Character Strengths + How to Use Them

I finished up my class last week and have already started a new one!  Stay tuned for some insights from that.  But first, the topic of this final week was character strengths and how to use them.  To start the week out, we were asked to take the VIA (values in action) survey, which can be found here.  This tool ranks you on 24 strengths based on how you answer how much certain statements describe you.  The top 5 strengths are said to be your signature strengths.  These tend to just flow out of you, like writing with your dominant hand.  The bottom 5 are doable, but require effort, like writing with your non-dominant hand.

According to VIA, my signature strengths are:
  1. Kindness and Generosity - You are never too busy to do a favor.  You enjoy doing good deeds for others, even if you don't know them well.
  2. Social Intelligence - You are aware of the motives and feelings of others.  You fit into different social situations, and know what to do to put others at ease.
  3. Leadership - You encourage a group to get things done and make everyone feel included.  You do a good job organizing activities and seeing that they happen.
  4. Honesty, authenticity and genuineness - You are a 'real' person.  You speak the truth and live your life in an genuine/authentic way.
  5. Fairness, equity and justice - You do not let your personal feelings bias your decisions about other people.  You give everyone a chance.
And my bottom 5 are:
  • Capacity to love and be loved - You value close relations with others, in particular those in which sharing and caring are reciprocated.
  • Appreciation of beauty and excellence - You notice and appreciate beauty, excellence, from nature to art to mathematics to science to everyday experience.
  • Caution, prudence and discretion - You are a careful person, and your choices are consistently prudent ones.
  • Modesty - You do not regard yourself as special.
  • Spirituality, faith - You have strong and coherent beliefs about the higher purpose and meaning of the universe.

Now, I won't go into too many details on these because it would be hard to understand if you don't know me well, but I encourage you all to take the survey for yourself.  The outcomes were interesting to me!

In the material for this week, we discussed how character strengths could sometimes actually cause us problems.  My professor said it well when she said, "Sometimes the best of who we are can get us into trouble".  Since these character strengths tend to just flow out of you, it is possible that this happens in the wrong place or at the wrong time.  For instance, if you have humor as a character strength, there has probably been a time where you made a joke and it didn't land well.  You may have actually ended up offending someone inadvertently. 

For me, my character strength of leadership could be annoying to those within a group project.  I have been known to try and get assignments done ahead of time and this may rub someone the wrong way.  Additionally, my sharing my opinions confidently might alienate group members who are less out-spoken and cause them to not want to contribute.  

I also have honesty as one of my top character strengths.  When it comes to honesty, sometimes the truth hurts.  It is important that with this character strength you choose when to say things and when to stay quiet.  Luckily for me, I also have the character strength of social intelligence, so I am able to navigate this predicament a bit more easily than some.  I have found that I can tell when the truth may need to be delivered privately or more gently to particular individuals.

One last point from this section is that individuals can judge themselves because they don't have a character strength that they see in someone else.  I find myself doing this quite often.  I have always been a competitive person and I think this is why I fall into this trap so easily.  I am not at all artistic, but I have some incredibly artistic friends.  I occasionally feel lesser because I don't have the ability to offer some medium of art into the world in the way that these friends do.  I am also not a person who accepts compliments or love easily.  I am good at expressing my feelings of appreciation and love to my friends, but then struggle to believe the nice things that others say about me.  I wish I could be better at that.....but I can say that I am trying!

What are your character strengths?  And how can you work to actively improve in those bottom trait categories?

-Vicky



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