Several years ago I had a Vice President who was full of energy and optimism. He was also very kind and had an “open door” policy where he was more than willing to chat with any one of the several hundred employees in his group about anything. In fact, you could talk to him about anything and he always seemed to have time for you.
I don’t know if he ever took the VIA Survey, but I would guess that some of his top strengths were:
- Hope, optimism, and future-mindedness
- Creativity, ingenuity, and originality
- Forgiveness and mercy
- Curiosity and interest in the world
In fact, he knew his strengths and he used them often – unfortunately, too often. And, while he was a very likeable person, he was a pretty ineffective leader. He consistently did not acknowledge risks or issues. He loved creative ideas but was easily bored with operational issues. He rarely fired anyone for poor performance. In addition, he really didn’t know how to adapt to situations. He continued to use his top strengths even when he wasn’t getting results. His organization eventually fell into disarray.
In recent years, we have heard the experts tell us to use our strengths. And, Robert Biswas-Diener wrote a great post about using our strengths in the ‘right’ situations. But, how do we know when we’re over-using a strength?
Unfortunately, I think over-used strengths usually represent a blind spot. That is, they’re difficult to recognize. Remember, using a strength usually feels good. We are engaged when we are doing something that we’re good at and we frequently go into a state of flow where time stands still. This can lead to situations where we lose our self-awareness.
Try these two strategies to examine the use of your own strengths:
- Look at situations where your initial thoughts were that you performed at a high level but the results did not follow. Did you misjudge the reactions of others? Did you miss some cues? List your top strengths and see if any of them actually contributed to the poor outcome.
- Ask for some feedback from people who know you well AND are not afraid to tell you the truth (that second part is VERY important). Take the VIA Survey to identify your top strengths. Share this list with your friend(s) and ask if you rely on these too much.
In the end, don’t abandon your strengths. The research shows that use of your strengths can lead to lasting happiness. Just try to exercise a little more self-awareness and consider the situation.
happier.com is a personal trainer for your happiness. With more than a dozen tools and tests to help you measure, track and improve your happiness, you can trust the happier.com experts to help you reach your goals. Exclusive videos and a popular blog mean there’s something new to learn every day. Download the free iPhone application or find what you’re looking for with the Positive Psychology Practitioner Directory. happier.com is on Facebook, LinkedIn, and twitter and has meetup groups in Washington, Philadelphia, and Portland, with more planned. Click here for a social media press release from our launch.
By invited author Robert Biswas-Diener
1. Use Your Strengths Less!
Although, at first blush, this is a counter-intuitive piece of advice it makes a lot of sense. Our strengths interact with situations and may or may not be appropriate to every circumstance. When i work with coaching clients I find there is often as much traction in dialing down a particularly strength as there is in accentuating another. At CAPP we think of this as “the right strength, in the right amount, at the right time.” This is what Barry Schwartz says about wisdom– it is a “meta-strength” and tells you when and how to regulate the other strengths.
2. Use the Strengths You Didn’t Know You Had!
Most folks are pretty aware of what they might consider their “top 5″– that is, those strengths they commonly employ to good effect. These are the things we all receive compliments on and we know well. But what about unrealised strengths? At CAPP, we think of these as natural strengths that are energizing and which lead to maximal effectiveness, but which you are not currently using. The Realise2 strengths assessment distinguishes between realised and unrealised strengths. This latter group is ripe for development.
3. Swap Your Strengths and Your Learned Behaviors for Increased Energy!
Your learned behaviors are those skills you have adopted, perahps becuase your job or relationships have required it. You tend to be good at these behaviors and they help you enjoy the success you have. Unfortuantely, becuase they are not natural to you they can require extra effort and leave you deflated at the end of the day. The Realise2 also distinguishes Learned behaviors. At CAPP we emphasize that while you may not be able to do without some of these you might want to practice moderating their use so that you are not drained by them.
4. Use Your Strengths to Target Your Weaknesses!
Don’t give weaknesses lip service…. actually deal with them. Your weaknesses are like a leak in a boat, you have to manage them or you will sink. Fortunately, you can employ your strengths in a variety of ways to accomplish this. You might use your strengths to compensate for or overcome your weaknesses; you might use your strengths to find collaborations with others that better address your weaknesses; you might use your strengths to make your weaknesses irrelevant.
