Brian Johnson walks through the VIA character strengths survey, which maps 24 signature strengths across six virtue categories like wisdom, courage, and transcendence. He shares his own top strengths and shows how to spot yours, then use them more often in service to something bigger than yourself.
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You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hey guys, what's up? This is Brian. We've got another video today. This one's on how to discover and use your signature strengths. We're going to combine two of my favorite domains, positive psychology and virtues. We talk a lot about how the classic philosophers tell us that virtue is the key aspect of living with consistent happiness and flourishing and eudaimonia and all that good stuff. Well, it turns out that the positive psychologists when they founded the movement in 2000, guys like Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson, they went and they studied the classic wisdom texts ranging from the Bible, the, the Bhagavad Gita, the Bushido samurai code and all these other great books. And what they learned was they all shared about six common core virtues. These included wisdom, courage, love, humanity, justice, temperance, spirituality and transcendence. And what they said was that if we want to be happy, we've got to figure out how to take these six core virtues and put them into action. And, and they identified 24 what they called signature strengths, which are essentially virtues in action. So in these six categories, they split them up and created 24 signature strengths virtues in action. They include in the wisdom bucket we have creativity, curiosity, open mindedness, love of learning and wisdom. In the courage category we have bravery, persistence, integrity, vitality. In the humanity and love section we have love, kindness, social intelligence. In the justice bucket we've got citizenship, fairness, leadership. In the temperance category we have forgiveness and mercy, humility and modesty, prudence, self regulation. And then finally we have in the transcendence category, appreciation of beauty and excellence, gratitude, hope and optimism, humor and spirituality. And again, 24 signature strengths. They call them virtues in action. The key if we want to live with more happiness is to identify our signature strengths and to use them often in our day to day lives. If we want more meaning, we want to use them often in service to something bigger than ourselves. Really, really powerful stuff. Again, this is what the classic graph Greeks told us with the concept of arete putting virtue into action. Now, I highly recommend you take the test. Over a million people have taken the test@authentichappiness.com and on that page there's a lot of stuff. Look in the middle column for the VIA survey of character strengths. I'll add this link into the little section below the video here. But authentichappiness.com take the via virtues in Action survey of character strengths and I recommend you reflect on these two questions. First, how have you engaged these strengths in the past. So think about when you've been most engaged, when you've been most happy and full of meaning in your life. My hunch is you've engaged these strengths that are yours. Your top five out of these 24 more consistently than in other times of your life where you may not have been as happy. That's question number one, worthy of journaling and reflection. Question number two how can you use these strengths that you identify more often in your life? Specifically this week? Really cool stuff. Literally.
Think about it.
Well, how do you use these strengths more often? Now my top strengths include creativity, hope and optimism, energy and enthusiasm, kindness and generosity and wisdom and bravery. I've taken it a couple of times over the last number of years and I literally have journaled many times. Well, how do I use my creativity more often? Well, I create videos like this and try to integrate different ideas into my teaching and my work in my life. Kindness and generosity. I find that I feel most alive when I give generously. Do all these videos for free and we do the flexible pricing with our business and try to find more and more ways to integrate this strength into my life more consistently. Kindness and generosity. Hope and optimism. I journal often, reflect on what I want to create in my life and really maintain this optimistic perspective. It's a big thing for us. Courage and bravery. Being willing to take risks and push edges and invest in places in our business that aren't guarantees and see if they work and see if we can find more cool ways to give to the world. Wisdom. If I don't do this work and teach, I don't feel anywhere near as alive as when I do these videos on a daily basis. It's so much more inspiring for me. So that's an idea of some of the ways that I use my strengths. How can you use your strengths more often? This week I'll do a whole other video on something called the Calling Description at some other point but for now we'll wrap it up. Remember, happiness comes when you use your strengths often get a meaningful life as you use them in service to something bigger than yourself. Take the test, reflect on these questions and and there you go. Quick look at how to discover and use your signature strengths. Hope you enjoyed quick look at positive psychology virtues in action with these strengths. Have an awesome day. Look forward to sharing more with you soon. See ya.
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