Designing Strengths-based Journeys with the Sailboat Metaphor with Mirna Smidt from Trainers Toolbox

which is an entire workshop or coaching session flow that combines concepts like goal setting, working with values, and most importantly, also working with strengths. So in this episode, we dig into all the above: what makes working with strengths a powerful tool, both for working with groups and with individuals, and how you can use sailboats to make it much more memorable, intuitive, and structure your entire journey. Enjoy.

Okay, so there are two things we have in common. On the one hand, a passion for positive psychology, for strengths psychology in particular, and also for working visually. To get us started, can you tell us a bit about these principles and what makes them powerful in your practice?

back to these three pillars, I would say, of what positive psychology can give us as a framework as trainers or facilitators or coaches. One of them is principles. Building on the positive, putting things in the spotlight that are the best in people, putting things we want to grow and nourish in some way. Very often we talk about this as the plant metaphor: if you have a plant and you want it to grow and flourish, it needs the right environment, and you really want to focus on giving it sun and water. When we look into some of the previous self-development approaches or different approaches in learning, often we focus on pulling out the weeds, trimming the plant, but not so much on providing the sun and water. So this idea of principles: let's look into what is flourishing. Let's see how we can support better, provide that nourishment, that water, that sunshine for what is the best in people. We have that mindset in positive

psychology, and we very much have it in strengths as one part of positive psychology, or in the strengths-based approach. Then the second thing is content. These ideas are also very present in strengths: the theory that's data-built, that's research-built, that's science-built. The second thing that positive psychology gives us is this valuable bunch of content and ideas and models and insights that are all very science-based and really built on research. Because positive psychology, while looking into positive things, is very rigorous in research and makes sure it builds things through proper science, so that the insights it provides us have a strong foundation. I love using it, and I loved using it before I fully focused on positive psychology, as this source of ideas, source of models, source of data that can really support many topics we work with in training, from

leadership to communication, to even presentation skills and things like that. I'll give you an example there as well. PERMA, one of the most familiar frameworks for wellbeing, is by Seligman, one of the, let's say, fathers and main authors in positive psychology. It talks about positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and achievements. That's one of the frameworks that we can use to work with somebody's wellbeing in a very simple way, even if we don't have a background in positive psychology, to work with a team or with individuals. Then the third thing, my favorite that we get from positive psychology, is this rich toolbox of different tools and practical interventions and methods. That's back to that engineering that you were mentioning at the beginning. I think where we really get excited is: what can we do with this to actually impact somebody's skills or wellbeing for the better? Which tool can we show them, share with them, practice with them, teach them? I work much more with

giving people tools than guiding them through the frameworks or the steps where they get some result. I work much more with, "Here are some of the tools that would be valuable for you. Let's try it together. Now go home, try it on your own," in the context of workshops usually. And then when you come back for the next module or the next workshop, we maybe discuss a bit: what did you learn? How did it apply in your own life? Where do you need to adjust it a bit? I think this toolbox, for me, especially looking into psychology in general, I love it because it comes with so many practical things and with interventions that are really built step by step, that you can immediately test out and give to people. Maybe my only little resentment with positive psychology is that, being the science, sometimes it gets a bit slower than the practice. So very often some things we would want to know and want to have more data on, we don't get as fast as we would like, and we have to wait for research to catch up. I think

the strengths-based approach inherited exactly the same thing. It also gives us a lot of data about strengths, a lot of interesting insights, a lot of interesting models, but also many different tools. And of course some of the principles of how we can see people more through their strengths, not through the things that they should improve. Just this inherently positive approach, I would say, or an approach more directed towards flourishing.

then what's also awesome about positive psychology is that we have this big variety of tools that are all evidence-based, with proper research put into them. No matter where we are, in training, facilitation, or coaching, we can look at what is suitable for us to work with there.

how to say, misassessed or misjudged in positive psychology: that it only looks into the positive and ignores everything else, and that it wants to replace any other approaches that do differently. But I think positive psychology is really looking to be a complementary approach. It started as a trend that said we are looking into negatives too much, we need to pull a bit on the other side. But it's not trying to be this denial machine where it's just, look at the positive, nothing negative matters. Not at all. It tries to create a balanced picture where the positive is leading a bit, let's say.

familiarizing with them, you build resilience, where again, we are back at positive psychology, I guess. So yeah, that is a very good disclaimer that you give there. And as a means of getting to know you a bit, how do you actually use that now in your work at Trainers Toolbox, and how does that look in the session room, if you want?

