Knowing the six core virtues is one thing. The real question to make your life better is, what do you value? What are your core strengths? Because what we value and what we are good at often map pretty closely together.
Those questions are essential for building our strengths to achieve excellence and live a satisfying life. The problem is that others often point out our weaknesses and encourage us to work on those instead. The public school system seems especially primed to identify those weaknesses and confront us with them. That is not necessarily wrong; it’s just not the most productive use of your effort. If you take a trait were you are bellow average and put in a lot of hard work, you can become average or, at best, above average. If you take a strength where you are already above average and put in the same effort, you could achieve excellence.
With that thought in mind, the issue becomes identifying your character strengths so you can build on them. Fortunately, Dr. Seligman has given us a tool to identify our strengths. It is a free, online assessment that maps your unique abilities onto a set of 24 Character Strengths. It then ranks those 24 strengths from highest to lowest, giving you an idea which areas will get you the greatest return and which you might want to outsource to someone else.
The test is called the Values in Action Character Strengths Survey, and it is free online. Just click on the link and go to the site. It asks you to register an account, and it is fine to do so. I have recommended this tool to many people. Neither myself nor anyone else I directed there has been spammed. Once you register, the survey will take you through a series of statements that you rate on a five-point scale from “Very much like me” to “Very much unlike me.” The inventory will take about fifteen minutes to complete, and it is worth investing the time to do it without hurrying.
So do it right now. Go to https://www.viacharacter.org/survey/account/register and get started.
It’s ok. I’ll wait. Go!
Did you do it? Great!
Now that you have your results look at the top five. These are your signature strengths. You will get the most benefit from investing your effort in these areas. Are there any surprises? Any areas that you used to pursue, but have moved away from in your life?
One of my top strengths was creativity. As a general surgeon, some creativity is needed in my job, but there is a limit to how creative you want your surgeon to get in the operating room. When I was younger, creativity was a big part of my life. As a child, I built with Legos. Later I tried my hand at drawing, painting, creative writing, and photography. And I was reading, always reading, mostly science fiction and fantastical stories. But when I entered medical school, I put away all that “fluffy stuff” so I could become a serious professional.
When I took the VIA Character Strengths Survey and saw creativity staring back at me, I wondered how I could incorporate that into my life and my work. I returned to my interest in photography and made up a book of photos paired with quotations that I had printed and placed in the waiting room of my office. That book has proven a great icebreaker. Patients learn a little about me from seeing the images I made and quotations I selected. By the time they make it back to the examination room, they feel they know something about me as a person, not just a generic white-coated doctor.
Shameless self-promotion, you can check out the book by clicking here.
Looking for ways to incorporate your character strengths into aspects of your life and work that don’t require those strength is not just a great way to stand out from the crowd, it is also a way to put more enthusiasm and joy into your life. Building on your strengths will make you happier. Way happier than trying to correct your weaknesses, which bring us to the bottom five items on your list. Many people look at these as their “Character Weaknesses.” I’m not sure that is accurate. The bottom five may simply be things you do not value. If you are agnostic, them spirituality may appear in your bottom five. The odds are that trying to “improve” your spirituality by forcing yourself to attend church services and read from religious text is not going to make you more spiritual; it will just make you more miserable.
Look at the bottom five, not as weaknesses, but as areas better left to others who naturally excel there. You likely have family members or colleagues who can better handle those areas. Let them. If you don’t already know someone like that, then consider outsourcing that task to a professional. As a surgeon, I care for patients and perform operations. Those are my strengths. I am not so good at all the record-keeping and scheduling that is a necessary part of running my office, so I have people to handle those tasks for me. Consider how you might do the same.
Make some serious time to contemplate how you can use and build on your character strengths. It may be some of your best spent time improving both your work and your personal life. Remember, you don’t have to be a Creative (capital C) to use that strength by becoming the next Picasso. You can be a creative (lower case c) and put a book of photographs and quotes in your office waiting room to break the ice. Either way, it will be beneficial for you and others.
This was a survey I had not bumped into yet. Thanks for the introduction and insights. I like your approach to bringing neglected ones back into the flow of your life and work.