The Power of Character Strengths: Appreciate and Ignite Your Positive Personality

by Ryan M. Niemiec

Virtues refer to the 6 core characteristics valued by philosophers and theologians across culture and time. Character strengths refer to the 24 positive personality ingredients of a fulfilling life, the pathways to the virtues.

As the poet Walt Whitman once observed, “Character and personal force are the only investments that are worth anything.”

As we often say, all 24 character strengths matter. Each helps us in different ways as we create greater wellness, build relationships, navigate stress, and reach our goals.

Character is the part of your personality that other people tend to admire, respect, and cherish. It is the sum total of those aspects of who you are as a person that leads others to see you as a person with integrity, a person who contributes, a person who can be trusted.

Character strengths are basic elements of our identity. When we express these character strengths through our thoughts and actions, research says we tend to feel happier, more connected, and more productive.

It’s worth noting that not every personal strength is a character strength. Talents like a natural ability to play music or basketball, or having good spatial or writing ability are also strengths, but they’re not part of character.

When things are going well, we can use character strengths to help us see what is best in ourselves and others.

When things are going poorly, we can use character strengths to give balance to the struggles we face, to shift our focus from the negative to the positive, to avoid becoming overly self-critical by thinking about our strengths rather than what’s wrong with us.

The newest research is showing that techniques for helping people boost their strengths can have important advantages over techniques that focus on correcting their deficits.

One of those biases is the tendency to remember and be affected more by negative events than by positive events. Problems and upsetting emotions stick with us like glue.

Reflecting on our strengths can help us offset those negative experiences, can help us figure out our natural best way to avoid them in the future, and can remind us that we have unique resources available to us in negative situations.

Research shows most of us are disengaged from the work we are doing. We go through the motions, get caught up in routines, and are not as productive as we could be. But research also suggests that when we make the most of our character strengths—and use them in our jobs—we become happier at work, more productive, and more engaged in what we are doing.

There’s more that we don’t know about ourselves than what we do know. And in some cases, others are more aware of how we are coming across than we are!

Character is plural. This is, according to the late scientist Christopher Peterson,

What Peterson meant by this is that character can’t be captured in a single concept such as honesty or integrity. Rather, people express a variety of character strengths, and almost always are expressing multiple strengths at the same time.

There isn’t a person who is the “good character” or “perfect character” person who uses all 24 strengths and makes no mistakes, just as there isn’t a person who uses zero strengths and is completely “bad.”

The concept of signature strengths is an important part of the VIA Classification. These are the strengths that are strongest or most prominent in your own strengths profile.

Explore these top strengths within yourself. Find new ways to express them at home, work, in relationships, and in your community. If you do, that is part of what is referred to as “being authentic.”

A phasic strength is a non-signature strength that you bring forth strongly in a given situation. This occurs when you “rise to the occasion.”

Character strengths can be developed. The last decade of research in personality psychology has resulted in the exciting finding that our personality, including our character, can change.

what you attend to grows.

Remember, character is plural: each of us has many strengths and we are using many of them at once rather than one at a time in isolation.

When you express your character strengths in your actions, that is not a guarantee that what you do will be successful, well-received by others, or the best choice for the situation.

You can overuse a strength by coming across too intensely for the situation or by negatively impacting another person unintentionally. You are even more vulnerable to regularly underusing your strengths, such as by not putting your best foot forward, not challenging yourself, not paying attention, or not being authentic.

There is no exact way to make sure you use the perfect amount of a character strength, or avoid its underuse or overuse. There are only concepts, ideas, examples, and ways of thinking about our lives through these lenses.

Remember that this is a learning exercise about getting to know yourself better so treat these insights as useful information, rather than an opportunity to beat yourself up. Objective self-review is an important part of optimal strengths use!

The person who is marked by wisdom is eager to learn about the world, even at the risk of having to accept being wrong.

Creativity is thinking of new ways to do things. It involves producing ideas or behaviors that are original. However, originality is not enough: whatever is created, whether an idea or a product, must also be useful or adaptable.

What really distinguishes a creative person is not intelligence; it is their general tendency to approach new dilemmas with a commitment to trying new solutions.

To be curious is to explore and discover, to take an interest in ongoing experience for its own sake. Curiosity is often described as novelty-seeking and being open to experience, and it’s associated with the natural desire to build knowledge.

Judgment involves making rational and logical choices, and analytically evaluating ideas, opinions, and facts. To use a term that originally came from outside the character field: it is critical thinking, weighing the evidence fairly, thinking things through, and examining the evidence from all sides rather than jumping to conclusions.

Sometimes critical thinking is squashed by parents, authority figures, and others. It’s common to see critical thinking discouraged in society, in politics, in religion, and even in many private institutions and schools.

It’s easy to think of the overuse of judgment—it’s being judgmental of yourself or of others.

In these situations, judgment should be accompanied by a heavy dose of listening, kindness, social intelligence, and self-regulation.

My relationship with my wife has probably suffered the most from my critical thinking. Sometimes she brings up an idea that she just means to introduce casually, and I get all intense about evaluating it. One time she said to me, “Can I tell you I’m thinking about going to the supermarket without having to hear all the pros and cons?”

Love of learning means a passion for learning, a desire to learn just for learning’s sake. In fact, curiosity and love of learning are among the most closely related strengths in the VIA Classification.

While curiosity is the motivating force that leads you to seek out new information, love of learning refers to the desire to hold on to and deepen that information.

The curious person is motivated by the pursuit of knowledge; the person who loves learning is motivated by the expa...

This mastery of new information can result in a variety of positive emotions, including gratitude, joy, pride, hope, and even a sense of peacefulness.

Those high in love of learning tend to do well in school and read a good deal. They are often quiet or introverted. This is not always the case for those high in curiosity.

Perspective means the ability to see the bigger picture in life. Perspective is about being able to see the forest as well as the trees, to avoid getting wrapped up in the small details when there are bigger issues to consider.

Judgment tends to be a micro strength (focusing on details), whereas perspective veers toward the macro (focusing on the big picture).

In the VIA Classification, bravery is about brave acts. Courage is about something broader, an attitude or approach to life that makes a person capable of bravery when it is necessary.

The courageous person accurately gauges the risks and is appropriately afraid of negative outcomes. They do not act with courage lightly.

To be brave is to face your challenges, threats, or difficulties. It involves valuing a goal or conviction and acting upon it, whether popular or not. A central element involves facing—rather than avoiding—fears.

To be brave does not mean the absence of fear; it means a willingness to act in spite of fear, risk, and uncertainty.

Perseverance is sticking with things. It means being hardworking and finishing what is started, despite barriers and obstacles that arise.

Failure is more likely to be viewed as a lack of effort as opposed to bad luck, and the emphasis is placed on the importance of having a strong sense of commitment to meeting personal or professional goals.

Persistent people are often seen as dependable—people who follow through on commitments.

In addition to feeling helpless, the other “h’s” that round out what’s sometimes called the depression triad—hopeless and hapless (unlucky)—are also likely to accompany underuse.