Trainers Toolbox is also a course, a fairly short one for experienced trainers, that's about building emotional journeys. That course is not just about positive psychology. It's how to bring more emotions into a training room in a way that really supports the learning, that makes things more memorable, deeper, more engaging. So it builds more, I would say, on emotions. But a big part of the content of that course comes from positive psychology. Because of course, many of the emotions you want to build in the training room are positive, and the ones that maybe are not, you still want to see how to work with them in a constructive way and in a resilient way. So very often, I'll bring in a lot of content, even in things that are not officially a positive psychology course, but that will just be different bits and pieces. Also the strengths-based approach: when working on Train the Trainer, we look a lot into, "Hey, what are your strengths in the way?" Not so directly. We work with feedback, and then in that, we keep tying in more focus on strengths and on these more authentic things

that they're strong at. On the other hand, there is also this more direct content or tools that I'm sharing. I'm also doing a course that's really positive psychology for trainers and coaches and facilitators. It's like, "Hey, come, get the tools. You already have the training knowledge." That is really content-focused in terms of positive psychology and tools-focused. But in many other bits, I also bring in different content and different pieces. For example, flow, one of my favorite concepts in positive psychology: being in the zone, being deeply immersed, an amazing state for learning. I think every trainer should know what flow is and how to build more for flow, how to challenge people to the right level, not to under-challenge them, not to overwhelm them. These are all pieces of content that we can plug in. So I would say ultimately, it's these two things. On one side, principles in the background. How can we use them as the foundation, even without talking about them so openly, just as habits in the way we work? And on the other hand, also

this content and data and tools and tangible little things that plug into different places.

motivation to flow, and high focus. These are some of the many preconditions that flow has to be able to happen. I think strengths are not directly plugged in, in the sense that you also need to use your strengths for flow. But they can very much support flow, because they give us a lot of energy to endure. They're intrinsically motivating, because when we engage with strengths, we engage with things we are good at, and again, that gives us energy. So in a way, it fuels that motivation bit. It fuels that resilience to keep on engaging with things that are enjoyable but difficult. And I think strengths can really be a good filter: which activities might be better activities for us for flow? Which things have more potential to pull out our strengths? Because again, flow is all about challenging ourselves a bit, pushing our skills and abilities a little bit higher, and we can do that best in areas in which we already have some abilities and

some skills, and we are already good at to a certain level. So I would say strengths are by no means a precondition to flow. We don't have to engage with them to be in flow, but they're definitely a shortcut to flow, something that supports flow, and something that to a certain level triggers flow and makes it easier and fuels it. So it would make a lot of sense to use them together. Thank you for the question. Interesting one.

they're in flow, so they actually want to go there and push the end of their abilities a little bit further.

strengths. And I love giving this metaphor just as a visual and as an image of why we would work with strengths. It's funny, because I always start with, here is what strengths give us, and list some evidence-based bits. Like, using strengths gives us more energy. It speeds up the learning. It gives us more positive emotions. It just lists these different things, and nobody remembers that part. Sometimes I share it before the metaphor, sometimes after, and then I share the metaphor, and everybody remembers the metaphor. It's amazing. So the metaphor basically says: as we are moving through our life, we can imagine that we are like a sailing boat. When we are that sailing boat, floating somewhere or sailing somewhere in the open seas, we have two important parts. One of them is the hull of the boat, and one of them is our sails. When we engage with that boat and with the sea around us, we can choose what we focus on. One thing we can focus on

