Virtues and Strengths

1. Virtues and Strengths

2. Talents and Strengths • Talents: • Innate • Either have them or you don’t • If we have them we have them whether we choose to use them or not • Nonmoral (neither good nor bad) • Relatively automatic • Limited buildability

3. Strengths • Can be chosen and nurtured • Can decide when to use it, whether to keep building it, or whether to acquire it in the first place • “Building strengths and virtues and using them in daily life are very much a matter of making choices. Building strength and virtue is not about learning, training, and conditioning, but about discovery, creation, and ownership” • “usually produces authentic positive emotion in the doer: pride, satisfaction, joy, fulfillment, and or harmony”

4. Strengths • Not all of our top strengths are “signature strengths”. • How to know which ones are signature: • 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 as the strength is first practiced • 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, and/or ecstasy while using it

5. Strengths • When used can bring sense of happiness and fulfillment • Allow us to experience “flow” • choose or design and activity in which you use one or more of your signature strengths • Allow yourself to become immersed in the experience • Allow us to potentially influence others