WHY SIGNATURE STRENGTHS MATTER

2 IDEAS FROM ME

1. Signature strengths are your most powerful weapons as a heart warrior. They increase insight, generate joy, promulgate peace, magnify meaning, awaken awareness, strengthen spirits, open opportunities, create connections, expand energy, and ignite the lightning of love in your veins.

2. Strengths are like muscles. Use them or lose them.

2 QUOTES FROM SAGES

1. The VIA Character Strengths Survey at https://viacharacter.com provides a free personal profile of 24 ranked character strengths in common with 2500 years of virtue catalogs across all world traditions and philosophies. Christopher Peterson, Martin Seligman. Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification

2. Character strengths differ from other strengths, such as talents (innate abilities), skills (learned proficiencies), interests (passionate hobbies), values (ideals of prime importance), and resources (external supports). Character strengths are noble virtues and the best path to realizing full potential. In his book Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment, Martin Seligman provides the following criteria for determining which of your character strengths are your signature strengths:

   • A sense of ownership and authenticity (“This is the real me”)

   • A feeling of excitement while displaying it, particularly at first

   • A rapid learning curve using the strength

   • Continuous learning of new ways to enact the strength

   • A sense of yearning to find ways to use it

   • A feeling of inevitability in using the strength (“Try and stop me”)

   • Invigoration rather than exhaustion while using the strength

   • The creation and pursuit of personal projects that revolve around it

   • Joy, zest, enthusiasm, even ecstasy while using it

1 QUESTION FOR YOU TO EXPLORE

1. How do you cultivate your signature strengths?

Namaste,

Duane Nelson