is the leaks in that hull, and every boat has leaks. If you ever sailed, you know there will be some water on the boat. You cannot overmanage, you cannot perfect those leaks enough. There will always be some bits that you can be fixing forever, and you will just keep on finding new ones. Or you can do the second thing, and the second thing is you can engage with the sails. Sails means you open up the sails, they propel you forward. To engage with the sails is enjoyable, it's energetic, it's fun as well, and they're really where our strength is, and they will be able to take us somewhere. So when we engage with the sails, not only do we enjoy it, but we also really advance fast and propel ourselves forward. In every moment, we can choose which one we engage with and to what point. And the message is not, let's never engage with the holes. If I have a massive hole in the hull of my boat, I should probably manage that hole and take care of it. But what I don't want to do is

stay in this micromanaging the holes, overthinking everything I should fix, looking for negative feedback and all the weaknesses that I need to manage and improve, because then I'll never get to a moment that I use the sails. On the other hand, if I focus on managing the big holes and then just focus on those sails, they will take me forward enough that most of the holes won't really matter. So I always want to strive for the balance, but more of my focus should be on the sails. It will make me happier, it will make me more fulfilled, it will give me more energy, and ultimately, it will give me better results. That's the short version, the simple version. What are your thoughts on that one?

very, I would say, a metaphor that we can apply both to personal life in a way. I want to get somewhere, I want to get to a destination, I have my sails. But even to an organizational setting, a team. We could also say, what do we have in our sails? How can we use the wind? This is what I love about metaphors, and this one in particular, that it's so versatile.

control, and things we still want to incorporate in our map of the world, but we don't necessarily want to aim to control them or try to control them. Exactly the opposite. We need to meet them where they are. In this metaphor, we have these eight different elements, and I'll just name them briefly. We have this one, which is our internal feelings and emotions and intuitions. We have sails and leaks, which we already named, our strengths and also our weaknesses. Sails can also include different resources or effective coping, and when we use this metaphor with someone, we can choose where exactly we want to go with it. We can just stay with strengths, or we can broaden it a bit into other resources, ways of coping, and so on. Then we have leaks, which are weaknesses, or in some way ineffective coping with different circumstances. What are the habits that are not serving you here? So we can really, again, broaden it a lot or keep it to really, not your abilities, but characteristics that don't really help you with this.

strengths really under the topic of strengths, but they also fuel and fit into many other topics. We could also pull in this metaphor when talking about values, about goals. I was saying our number three is the destination. That's the goals and wishes. Where are you striving to go? Where are you hoping your strengths will take you? Then we also have the steering wheel, which is needs, values, and meaningful direction in a way. So I think destination, steering wheel, and compass overlap a bit. You could tweak them a bit as well, you could even merge them into one conversation. Depends how you want to go about it. And then of course we have the water, which is the reality, the environment, the things that are around us, the things that we are going through. Then we have the weather, which is uncontrollable circumstances. We can be really lucky and have an amazing sunny day and good winds, or we can have the storms, and what are we going to do with that? This is really useful, the weather, when we want to talk about resilience,

but also when we want to talk about what's our level of control, what's our circle of influence, what are maybe the things that we are putting too much effort in and that are out of our control in a way. Then finally, we have other boats. That can be other people, and they can be our peers, or they can be our teammates. So we can even talk about it in the context of a team: "Hey, let's work on individual strengths, and now we have our fleet that goes together." Or we as a team can be a boat. And if we have a fleet, we can have different boats in that fleet. So we can really play with this, how we adjust it to a certain use case. I don't know if that was too elaborate already. Tobi, what are your thoughts on this one?

topics. But I think it's really powerful. And if you like, I can share the connection that I made immediately when I saw this.

