- Thinkers and scholars
for thousands of years have recognized the importance of virtue. If you talked to a
philosopher like Aristotle about what made for a good life, Aristotle would say that a good life was a life filled with 'eudaimonia;' his word for flourishing. But he thought that flourishing came from cultivating a life of virtue. Some of the most exciting
work on the power of virtue comes from Marty Seligman
and Chris Peterson. They went back to the ancient traditions, and what they found was that there seemed
to be these six domains into which the other virtues fall, with around 24 different
character virtues. They're the kind of things that we know universally are
just good things to have, but that people tend to have
in slightly different degrees. These are our character strengths. Whenever we engage with any of these, we wind up becoming a
more virtuous person; the kind of person that Aristotle would really want us to be. But it turns out that scientific work suggests that they can
impact our behavior, our sense of meaning, but
also our sense of happiness. When we're engaging with
our character strengths, we tend to feel a little bit better, but it's not just any
old character strengths that can make us feel happier. It turns out that each of us has a couple different character strengths that resonate with us really well. So when we look at the big
list of character strengths that Seligman and Peterson came up with, there might be a couple of
those character strengths that pop out at you, that
you might think like, "Ah, persistence is fine, but I'm really a person that
has a love of learning," or, "I'm really a person
that cares about humor." Those specific things that pop out for you are what researchers have called
your 'signature strengths.' They're the ones that you feel as part of a sense of your own identity, and they're also the ones that
when you engage in them more the evidence suggests
that you will feel better. One of my favorite studies in the domain of character strengths work is the power that our
signature strengths have for improving how much we love our job. Lots of people are really interested in this question of like, "Okay, what will make me work better? What will make me perform better at work? But also what can I do
to love my job more?" And our instant go-to reaction is that we need to pay people more, right? If only I get a raise, I
would love my job more. But the evidence suggests
that a faster path, maybe a more effective path
to feeling better at work, is to make sure you're engaging more of your signature strengths. In fact, if you engage more of your signature strengths at work, you tend to not just love your job more, you tend to perform better at your job, and perhaps not surprisingly,
you tend to earn more money. We think earning more money is the path to being happy at work, but it might be that engaging
our signature strengths is the path to performing better, which then get us earning more money. And so, if we really want
to feel better at work, we need to find ways to bring in more of our signature strengths. And this can feel a little
bit tricky sometimes because you might think, "Well, you know, I'm a
receptionist," or, you know, "I just work on a bunch of
Excel sheets at work," right? Like, "How am I gonna bring in the strengths of humor or zest and so on?" And there's some lovely work by the Yale School of Management
professor Amy Wrzesniewski that gives us a path forward for this. She says that you can engage more of your signature strengths at work through the practice of what
she calls 'job crafting.' Job crafting is just the act of taking your regular job description and trying to figure out
where you can squeeze in more of your signature strengths. You're not changing really
exactly what you do at work, but you're changing how you frame it, and the things you pay attention to to get in more of those
character strengths that feel like you, that
sort of light you up. The reason I love Amy
Wrzesniewski's work so much is that she looks at a profession
where you might not think that there was a lot of
flexibility for job crafting. One of her janitorial staff members talked about working on a coma ward. She said that she would
exercise creativity by just ever so subtly
moving the paintings and the plants in the room around. And she thought, "You know, I'm not sure
if that's helping people, but I like to do whatever
I can do creatively to make the environment more interesting to maybe help these patients." These were things that weren't
in someone's job description, but they were exercising job crafting to find a way to engage
more of their virtues. And by doing that, they
wound up feeling happier and feeling their job
was more of a calling than it would've been otherwise. As we think about bringing more of our signature strengths into our lives, it's important to note that
this isn't just something that you need to do at work- there's many ways to engage
in our signature strengths. How can you bring a sense of humor or a sense of zest or love of
learning into your leisure? And I think this is really important because there's often a sense that we're not using our
leisure as well as we could be. We have this free time, but we often do something
that's kind of passive. You know, we plop down and watch TV, or we scroll through social media. Usually those things aren't engaging any of our signature strengths 'cause we're doing something
that's just so passive. So the best way to figure
out your signature strengths, honestly, is just to look at a big list of the 24 character strengths. Read through them and see which ones kind
of pop out for you. If you wanna do it a little
bit more systematically, there's a fantastic
survey that you can take, a much more well-validated
psychometric survey, on the VIA Character Strengths website. You can kind of go through
and answer these questions, and it will print out for you
a list of your 24 strengths in the order that they resonate for you. So you can do it the more systematic way, or you can do it the quick and dirty way. The key is that you figure out ones that really resonate with you, and commit to putting those into practice. And when you look at these
different character strengths, there'll be some strengths
that will be at the top, your signature strengths, and then you'll kind of go down as you go. I think it's important to recognize though that if you have a few strengths that are at the bottom of the list, that doesn't mean you're
bad at these strengths or that doesn't mean that they're things that you'll never get good at. Those, in fact, might be the spots where you can really take a growth mindset and work on these things even more. Scientific studies of the
power of character strengths are relatively new, but the impact of character
strengths is something that people have known
about for a long time. All over the world, we talk about the meaning that we can get from engaging with our virtues. when you're doing something
that brings you flow and makes you feel really energized. The Japanese concept
of 'ikigai,' you know, doing really meaningful work that hits upon your
particular set of strengths. These are concepts that
we see around the world that just tell us the impact that engaging with our character strengths can have on our performance, but also on our well-being.