5. Challenge Ben Franklin!
Okay, so Ben adopted a strengths a week and rotated through his core aspirations over the course of weeks and years. he got so good at it that his friends couldn’t shut him up and recommended he add “humility” to the mix! What about you? Can you rotate through your “top 5″; choosing one a week as a theme through which you view problems, setbacks, decisions and plans?
6. Strengths spotting
Recognizing strengths in yourself may come easily for folks who use happier.com, but what about others, for whom the vocabulary of strengths is a bit more…. foreign? You can gain traction by labeling every instance of a strength or passion you see in others. Be vigilant for that straight posture, increased gesturing, more fluid speech, use of metaphor and brighter facial expressions. Point out and label each strength as you see it in play. But be forwarned, the larger your own strengths vocabulary is, the more you will be able to spot in your friends, clients and colleagues.
happier.com is a personal trainer for your happiness. With more than a dozen tools and tests to help you measure, track and improve your happiness, you can trust the happier.com experts to help you reach your goals. Exclusive videos and a popular blog mean there’s something new to learn every day. Download the free iPhone application or find what you’re looking for with the Positive Psychology Practitioner Directory. happier.com is on Facebook, LinkedIn, and twitter and has meetup groups in Washington, Philadelphia, and Portland, with more planned. Click here for a social media press release from our launch.
© Alex Linley 2008
Use your strengths less!
Post by invited guest contributor Robert Biswas-Diener
For most people, using strengths is second nature. We are all naturally inclined to gravitate toward situations in which we will excel and we tend to leverage our best abilities for greater achievement. In fact, using strengths can seem so obvious a strategy for success that some people avoid working on strengths altogether! For these people, it seems sensible to focus on weaknesses for the pursuit of personal growth.
In recent years, however, a growing body of research suggests that working with your strengths can be a strategy for success. For example, the most successful managers tend to spend disproportionately more time with their top producers relatively to their lowest producers. In addition, engaging personal strengths is associated with more intrinsic motivation and, therefore, more happiness. I have even seen how much more effective I am as an instructor when I focus on my students at Portland State University who are in the C, B and A range.
What this line of research has translated to—where positive psychology is concerned—is a push toward “using your strengths more.” I have seen blog posts encouraging folks to use their strengths more and attended trainings that promote the same approach. While there is nothing inherently wrong with this advice it may not be the entire story. What most people forget is that, as individuals, we interact with the world around us. Although strengths are a natural part of us, our strengths interact with situations and circumstances. Simply put, not all strengths are appropriate to every situation. Sometimes using a strength less, rather than more, can help you be far more effective and result in greater satisfaction!
This week try gaining more mastery of your strengths by thinking about the most appropriate way to use them. As you consider the challenges and circumstances of the near future which of your strengths do you think you can put into play more, and which might you want to dial back? If you have a particularly good story about overusing a strength, feel free to e-mail me.
happier.com is a personal trainer for your happiness. With more than a dozen tools and tests to help you measure, track and improve your happiness, you can trust the happier.com experts to help you reach your goals. Exclusive videos and a popular blog mean there’s something new to learn every day. Download the free iPhone application or find what you’re looking for with the Positive Psychology Practitioner Directory. happier.com is on Facebook, LinkedIn, and twitter and has meetup groups in Washington, Philadelphia, and Portland, with more planned. Click here for a social media press release from our launch.
Post by invited contributor Robert Biswas-Diener
I once coached a woman who was exceptionally creative. She had a head for sales and was a whiz at putting together trainings to teach young sales associates how to perform better. She was so good, in fact, that she was quickly promoted to a management position. The problem was, she did not shine at management the way she had excelled at training. As a result she had to learn all sorts of new behaviors—confrontation, assertiveness, administration, detail orientation—that would help her succeed in the new job. My client was bright and she quickly learned these new behaviors and even did them well. There was only one problem: at the end of the day she felt deflated instead of energized.