with all the tools, including this one, is that we sometimes take them too rigidly. But in reality, I think the goal is to adapt this to our goal of the workshop. It depends what we want to achieve. I could use this in the parts about strengths. I could use it, like you're saying, maybe more in life design, life coaching type of thing. I could use it with a team to discuss their strategy and where they are moving. But I will just say I see three levels on which you can use it. One is just sharing this brief metaphor as an image for things, and then discussing whatever you want to discuss, strengths or whatever, just making it more memorable, more sticky, and frankly, having less resistance from participants to the idea of looking at things from the more positive side. The second way is to use it in a linear way, and that's what you're saying, the whole session or the whole course, step by step, going through all these different aspects. I rarely use it like that. I do sometimes, but rarely. Many more times, I will use it by starting from some bit, maybe sails and

leaks, or maybe goals, depending on where we want to go, and then see what naturally emerges. I think we can give ourselves as trainers the permission not to be linear and rigid in following the framework, but to really dive into what emerges as most relevant in the context of our workshop goal or the coaching goal. So thank you for that question. I think it's really important, because otherwise it's easy for people to get tied into a framework: "I should use it like this or not use it at all." But I really want to say, "Hey, own it. Adjust it, adapt it, play with it. If some part you don't really understand or it doesn't really resonate, kick it out." Like I said, sometimes I will merge destination, steering wheel, and compass, or some of these elements, more into one to simplify it a bit. Or even water and weather. So we can definitely play with this, and I think we should aim to make it very practical. But Tobi, I heard that you got some good ideas on how to make this practical in one amazing tool. So I would love to see what

you have done there and how you took it.

energy drain. So what do you overuse? What is maybe even more a learned behavior and not a real strength? I think this is great, and I have seen this do wonders in coaching and also in team-building settings. But just like you said earlier, it is also very much a long cognitive report with many words. This is where it really resonated when you said, "Yeah, I give people the facts about positive psychology, the facts about their strengths, and it doesn't stick." This is where metaphors come in. So this is where basically I thought, "Okay, this could be a really cool way to debrief that report." What we have here now is we can say, start the strengths debrief, and then let's work with the sailboat metaphor. This is where we can basically hop into your very report, but now visualized on a sailboat. We have the sails with the five strengths that we

previously discussed. We have some leaks, maybe weaknesses, unhelpful patterns, overused strengths. And then we also have other boats. This is also what we saw on the previous report, that you have also asked feedback from other people. They say, "Okay, this is how I see you, Mirna. These are the strengths I can see in you." We see a nice overlap with your self-assessed strengths here. And yeah, now we have this as a big visual, a big metaphor, and we could go into that with a group or with a single person and explore where it is that we actually want to go. What is happening in life, with our team right now? What is our destination? We can say, "Okay, let's explore that." Where are we right now? What's in the water? How does our reality look? And of course, we can then go into the sails and dig deeper. What are the strengths that I can see here, and maybe what's also missing in this first assessment? And yeah, let's maybe do a

bit of a reaction here, and let me know, Mirna, what resonates here, what do you miss, and how do you feel about all this?

survey brought it all together. So really well done on that, and I definitely recommend everyone to check it out. I'm sure we can also link it in the episode. So now, to your question. I also love that you keep developing it, and every time we talk, there is a new addition to it and a new version, and now the sailboat is there as well. I think it's really cool. Okay, cool. In the sails, what resonated? One thing that I relate to a lot is learner, because that's one strength that always shows up for me, and I think that's the core of who I am. Three that were quite interesting were visionary, motivator, and communicator. I think I do recognize myself in them a lot, but I wouldn't name those as my top strengths from the top of my mind. So it was interesting. I think that's also very interesting with strengths, how often they give you vocabulary and permission to claim something as yours. The one that was maybe most curious for me is inventor, because I think I have a

strong problem-solving part, an engineering background, and a strong learning part, looking for new things. But I don't feel like I'm very quick with jumping into new things. I also hear that it says that I'm drained by rigid procedures sometimes, but I also like a bit of OCD, putting things in place and structures and so on. And I don't feel I'm very strong in experimenting. Depends, but not so much. I'm more like, "Yeah, let me nerd out on everything I can find about it, and then eventually maybe experiment." I'm not jump first and then learn how to swim. So I find this one, inventor, to be really interesting. Also just reflecting on it, discussing it with my buddy on the course a little bit, because they also actually had inventor, but they were exactly the opposite. Jump first, experiment a lot, do quick things, make quick mistakes. That's not me. So it was very interesting to reflect also on the shades, how the same strength can be packed in different ways, show up in

different ways.

