Signature Strengths

How often do you spend your time thinking about what you don’t do well? It seems that school life is often focused exclusively on our weaknesses. Even at schools that genuinely believe their feedback is always supportive, we can find ourselves being told multiple times a day that X isn’t good enough, or that Y needs to be better. 

If we spend our time immersed in our weaknesses we can undermine our sense of self worth. We come to think that we are our weaknesses. Of course, it is important to understand our limitations, and to work to improve them. However, when we focus on our strengths, we can learn to amplify them and their benefits. When we focus on our strengths, we spend more time in our day feeling confident and capable. When we focus on our strengths we feel more empowered. A happier, empowered person is bolder and more creative. And a happier, empowered person has much more bandwidth to then work on their limitations.

In a world where we focus primarily on our weaknesses and flaws, we make it needlessly hard for people to enjoy doing their jobs, studying their classes or even maintaining their relationships. After all, why would we do something for the intrinsic value when we are bombarded with white noise telling us that we don’t have much intrinsic value to begin with. In that context, it makes sense that we would start to over-value extrinsic rewards like achieving high grades. 

But the more emphasis we put on extrinsic rewards, such as achieving high grades, the more obsessed we become with achieving those high grades. And the more obsessed we become with achieving high grades, the less we care about learning new things, or taking risks, or following our passions. Extrinsic rewards close our minds to embracing new discoveries. We can call this the ‘Is this on the test?’ syndrome. 

Meanwhile, when we learn to embrace the intrinsic rewards, we train ourselves to become more open minded, more curious, more engaged, more empowered, and more creative. 

So let’s stop focusing primarily on our weaknesses and instead start paying much more attention to our strengths. This might be easier said than done... After having spent so many years being told what we’re not good at, it may not be entirely obvious what our strengths really are.

The Values In Action (VIA) character survey has come to our rescue. It helps us to identify which strengths are the most prominent in our personality. VIA has identified a broad range of character strengths that include:

• bravery 

• humour 

• kindness 

• leadership 

• judgement 

• creativity 

• perseverance 

• prudence 

• love of learning 

• hope 

• social intelligence 

• honesty 

• perspective 

• curiosity 

• appreciation of beauty and excellence 

• gratitude 

• fairness 

• forgiveness 

• love 

• teamwork 

• spirituality 

• self-regulation 

• zest 

• humility

The research suggests that focusing on your top five strengths is optimal. These top five are called our signature strengths. Knowing our signature strengths allows us to concentrate on how to develop them and, crucially, how to use them more frequently in our daily lives. 

Take a look again at the above list of VIA character strengths. Which five do you think are your signature strengths?

Let’s check to see if your intuition is right. Take a few minutes to complete the VIA survey.

Having taken the survey, now take a look at your report. Do these signature strengths ring true or are you surprised? Spend a few minutes thinking about times when you have used each of your signature strengths in action.

Being happier isn’t about working hard, it's about working hard at the right things. By capitalising on the good, we enhance its benefits, and we keep the excitement we feel in that good moment going. Likewise, when we appreciate our strengths, our strengths appreciate in value. In other words, by focusing on our signature strengths and devising new ways to use them daily, we make significant deposits into our wellbeing account. 

Devise at least one way you will use each signature strength more intentionally in your day to day life. 

For example, if one of your signature strengths is kindness perhaps you can pick a day of the week to perform a random act of kindness. If your signature strength is leadership perhaps you can assist a classmate to develop their own leadership capacity. Copy and complete the table below.