As many surprising cooperative endeavors have demonstrated in recent years, from open-source software development to the explosion of Wikipedia and its unexpectedly high-quality content, what lies beyond the era of information and sheer competition is an era of collaboration. Leaders are learning to connect so that they might borrow and duplicate (“the highest form of flattery”). Successful leaders create alliances and networks instead of focusing on the gigantism popular at the end of the last century. We might call this “appreciative competition”.

The Window of Strengths

As we journey outward as human service providers in learning to appreciate other people and situations we also begin to understand and appreciate ourselves in new ways. We come back full circle to ourselves and to self-understanding—a necessity for the counselor, coach, or consultant who has to role-model a superior level of self-awareness and inner alignment. The appreciative window of strength offers one way to comprehend the self-insight gained from an appreciative perspective and becomes a fundamental tool for the human service provider.

There are essentially two ways in which both we and our human service clients come to appreciate our own distinctive strengths: through self-perception and the perceptions of other people. Our self-perceptions of strengths are based on the processes of reflection upon our impact on the world in which we live and work. We draw comparisons with other people who are also impacting this world. The perceptions of other people are made known to us through direct or indirect feedback. In some cases, we know of our strengths. In other cases, we do not. Similarly, in some cases, other people know of our distinctive strengths. In other cases, they do not.