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Satisfaction Begins With Strengths

For greater life satisfaction, identify your unique strengths and talents and strive to utilize them each day.

What makes you and I unique? Certainly physical characteristics and personality separate us from others, but that

isn’t all. Each of us has unique strengths and talents that also set us apart. When we use these unique strengths we tend to be at our very best and, more importantly, utilizing our strengths makes us happy. 

What are your unique strengths and how do you capitalize on them? First identify your strengths. We all have many competencies. Being fully functional in daily life depends on being competent at multiple life activities. But which of these many competencies are unique strengths?

The following will help you identify your unique strengths from among your many competencies.

  • There are likely things you do during which you lose track of time. This is often called flow or being in a zone. Regardless of what it’s called, you’ve had this experience of getting totally lost in some activity, losing track of time and being so wrapped up in what you were doing that you forget to eat, forgo sleep, and feel like you could go on forever. This is a clue that you were using one or more unique strengths.
  • What do you love to do? Normally, things you love to do involve special talents and strengths. That’s why you love to do them; the doing is effortless, engaging, and fulfilling.
  • Take a validated assessment. The VIA Signature Strengths Questionnaire is an excellent, research-based assessment that will identify your top five strengths. These are termed signature strengths because they are unique strengths that set you apart from others. In all, this questionnaire identifies and rank orders twenty four characteristics. The assessment can be found at this University of Pennsylvania web site.

    • Now that you’re aware of your unique strengths, the question is how to take advantage of them to bring you a happier, more fulfilling life. Your goal here is to use your unique talents and strengths to your advantage by using them each and every day. This may take some creativity, but it’s to your advantage to focus on your strengths.

    Some experts advise us to improve our weaknesses. But why put time and energy into moving an ability from poor to good when that same time and energy can be devoted to things we do exceptionally well?

    We’re not only happier when we utilize our signature strengths, we’re also more productive. Think about the best contributions you’ve made in your lifetime; those accomplishments that filled you with pride when you completed them and are still very pleasant memories. It’s highly likely that you achieved these accomplishments primarily using signature strengths.

    To integrate your strengths into each day, examine your roles and responsibilities and search for ways to incorporate and maximize your ability to use them. You’ll find that each day is more satisfying and fulfilling.

    This article first appeared in the Personal Development Topic at Suite101.com.

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    This entry was posted on Saturday, October 20th, 2007 at 8:36 am and is filed under Tools, Personal Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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