But that's one I would not claim as mine. When I reflect on it, I find elements, but it wouldn't intuitively be on my list, I would say.

and then also to embrace it and live it in a way. Take this into our subconscious maybe to some extent and have it top of mind. Okay, I can have this invention resource. I'm stuck now in this problem. What can I do? Let me actually access my invention resource.

always with my top two or three strengths, I would be like, "Oh, that's a thing? Doesn't everyone..." For example, in one of the reports there is this strength called activator, and it's about being quick on doing and creating things and pushing things forward and being very proactive. That's very me, because I get excited easily about things. And for me that was like, what do you mean? Everybody does things. It's not a thing. So I think this vocabulary is interesting. But just to go back to the inventor thing, I just realized something that's also maybe interesting, and that's how they work together. I was saying I do think I'm quick on problem-solving, and I push for problem-solving, and sometimes quick on incorporating new things and learning, but not quick on experimenting. I'm wondering now how much that has to do with visionary, because I'm very goal-oriented, and I'm always like, where are we going and what are we trying to build here? I don't build things just for fun. I build things because I want to create something and I believe in something. I'm thinking now maybe that's the part where

they pull in together, and maybe that's why the part of inventor that's not the visionary, it's just not that.

there. I will usually move deeper, really into goals, and I'll work with it, or values, and I'll work with it in a similar way that we would work in any workshop that was on the goals. So for example, maybe I would ask something like... Well, it really depends. Usually with goals, I start by asking a few questions to warm up. What do you really enjoy doing? What are you grateful for in your life? What is important to you about your life, about the world, and whatnot? And then from there, what are you good at, incorporating strengths, and following the Ikigai, the model where we have what you're good at, what you like doing, and what are the problems that you want to solve in the world. Going down the track of these three, exploring each with a few questions, and then looking for an overlap. And then when working with goals, I'm always going to go from big ones first, so that's going to depend on the context. If it's more individual, probably we're going to discuss lifetime goals and give some time to reflect on

that, and so on. I'll work with three levels, like lifetime, five, one, or lifetime, ten, one, or something like that. I do find three years to be a strong sweet spot where people can think big, because it's long enough, but at the same time they don't disconnect, because it's not as far as five years. So I think that's an interesting one to play with, to incorporate three years somewhere in these three steps that we are working on.

Ikigai or have some more dreamy exercises. One dreamy exercise can be the ideal day, when they're just journaling for ten minutes, or maybe discussing with someone how their ideal day looks, five years from now or one year from now, depending on how big we want to think, and how big I think they're ready to think based on how they come into the workshop and what I discover about them before. So one is the ideal day. Another one is the rocking chair. That's one I use really often, because I feel it's the broadest. That's when you imagine yourself as a 90-year-old sitting on your veranda, all happy, all at peace. You feel there is nothing left that you have to do in life. You're content with everything, and you think back at your life. What are you thinking about? I actually have a guided version of that exercise on the Happiness Academy YouTube channel. If you Google Happiness Academy rocking chair YouTube, it'll pop up. But it's also a famous exercise. You can find it elsewhere too. So that's one.

Or the third one, which I don't use often but can be very powerful, is the funeral speech: to actually write the speech that somebody showing up at your funeral would say about you. Then it's often useful to switch different roles, like your friend, your colleague, and your family maybe. What did they say? I find this one to be disturbing for many people, but it also kicks the butt sometimes. It can be quite useful, but I think it's more to be used when we feel people need to be shaken up a bit, that they're settling too much, that they're taking it easy. Then that one can be quite powerful. I would more often go for the rocking chair. So we have the ideal day, rocking chair, or funeral speech. Not all of them, one of them, just to open up that creative thinking before people have to commit. Because the moment we ask them to write their goals is the moment we ask them to commit already, and then you know how it goes. Everybody is, "Oh, I don't want to put something too big there," or "I don't want to fail," or whatnot.

