One of the very best measures available to coaches and mentors to support their work is the MTQPlus, a comprehensive personality assessment, and its shorter derivative, the MTQ4Cs. As a foundational coaching tool, it enables practitioners to understand deep-seated mindset drivers rather than just surface behaviours.
The MTQPlus assesses eight factors established as the core components of mental toughness. Mental Toughness is the psychological concept that describes our unconscious mental responses that shape the way we behave – these sit at the core of coaching and mentoring.
A professional coach will have a range of measures in their toolbox. Most will have behavioural instruments that help users to understand how clients act when events occur.
What Makes MTQPlus a Unique Coaching Tool?
The MTQ measure is different, and it is unique. It helps to identify why the client responds to events the way they do — delivering a deeper experience using a proven coaching tool that addresses a fundamental perspective central to a coach’s work.
What else is special? The MTQ measures are normative measures. The client’s responses are compared to a global norm to describe the extent they differ from that norm.
This means that they can be used to compare individuals, and it also means that you can assess differences before and after intervention to explore how this has helped to achieve outcomes such as wellbeing, performance, and organisational agility.
Rigorous Science Behind the Assessment
Does it work? From the user’s perspective, the technical properties of the MTQPlus have been subjected to independent peer review in the highest-ranking academic journals. Users can be confident that what they are using is a reliable and valid coaching tool.
The eight factors can combine to produce over 40,000 different profiles, each one offering a customised explanation of a client’s behaviour.
The MTQ measures generate expert reports for the client and the coach. The coach’s report identifies advantages AND disadvantages that may apply to a particular profile, enabling the client to be described as a unique individual and not as a type or label.
Evidencing Progress in Individual and Team Coaching
The normative feature brings an important benefit for coaches – the ability to evidence what they are doing.
This feature is also valuable in team coaching. It is possible to create a team profile by aggregating the individual profiles for its members. This can give remarkable insight into the team’s behaviour as well as exploring team dynamics from the perspective of team members’ mental response to each other.
Ultimately, the mental toughness concept gives users a lens through which they can understand a complex and hidden aspect of personality, and the MTQ measures bring a data-based approach to developing people and teams.
Given the elusive nature of exploring a client’s attitude to their work and their lives that is not easily observable, it is no wonder that coaches often describe this coaching tool as “making the invisible, visible.”
