Turning Towards Strengths

Exploring Positive Psychology

Yesterday I wrote about my tendency to approach self-improvement from a weakness-elimination standpoint. My strategy has always been to identify what I am bad at and pour all of my energy into remediating those skills.

I’m starting to notice that this has the perverse consequence of causing my weaknesses and deficiencies to constantly be on my mind, which, hilariously, causes me to act them out with some frequency.

Luckily I like dark humor.

Equally luckily, Positive Psychology promotes a different approach: identify your strengths, and then employ the hell out of them.

To that end, Martin Seligman and his team at the University of Pennsylvania* have identified a list of twenty-four character strengths and created a questionnaire to give anyone a simple metric for identifying theirs. As all questionnaires do, it relies on self-reporting, which means it will be only as effective as you allow it to be. Here is a place to be honest with yourself. Perfect honesty is impossible because we all contain multitudes of contradictory impulses, but over 120+ questions I think it’s reasonable to assume that the questionnaire can give you a fairly good description of your strengths.

I took it last night. Here are what it identified as my top five:

1) Love of learning
2) Self-control and self-regulation
3) Curiosity and interest in the world
4) Zest, energy, enthusiasm
5) Industry, diligence, and perseverance

Whether this list corresponds to my actual strengths or merely the strengths I want to cultivate is perhaps open to question (as is the extent to which those two things are separate), but it feels right to me, which is ultimately all that matters. It’s interesting and a little worrisome (though unsurprising) that the lowest score was for “The ability to love and be loved”, but, hey, even if it’s 24th on the list at least it’s still there.

If you’re interested in checking the questionnaire for yourself,here’s a link. You’ll have to sign up for a profile. There are a ton of other questionnaires on there as well.

Positive Psychology at UPenn, Questionnaires

https://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/testcenter
* Due to its name, Positive Psychology could be regarded as self-serving and lacking rigor, so it’s worth mentioning that UPenn is an incredibly prestigious Ivy League university. Of course, the fact that a given body of knowledge comes out of an Ivy League context doesn’t necessarily prove that it is accurate or effective, but it does make the field more difficult to disregard off-hand. That Positive Psychology seems to be thriving at UPenn despite it being a new, unconventional, and contested approach to mental health strikes me as a relatively clear signal that it’s worth investigating.

image credit: Thomas Pate via freeimages.com