now more than ever before it is to our detriment if we wait for adversity to strike before realising, we need a resilient team!

Although The Change Maker Group has been working with organisations in change for many years, now every organisation feels that they are deeply entrenched in change – COVID-19 has made sure of that.

Personal Resilience

The first question we tackled was how to help individuals be resilient.  Our own Vanda North, co-creator of the powerful Mind Chi technique, demonstrated BEAT – which stands for Body, Emotions, Actions, Thoughts. The power of spending just a minute a day (as part of an 8 minute a day Mind Chi resilience exercise) to help to create a positive energy in your physical body, as part of your emotions, integral in your actions and to focus your thoughts. You can catch up and watch her video here:

Dr John, co-creator of The Change Maker profile says:

“it is useful to understand what puts individuals under pressure because we’re all different in that regard. What might put you under pressure won’t necessarily put me under pressure. If you can have insight into that then we can help build resilience in individuals and teams.”

He then goes on to explain how our proclivities, help to predict how individuals will experience pressure. Knowing that helps people look after themselves, colleagues and teams.

The strength of a resilient team

Play to organisational strengths for change

Turning to resilient teams he says that there are three ingredients that are key for the team leaders to pay attention to – Perceived Resourcefulness, Optimism and Connectedness. These all work interrelatedly rather like this cog diagram.

If you can help individuals understand what people want to contribute – their perceived resourcefulness – then they will be contributing in the best way they can and this directly makes their contribution feel more valued and they are more resilient. The Change Maker Profile is focussed on this area.

When you create an environment of optimism everyone’s energy levels are more resilient.

And when people feel part of a common purpose and bigger movement, a tribe if you like, then the sense of connectedness creates interdependence and a resilient team. Leaders need to engender the actions and culture of ‘you are not alone’ and ‘we’re in this together’ to help build that cohesiveness and connectedness with a common purpose and shared goals.


Putting all of this together, it is for leaders, as well as the individuals themselves, to work out how to develop the resilience that everyone needs. Having this model at the front of the minds will help leaders build the resilience that everyone needs, with everyone optimistically maximising their personal contributions, to shared goals and with a connected culture.

Nicky, Chi and I are standing by on the ready to take your calls and emails! 

Showing how memory and positive success associations link in your brain
Chi & I look forward to seeing / hearing from YOU!!! 

To book a 15 minute Mind Chi Chat with Vanda to explore how Mind Chi might assist you, your group, team or company build resilience and joy! 

For more wonderful Mind Chi blogs:

Want more resilience for your organisation, here:

Here is a short cartoon about ‘Resilience for Change’