- 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.