Understanding your character strengths is a huge component of finding yourself, or learning who you truly are.

For myself, buried beneath all of my years of dieting, restriction, extreme exercising and seemingly high levels of resilience, was me. There I was. 

But I couldn’t see me. I never really knew who I was.

I had become so conditioned to be the ‘me’ who was all of the above, the me who the outside world saw  – the one who was always following some fitness challenge, triathlon, muddy race, or working critically on reducing the amount of time it took me to hike up 1000 steps on the side of a mountain, even I had lost sight of who I really was, behind this person unconsciously attempting to be strong & resilient.

It’s not that I am not strong and resilient, I absolutely am. But that isn’t WHO I am.

(Inside I was crumbling emotionally – that story is for another page)

It has been through understanding my character strengths, that has finally had me on the road to understanding who I really am – underneath all the surface-level stuff.

I find many of my clients have little awareness of how wonderful they are. 

It is through discovering their character strengths that they begin to see themselves and all the good things about their personality. 

The VIA character strengths quiz can be taken in about 15 minutes and is a simple way to discover your best personality traits. Those that you are most often expressing, but because you are being you, on automatic for most of the time, it can be difficult to see what makes you tick!

We often focus on the things we find challenging, looking for ways to improve our performance.

How about spending a little time really getting to see the sides of you that bring out the best in your personality?

I ask all my clients to take the VIA character strengths test, it gives us a fabulous guide during discussion and can also be helpful when making difficult decisions.

Remember, when we are expressing our top character strengths, we are being our best.

For instance, until I explored my strengths in great detail, I had never really considered that ‘perspective’ is one of my top character strengths. ‘Kindness’ may seem one of my more obvious strengths, but when I put these 2 strengths together, it is easy to see why I am a coach. I am expressing 2 of my top character strengths in the work I love to do!

VIA –  (CHARACTER ON STRENGTH) shows on your report how each character strength shows up in your personality:

PERSPECTIVE

Being able to provide wise counsel to others;
having ways of looking at the world that make sense to oneself/others.

KINDNESS 

Doing favors and good deeds for others; helping them; taking care of them.

Not only was it interesting to see why I do the things I do, but also, if something isn’t feeling in alignment with me, I can more easily understand why.

If I was making a decision about a career move, it would be helpful to understand what aspects of the job I was considering will support me in expressing my top character strengths.

It’s also important to know that we ALL have ALL 24 of the character strengths, the ones at the bottom of the list will likely only come into play when you are expressing one of the top strengths.

For instance, perseverance is no. 24 on my character strengths report, but if I am working on supporting a client, (expressing my top strengths), perseverance becomes my greatest strength!

Another factor is interest. If something holds a great amount of interest for us, we will more likely pull on our character strengths from the bottom of the report!

These are known as ‘phasic’ strengths. It’s not that the ones at the bottom are weaknesses, more that for the most part they don’t show up in your personality, but when you are naturally expressing who you are, they rise to the top!