when I heard you describing the rocking chair exercise now. I was like, "Oh, this is a nice, less threatening variant of the funeral speech." Cool. Okay. Wow. And so out of that phase, we come with a goal that is more or less clear, either long-term visionary or maybe also short-term concrete, or both ideally. Which other parts of a sailboat workshop would you like to highlight? What do you think is still interesting to dig into?

steering wheel, which is needs and values. The compass, your intuition. The other boats or the destination we covered now. And then finally, the weather, which is the circumstances we cannot control.

again, if we're not working in that linear way where we go one step at a time, I think this is one that most commonly will emerge spontaneously. Because when you talk about needs and values or wishes or intuition and feedback from the environment, inevitably something will show up that's, "But this is preventing me," "But I can't do it because of this." And I think there are two very interesting questions there. For me, that's also the ultimate resilience question. I say if you want to shortcut the resilience, you have no time to discuss it with someone, this is your ultimate question: what is out of my control, what is within my control, and what will I do about the part that's within my control? And then we want to move to action. Because what happens when we obsess over the things we cannot control? We waste a huge amount of energy, and we end up demotivated and disempowered, because we keep banging our head against the wall on something we really cannot change, so we just feel more

helpless. We want to avoid that. At the same time, people are often quick to judge that something is out of their control when it's maybe not. So I think an interesting question, even more so in coaching, but I do more workshops, so I can't always have enough feedback on whether I should ask it or not, the interesting question can be: is this really out of your control? Should this really be in the weather, or maybe is it a need or intuition or feedback, is it part of your compass? So I think the first question to go with is really, what's under my control, what's not, and what's not, we put into the weather. But then the interesting one is, does that really belong there? Are there ways to see,

to influence it? And then the amazing weather question is to take it back to the positive, of course, in positive psychology. What are your resources? Who is supporting you? What are your external resources? What relationships can you get support from, in terms of emotion, in terms of action? Who are other people who can support you with this? Which resources do you have from your past

or from your strengths or from previous experiences or from your knowledge? So all these internal resources. These would then go more into other parts, but if we start from there, they will usually grow also into external resources. I also have this option or that option. So I think with the weather, we often recognize that it's not as separate a thing as it seems. It's not a clear line: not under my control, totally under my control. That's a vague line to explore. Which of the internal resources can also slip over into the external? Which of the external obstacles are actually partially internal obstacles? I think this very much relates to our beliefs, and really questioning our mindset and beliefs about things. And we will then have people who are trying too hard in things they cannot control, and the opposite, people who downplay because they don't think they necessarily have control.

actually brought up by your participants, by your clients, because they

come to you with a belief about the world that whatever I want to do, my destination, it's hard, it's even impossible because of this and that factor that is outside my control. And then the weather gives us the chance to challenge that, maybe. Are these beliefs even really true? And then also redirect the focus to what is in my control and what maybe we just accept and live with, and also what outside my control is maybe actually working in my favor. Are there people I can have access to? Are there other resources that we can dig into?

also finding positive things that are supporting us, even though they are not internal resources, but external in a way.

Yeah. To slowly but surely wrap up, is there anything, Mirna, that you think we didn't sufficiently talk about when it comes to positive psychology, strengths, sailboats, anything that we missed?

well, and you can always look on Miroverse for Trainers Toolbox and see what's there from different positive psychology exercises. And then on LinkedIn, that's the easiest place to find me, the easiest place to connect and ask something. So please do. Also give us any feedback on what we forgot to mention or elaborated on too much, so we both know for future episodes as well.

discussed today, but way beyond that, to exploring the report, to discovering different cards, different tools for the strengths, to have some really interesting conversations about our own strengths. Everything about it, how it's built as an event, is about us immersing as a participant to really experiment with these tools, but then ultimately being able to use those tools really effectively with our own clients or participants. So I really enjoyed it, and I would definitely recommend checking it out. You can also join me in Zagreb in November, or anyone else at other events around Europe and the world, because they're all amazing events, if you feel like strengths and working with images and emotions are some of the topics you want to dive into deeper. Tobi, if you have anything to add that I forgot.

metafox.eu/academy or metafox.online.