Strengthscope: discover and optimise your strengths
A strength isn’t simply something you’re good at. It’s something you’re good at that gives you energy back. Plenty of tasks you’re entirely competent at take energy away instead, and a working life made mostly of those is what drains motivation.
Strengthscope was the first strengths assessment in the world to achieve BPS Registered Test status. It measures 24 strengths across four areas: emotional, relational, thinking, and execution. You complete it online and we work through your report together, so you can see where your energy actually comes from and start engaging with your strengths more deliberately and more often.
Available as an individual assessment, a 360 with colleague feedback, a leadership version, and a team profile showing where a group’s strengths overlap and complement each other.
I am a Strengthscope Master Practitioner, accredited to deliver Strengthscope, Strengthscope 360, Strengthscope Leader, and Strengthscope Teams.
Workshops: for collegiate learning
I design and deliver workshops for organisations developing their researchers and professional staff. Participants are typically doctoral researchers, early career researchers and clinician researchers, alongside the professional services and line-management staff who work with them.
Topics include perfectionism and imposter feelings; stress, resilience and strengths; workload and strategic prioritisation; assertiveness; negotiation; resolving conflict in the research environment; navigating change and uncertainty; and communicating research to non-specialists. They’re interactive, usually three hours, and run online. Sessions can be adapted for a particular cohort, or condensed into a shorter, more focused webinar.
I’ve run these for universities, doctoral training partnerships and research institutes, and also for the NHS, learned societies, bioscience companies, local government, and the arts and museums sector.
I’m a chartered psychologist and an experienced learning designer, and that shows up in the quality of the design, as well as in the two things participants name most consistently in feedback: the sessions are accessible, and they’re safe enough that people raise the difficulties they’re actually having. I worked with a university consortium to develop their accessibility policy for online workshops.
We have been the most exhausted and battered cohort ever. I have wondered at times how any one of us could have been motivated at all to engage or change. Sarah managed it. - Professional services staff, personal development programme
We have been the most exhausted and battered cohort ever. I have wondered at times how any one of us could have been motivated at all to engage or change. Sarah managed it.
- Professional services staff, personal development programme
I’m Dr Sarah Robins-Hobden, a Chartered Psychologist and Chartered Coaching Psychologist, an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society, and a BPS-registered (RAPPS) supervisor of coaching psychologists. Since 2013 I’ve worked as a freelance coach and researcher developer across universities, research institutes, the NHS, learned societies, bioscience companies, local government, and the arts and museums sector.
I left school at sixteen with one GCSE. I know what it is to be certain you don’t belong somewhere, and to be wrong about it. That’s probably why my most requested workshop is about handling imposter feelings.
Reflexive practice sits at the core of how I work. I take more supervision than either of my professional bodies requires, because the depth of thinking I do about my own work is exactly what I ask of my clients.