The Realise2 strengths assessment distinguishes between realised strengths—those strengths you find energizing and use frequently—and “learned behaviors.” Learned behaviors are acquired skills that a person can learn to perform well, but they do not come naturally and the extra energy and effort required to use them leave a person feeling flat. People often acquire these new behaviors because their roles or circumstances have changed. Learned behaviors are frequently necessary for good performance. Using them too much, however, can lead to dissatisfaction and burnout.
This is one of my favorite aspects of the Realise2. And, if our client response is any indicator, one of everyone’s favorite aspects of the assessment. We used the Realise2 with a large organization recently, to help them with recruitment. They loved the fact that the assessment was able to distinguish between people who would be good at their job while loving their job and those who would be good at their job but hate it.
So what should you do about your own learned behaviors? At CAPP we recommend “moderating” them. You will probably need to use your learned behaviors sometime, but see if you can limit the amount of time you use these draining behaviors. Consider the outcomes that are attached to these behaviors—how are they paying off for you at work or in relationships– and see if you can achieve these same valued outcomes by using your realized or unrealized strengths instead.
To take the Realise2 visit www.cappeu.org. If you would like to find out more about how I use this assessment with my coaching clients just drop me a line or leave a comment on this post.
happier.com is a personal trainer for your happiness. With more than a dozen tools and tests to help you measure, track and improve your happiness, you can trust the happier.com experts to help you reach your goals. Exclusive videos and a popular blog mean there’s something new to learn every day. Download the free iPhone application or find what you’re looking for with the Positive Psychology Practitioner Directory. happier.com is on Facebook, LinkedIn, and twitter and has meetup groups in Washington, Philadelphia, and Portland, with more planned. Click here for a social media press release from our launch.
After learning that my wife was pregnant with our second child several years ago, we made the decision to look for a larger house. We were living close to a major city and housing prices were high. We loved the community but couldn’t afford to stay if we wanted more space.
So, we made the big decision to move away from the city where larger houses were much more affordable. In the end, I don’t think we made a bad decision, but I don’t think we really could have made a more informed decision.
I have thought about the choice we made many times but a recent lecture at the IPPA World Congress by one of the pioneering researchers in positive psychology (Dr. Ed Diener) helped me understand what we did and how we can do better in the future. ‘Materialists,’ Ed mentioned, say that getting what we like will bring happiness while positive psychology tells us to simply like what we have already.
According to the materialists, my wife and I should have been overjoyed to get the bigger house we had just purchased. We’re two educated, rational adults who make dozens of decisions every day. Instead, we spent the first few months ruminating about our ‘poor decision’ and figuring out how to spend more time with the friends we had left behind.
We were certainly pleased with the new house and we constantly reminded ourselves how fortunate we were to be in a nice house and in a beautiful neighborhood. But, all the gratitude in the world did not change the fact that we were now over an hour away from a city that we loved and friends that we loved even more.
At the conference last week, Dr. Diener gave an alternative model for making decisions that I would like to pass along: focus on wanting what we really like. His simple formula was to write down the things that you know you like. Then compare this list to what may take place with a given decision. In our case, our “likes” would have included our proximity to the city, the yearly block party in our neighborhood, having frequent dinners with close friends, etc. When listing the outcomes of the decision to move, we probably would have listed bigger house, longer commute, far from the city, less traffic, and several other things. Upon seeing that the two lists were independent of each other, I am sure we would have paused and thought this through differently.
In retrospect, we have made some great friends, our kids are thriving, and we are closer to my sister and her family. But, the next time we are facing the decision to move, take a new job, or any other big decision, I plan to use Dr. Diener’s model since I now know that the bigger house does not necessarily make me happier.
happier.com is a personal trainer for your happiness. With more than a dozen tools and tests to help you measure, track and improve your happiness, you can trust the happier.com experts to help you reach your goals. Exclusive videos and a popular blog mean there’s something new to learn every day. Download the free iPhone application or find what you’re looking for with the Positive Psychology Practitioner Directory. happier.com is on Facebook, LinkedIn, and twitter and has meetup groups in Washington, Philadelphia, and Portland, with more planned. Click here for a social media press release from our launch.
