This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 at 1:49 pm and is filed under Free Stuff, Positive Psychology Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
At the root of happiness, well-being, resilience and living a satisfying life is the concept of “playing to your strengths.” Currently there are a couple of measures which address strengths, and the one I am suggesting people engage in is the Values in Action (VIA) Signature Strengths Test (site listed in resource section to the left.)
So often throughout our lives we can find ourselves in situations which don’t “feel” right. Of course, the first impulse is to question, “what’s wrong with me?” “how do I need to change to adapt to this setting?” We have all been coached and schooled in examining our “short comings” but rarely do we attend to and value those underlying strengths that make us uniquely us.
Humor and playfulness has been a strength of mine for years. However, I didn’t always view that as a strength because in certain settings it was viewed critically by my cohorts or peers. Once I excepted that I need to participate in relationships, settings, and communities where that strength was honored and valued, life became much easier.
An exercise I did when first reading about strengths was to create a collage of my top 5 strengths and I placed it in a key point in my house. I essentially began to honor and respect those top 5 strengths and when the world “tilted” I would question how my strengths might enter in to “save me.” As I became braver I looked at the virtues that were at the bottom…like so many of my favorite people, my all time low scoring virtue was “self regulation”. As has been suggested by Ben Dean, Phd and others, we can use our top strengths to “work with” our “weaknesses”.
So, if you haven’t taken the VIA yet, I hope this serves to encourage you to start examining what’s right with you instead of what’s wrong with you…
Lead with your muscle…
Beth
read comments (3)
October 10th, 2007 at 7:08 pm
Now why would I have looked at my lowest strength? The focus has always been on the top 5 and for some reason my little brain didn’t even want to look further. Didn’t even think about looking further.
I think it was kind of like connecting anything below the five as being less than okay. Only that really isn’t true.
It has been a long day and my mind isn’t functioning as it should so what really hit me when I read your words is hard to spit out. maybe later.
October 11th, 2007 at 6:44 pm
After taking the VIA I learned my top 5 strengths and I wasn’t all that surprised. But going back and looking at my lowest (Hope, Optimism and Future-mindedness) makes me realize that they are strengths that I should have! It makes me face what my life has become and that I desperately need a change. I will surely kick and scream, but nevertheless make my way towards it.
October 15th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
Yeah, those low scores can be worked with and increased…SK, a low score in hope, optimism and future mindedness is so workable. The cool thing is that we are learning more and more that things like optimism are a way of thinking, viewing the world, and that even though, old habits die hard…they do die…
In an interview with Alex Lindley, a biggie in positive psychology, the notion of using strengths to bolster areas that are “less robust” makes great sense.