English Literature – Articles ☆ Positive Education # 12: Virtues and Strengths ☆ Shri Jagat Singh Bisht ☆

Discover your signature strengths

“Contrary to what most of us believe, happiness does not simply happen to us. It is something that we make happen.”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Authentic happiness comes from identifying and cultivating your most fundamental strengths and using them every day in work, play, love, and parenting.

By identifying the very best in ourselves, we can improve the world around us, and achieve new and sustainable levels of authentic contentment, gratification, and meaning.

Every major religious and cultural tradition endorses six virtues:

Wisdom and knowledge,

Courage,

Love and humanity,

Justice,

Temperance,

and Spirituality and transcendence.

Signature Strengths

There are several distinct routes to each of the six virtues. Happiness is nothing else but virtues in action.

Signature strengths are the routes – the strengths of character – by which we achieve the virtues. If you want to be happy, you have to discover your signature strengths and put them into action.

The routes to achieve the virtue of wisdom and knowledge are:

curiosity or interest in the world,

love of learning,

critical thinking, open-mindedness,

ingenuity, originality, practical intelligence,

social intelligence, personal intelligence, emotional intelligence,

and perspective.

The routes to courage are:

valour and bravery,

perseverance, industry, diligence,

integrity, genuineness, and honesty.

The routes to the virtue of humanity and love are:

kindness,

generosity,

loving,

and allowing to be loved

The virtue of justice is attained through:

citizenship, duty,

teamwork,

loyalty, fairness, equity,

and leadership.

Temperance may be achieved by:

self-control,

prudence,

discretion, caution,

humility, and modesty.

Transcendence may be reached by:

practising gratitude,

optimism,

spirituality, religiousness, faith,

sense of purpose,

forgiveness, mercy,

and appreciation of beauty and excellence.

Playfulness, humour, zest, passion, and enthusiasm are also routes to transcendence.

We possess these strengths of character to a lesser or more degree but some of these strengths are well pronounced and in abundance.

We enjoy exhibiting these strengths and they come naturally to us.

They are our signature strengthens and we must use them more and more, again and again in the mansions of life – work, love, and parenting.

VIA (values in action) survey of character strengths helps determine the highest strengths you have.

The signature strengths, when used often, enable you to increase the amount of flourishing in your own life and on the planet.

Peter Drucker says, “Individuals who invest in their strengths are happier and more successful. Only when you operate from strengths, can you achieve true excellence.”

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, or conditioning, but about discovery, creation, and ownership.

“A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately happy. What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization.”

Abraham Maslow

English Literature – Articles ☆ Positive Education # 10: Myths and Reality ☆ Shri Jagat Singh Bisht ☆

English Literature – Articles ☆ Positive Education # 11: Happiness Equation ☆ Shri Jagat Singh Bisht ☆