3 Strategies to Leverage Your Character Strengths - IBZ Coaching

3 Strategies to Leverage Your Character Strengths

3 Strategies to Leverage Your Character Strengths:

Feel Happier in Your Life and Leadership Roles

Do you want to gain momentum and feel happier in this season of your personal and professional life?

Capitalize on your strengths. Leverage your top character strengths not only to lead more effectively but to feel greater well-being during the process. Your personal strengths can help you flourish in your life, your work, and your contributions to the world.

What are Character Strengths?

Your character strengths reflect your core personal identity and can bolster your thinking, feeling, meaning, and engagement. According to Martin Seligman, PhD, father of positive psychology, the 24 character strengths are the cornerstone of personal well-being and a flourishing life. These strengths are: creativity, curiosity, judgment, love of learning, perspective, bravery, perseverance, honesty, zest, love, kindness, social intelligence, teamwork, fairness, leadership, forgiveness, humility, prudence, self-regulation, appreciation of beauty and excellence, gratitude, hope, humor, and spirituality.

Know Your Top Strengths

To build your momentum toward achieving your professional and personal goals, identify your top strengths and learn to use them in new and more effective ways. Building on our top (signature) strengths has been consistently shown to increase our happiness and improve work engagement, life satisfaction, and well-being.

Strategy 1: Here are 4 steps identified by positive psychologist Ryan Niemiec, PhD, the leading authority on character strengths, to help you identify and use your top strengths. These steps have been validated internationally with populations of children and adults:

    1. To boost your leadership capital for life and work, identify your top strengths. Take the free VIA Survey, a quick (less than 15 minutes), self-assessment of your personal strengths. It’s highly evidence-based and has been taken by over 7 million people throughout the world.  You can find the VIA at http://www.viacharacter.org/www/Character-Strengths-Survey
    2. Look at your VIA findings, and as Dr. Niemiec suggests, ask yourself what strengths are most essential to who you are as an individual.
    3. Choose one of these strengths and find a way to use it in a new way each day for a week – at home or at work.
    4. Notice how you feel and what thoughts and emotions emerge when you capitalize on this strength (Seligman, Steen, Park & Peterson (2005).
3 Strategies to Leverage Your Character Strengths - IBZ Coaching

Strategy 2: Apply Your Top Character Strengths in Your Personal and Professional Life.
Now figure out how to apply your top strengths to propel yourself toward your goals. Here are a few ways to use some of the 24 strengths:

Leadership – Developing and maintaining good relations among a group and engaging them toward accomplishment:

  • Compliment employees, colleagues, family, and friends on a job well done – one-to-one, in a meeting, or by email.
  • Strengthen interpersonal relationships by paying attention to your positivity ratio – share more positive than negative messages with people when you communicate (Cameron, 2012).
  • Create your own consultation team with co-workers or other professionals in your field, and offer each other moral support.
  • Assist a colleague or co-worker who is struggling in the leadership process.
  • Seek assistance and encouragement from others when you need it.

Perseverance – Staying on task toward what you start, despite challenges or obstacles:

  • Set a meaningful long-term goal for your professional or personal life.
  • On a daily or weekly basis, set small, manageable sub-goals to propel you toward this goal.
  • Track your progress on your calendar or computer.
  • When something gets in the way, be adaptive. Figure out how to move past it, and reach your goal.
  • Identify your most productive hours of the day.  Work on your goal during those times.

Kindness – Caring about the needs of others and being willing to do a good deed without expecting a return:

  • Offer a kind word to people as you go through the day, for example, at the office, coffee shop, grocery store, via email, at meetings, or while traveling.
  • Offer a small random act of kindness toward someone else – whether someone you know or a complete stranger.
  • Share something with another person or offer to help them if you know something they don’t know.
  • Be kind to yourself. Acknowledge your progress and achievements.Take good care of yourself with nutritious foods, exercise, and enough sleep.

Strategy 3: Act As If
If, like many people, you have a negativity bias, focusing on areas of weakness rather than strengths, try this strategy recommended by Shannon Polly and Kathryn Britton in their book, Character Strengths Matter. You can “act as if” to pull up strengths at the lower end of your VIA strengths ratings. Pretend you have that lower strength as a top strength and act as if. Like an actor, practice positive outcomes and create new stories about how you utilize this strength to build momentum and positive engagement. This strategy can make a difference in personal and professional realms – in your leadership role at work and as a leader in your own life.

Crossing the Finish Line
As you leverage your strengths – empowering yourself and others toward achieving positive results in life and at work – you may experience greater well-being than you might have imagined.

Recommended Readings and Resources:

Ilene Berns-Zare - Life and Work Coach
Would you like a coach to help you recognize your character strengths and apply them to your personal life and work? Let’s chat! Contact Ilene
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Ilene Berns-Zare, PsyD, PCC, CMC is an ICF Credentialed Professional Coach and Speaker. Ilene helps people live their best lives by bringing mind, body, and spirit into flow with their strengths, callings and potential. She inspires clients to find fresh perspectives and access their full potential as creative, resourceful, whole persons. Find Ilene online and access free resources at http://ileneberns-zare.com.

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Ilene

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