“Hide not your talents. They for use were made. What’s a sundial in the shade?“ — Benjamin Franklin
Monthly Archives: September 2013
What’s New: VIA strengths updated
All 24 VIA Character strengths are updated with information on tapping into each including book recommendations.
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Deliberative
People strong in the Deliberative theme are best described by the serious care they take in making decisions or choices. They anticipate the obstacles.
- Needs on a team: To think things through
- As a Leader: Anticipate obstacles
- In Conflict: Help make decisions
- Partner with: someone with strong Command, Self-Assurance, or Activator talents. Together you will make many decisions, and these decisions will be sound.
- In academics: – loves to think it through – this student wants to know all the options and have all the information in hand before making a decision – will probably be well- prepared for the advising session and will appreciate an advisor who is well- informed and fairly directive – likes to know that the advisor can be trusted – will want to double check everything and will be concerned about meeting requirements – prefers courses where the expectations are clear, where class time is used well, and where students take the course seriously – encourage them to get copies of syllabi before choosing their courses, so there will be no surprises
At your best (Balcony): good judgment, identifies risk, makes solid decisions, can plan for the unexpected
At your worst (Basement): standoffish, aloof, cautious, slow, introverted, afraid to act
Worth Reading
Worth Watching
Go deeper
- Using your strengths in school and college wth great ideas on building relationships, study techniques, class selection, and extra curricular activities.
Listen to these podcasts
- Theme addicts is a series created by UnleashStrengths to highlight the massive impact the StrengthsFinder assessment through interviews and disucssions.
- Lead through your strengths features many interesting guests and Career Q and A about leverage your strengths at work.
- Maximize Your Strengths features interviews and disucssion on developing your strengths. She really drills into each of the themes by interviewing real people on how a specific theme shows up in their lives.
- Called to Coach is a webcast resource for those who want to help others discover and use their strengths. We have Gallup experts and independent strengths coaches share tactics, insights and strategies to help coaches maximize the talent of individuals, teams and organizations around the world.
- ISOGO TV promises a lot: So dramatically increase your energy and decrease your frustration at work, that you cannot help but take the Strengths paradigm home to your family. Fueling life-changing stories.
- The True Strength Podcast by Ian Pettigrew (Kingfisher Coaching) features inspiring true stories of how people succeed through applying their strengths and being resilient. It often includes a Gallup StrengthsFinder profile.
- If you are looking to identify and develop your strengths and talents, take calculated risks and make decisions, The Strengths Revolution with Steve Morgan will help your personal development, as well as helping you support your clients, employees, teams and wider organisations. Knowing your strengths will also support positive risk-taking and decision making as part of good risk management.
Sources:
Inspiration
The beautiful thing about setbacks is, they introduce us to our strengths. — Robin Sharma
“The choices we make reveal the true nature of our character.”
“The choices we make reveal the true nature of our character.”
The beer company gusiness is StrengthsMining in its latest add and the world is responding. Read more at Bussiness Insider.
2 million views!
The Virtues Project #2: Empathy
Continuing with the series on comparing the Virtues Manefesto from the school of life with the VIA strengths.
The Virtues Project #2: Empathy
Why it matters
The folks at greater good point out all sorts of benefits for practicing empathy:
- Seminal studies by Daniel Batson and Nancy Eisenberg have shown that people higher in empathy are more likely to help others in need, even when doing so cuts against their self-interest.
- Empathy reduces prejudice and racism: In one study, white participants made to empathize with an African American man demonstrated less racial bias afterward.
- Empathy is good for your marriage: Research suggests being able to understand your partner’s emotions deepens intimacy and boosts relationship satisfaction: it’s also fundamental to resolving conflicts. (The GGSC’s Christine Carter has written about effective strategies for developing and expressing empathy in relationships.)
- Empathy reduces bullying: Studies of Mary Gordon’s innovative Roots of Empathy program have found that it decreases bullying and aggression among kids, and makes them kinder and more inclusive toward their peers. An unrelated study found that bullies lack “affective empathy” but not cognitive empathy, suggesting that they know how their victims feel but lack the kind of empathy that would deter them from hurting others.
- Empathy promotes heroic acts: A seminal study by Samuel and Pearl Oliner found that people who rescued Jews during the Holocaust had been encouraged at a young age to take the perspectives of others.
- Empathy fights inequality. As Robert Reich and Arlie Hochschild have argued, empathy encourages us to reach out and want to help people who are not in our social group, even those who belong to stigmatized groups, like the poor. Conversely, research suggests that inequality can reduce empathy: People show less empathy when they attain higher socioeconomic status.
- Empathy is good for the office: Managers who demonstrate empathy have employees who are sick less often and report greater happiness.
- Empathy is good for health care: A large-scale study found that doctors high in empathy havepatients who enjoy better health; other research suggests training doctors to be more empathic improves patient satisfaction and the doctors’ own emotional well-being.
Which strengths do you need to mind to build your empthy?
Social intelligence: At the heart of empathy is an intuitive understand of people and what motivates them.
Capacity to love and be loved comes into play because empathy is a sharing of the heart–their and yours.
To show someone empthay is give a gift of Kindness, nurturing the possibility of authentic human connection.
Bravery because listening to other’s hearts takes courage. In order to feel deeply takes an extraordinary type of courage.
As ee cummings explains, feeling is not easy:
A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feeling through words.
This may sound easy. It isn’t.
A lot of people think or believe or know they feel-but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling-not knowing or believing or thinking.
Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself-in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else-means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time-and whenever we do it, we’re not poets.
If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve written one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed.
And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world-unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.
Does this sound dismal? It isn’t.
It’s the most wonderful life on earth.
Or so I feel.
Books worth checking out:
The Virtues Project #1: Resilience
Over at the school of life, they have released the Virtues Manefesto. Over the next ten days I am going to compare these with the VIA strengths. After all, VIA stands for Values in Action.
The Virtues Project #1: Resilience
Why it matters
According to Dr Heather Payne & Professor Ian Butler,
Resilience is a key factor in protecting and promoting good mental health. It is the quality of being able to deal with the ups and downs of life, and is predicated on self-esteem. This in turn is generated by secure early attachments, the confidence of being loved and valued by one’s family and friends, a clear sense of self identity (personal, cultural and spiritual), a sense of agency and self efficacy (being able to make decisions and act independently) and the confidence to set goals and attempt to achieve them.
Which strengths do you need to mind to build your reslience?
Perserverence: Your ability to stick through, especially in tough times, will make all the difference in the world.
Social intelligence: Being able to read people, to form relationships and adept to the changing social millieu builds your resilience capacity.
Capacity to love and be loved since attachment seems to play such an important role in resiliance.
Hope and Optimism allow you to focus on a brighter future, which is key to seeking your goals.
Self Control: Like perseverence, self control seems central to building capacity for reliency.
The Penn Resiliancy Project outlines the 7 abilities to building Relisiency in Children:
- Ability 1. Being in charge of our emotions
- Ability 2. Controlling our impulses
- Ability 3. Analyzing the cause of problems
- Ability 4. Maintaining realistic optimism
- Ability 5. Having empathy for others
- Ability 6. Believing in your own competence
- Ability 7. Reaching Out
Books worth checking out:
Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back Paperback