Personal Strengths "O would some power the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us," wrote the Scottish poet Robert Burns. He meant it in a cautionary sense: We should govern ourselves so that if we were standing outside of ourselves watching our actions we would not shame ourselves. But a corollary to this is also true: We are not always aware of our own strengths. This paper examines the differences between my own assessment of personal strengths and those that a survey of these strengths showed up. There is a temptation to designate those strengths that are assigned by an outside source (in this case, a well-tested social-psychological instrument) as being more legitimate than those one has thought up on one's own in an extemporaneous way. However, central to the value of this process for me has been my exploration of the ways in which these two assessments differ from each other as well as the ways in which they dovetail.

My own (that is, self-assessed) strengths were as follows: Leadership, Teamwork, Fairness, Honesty, and Perseverance. The positive traits that were suggested by the survey had a high degree of overlap: Leadership, Fairness, and Perseverance also appeared. However, in the survey, Forgiveness and Gratitude also showed up. Peterson (2007) argued that personal strengths can be grouped into larger categories -- ones that he and Seligman used in their 2004 study. One of their categories of strengths is "Strengths of Justice: civic strengths that underlie healthy community life." This category includes both Fairness ("treating all people the same according to notions of fairness and justice; not letting personal feelings bias decisions about others") and Leadership: ("Encouraging a group of which one is a member to get things done and at the same maintain time good relations within the group").

Arguably, Forgiveness and Gratitude are cognitively and emotionally linked to the concept of Fairness. Thus while these traits showed up as different results in the two assessments, they are arguably fundamentally the same. This is one of the limitations of this form of assessment:...

I believe that in my case, the trait of Fairness (which shows up in both lists) encompasses the ideas of Forgiveness and Gratitude. Perhaps a clearer way of expressing this is that the semantic category that I identify as "Fairness" intersects with "Forgiveness" and "Gratitude" in a sort of cognitive Venn diagram.
"Perseverance" also shows up on both lists and again I think that there may be some semantic overlap. A large part of what I consider to be good leadership is in fact the ability (and indeed the need) to follow through. I believe that quitting before a task is complete is the antithesis of leadership. Thus the fact that the trait of Perseverance shows up on both lists is to me more a reinforcement of the importance of Leadership than the importance of a fully independent trait.

It seems highly significant that not only did the strengths of Fairness and Leadership show up in both the internal and the external checklist and in addition to this are part of the same overall category. This to me suggests not only that these may be my strengths but also my aspirations. This is an important concept: The attributes that we consider to be our strengths are in many cases the same attributes that we consider to be virtues and so are things that we aim for.

Peterson (2007) refers to strengths like this as "signature strengths," which he defines as follows:

I believe that people possess signature strengths akin to what Allport (1961) identified decades ago as personal traits. These are strengths of character that a person owns, celebrates, and frequently exercises. In our interviews with adults, we find that almost everyone can readily identify a handful of strengths as very much their own, typically between two and five.

Signature strengths are not simply attributes that we have as recognized by ourselves and others, but attributes of ourselves that make us feel most authentically ourselves. Peterson…