In this short blog post I’m going to focus on what why it’s helpful to get to know what your strengths are, and ways in which you can look to build these strengths.
Why is it important to know about your strengths?
Strengths are the core of what makes us tick, what we value and what we find fulfilling. These might be things that we want to have more of in our lives, they are what make us feel good about ourselves. To understand what our strengths are allows us to develop self-understanding and focus on positive outcomes (such as where we have been successful and done things well). This self-knowledge can help us in many contexts. If we are looking for a new job it can be helpful to understand our strengths so that we align any aspired-for role with what we value. If we know we are good at certain things we want to see if we can get more of that into our working day. Not only is it heartening to start out from a point at which we celebrate our strengths, rather than focusing on the negatives, there’s also evidence that when we use our strengths we are more engaged, more confident and less stressed out (see for example, Linley et al, The Strengths Book, 2010).
How do I use my strengths to best advantage?
Once you have established what your strengths are you can begin to think about what you might want to build and how.
Understand the contexts within which you use your strengths. The following exercise is borrowed from Ryan Niemiec’s (2017) Character Strengths Interventions. He suggests that one way to think about our strengths is to understand the contexts within which they manifest strongly, and the contexts in which they manifest to a lesser degree. Firstly, write about one situation in which you expressed your chosen strength powerfully. As you do this, consider in detail what the situation was, and what about it enabled you to manifest your strength. What was the impact of you manifesting this strength? Now repeat this exercise with another context in which your strength was manifested less powerfully. What was it about this situation (the people/the location/the type of activity?) that impacted on you being able to express your strength? Understanding how contexts impact on the degree of your strength’s expression can help you to think carefully about how, why and where you would like to develop that strength. It might be that particular situations don’t allow you to manifest particular strengths (e.g. humour at formal meetings); it might be that there are particular situations that you thrive in, that you want to bring into your life more.
Understand how you use strengths together. Here’s another nice exercise from Niemiec. He suggests that in any given situation you might also be using a number of your strengths in different ways. He suggest here that you pick an event that is particularly meaningful to you, and rate where your strengths present at the beginning, middle and end of the activity. I chose coaching as a hypothetical example (which I think works just as well if you are being coached, or if you are the coach). You’ll see that humour is low here and only increases when we’re in the flow in the middle of the session, but the other strengths are quite high. Niemiec suggests you can do this exercise for all 24 of the VIA strengths at the same time – but you’ll see below that I’ve picked only 7 strengths and already my chart is busy. I think it’s fine here to focus on your top strengths. Where this exercise can be really useful is to get you thinking about the relative degree of the strengths you are using and where you use different strengths in combination with each other. This can allow you to build a more nuanced picture of your strengths.
Use your ‘signature strengths’ in new ways: this exercise is a positive psychology intervention (Seligman, 2005), which demonstrated positive outcomes for those with and without depressive symptoms. Here a sample were advised to pick their top 5 strengths (using the VIA survey), and then use those strengths in a new and different way, each day, across 7 days. The effects of this were registered particularly after 1 month (in terms of ‘happiness’ scores). If you used your signature strengths for new ways across a week, what would you do? How would you measure the success of the impact? (‘Authentic Happiness’ questionnaires from Seligman are available here).
It’s also important to understand that just because something is a core strength for you, you don’t need to use it at every opportunity. Linley et al point out that by paying attention to the context and situation in which we use our strengths, we can be careful not to overplay them. This is important they caution, as overplayed strengths can lead to a decline in performance. Instead, they suggest we should be looking at our ‘unrealised strengths’: things that energise us, but what we don’t use very often. It is here, in increasing our ‘unrealised strengths’, the things we don’t do very much, that we can really make a difference to our wellbeing and confidence. A positive psychology intervention for deploying lesser-used strengths can be found here; again participants used 5 of their ‘unrealised’ strengths (identified using VIA) across 1 week, with positive results. So what would you see as your lesser-used strengths? What situations and activities could you see yourself using them in? What difference would that make to you?
So strengths are good for your wellbeing, good for your performance, and there are a number of ways in which you can bring them more into your day to day life. Let me leave you with a question: What will you take from this blog post to enable you to draw out your strengths more?
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