Personal strengths: comparing Peterson-Seligman classification with Values in Action survey results

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: Because it consists of close-ended questions it is impossible to have follow-ups that clarify exactly what is meant in terms of specific terms. 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 & Seligman (2004) summarized the way these signature strengths make us feel:

Signature strengths allow a person to feel authentic

When a person is using his or her signature strength, s/he feels excited

Enthusiasm for learning new ways to apply this strength

A feeling that it is inevitable that one should fall back on this strength in varied situations

Feeling more energized after one has used this strength -- rather than feeling exhausted or depleted

A sense of epiphany or wonder when an individual first discovers that this is a personal strength (Seligman, 2002; Seligman et al., 2005).

Background of Personal Strengths and Three-Month Plan

I am not entirely sure where the antecedents of my sense of leadership as a key strength although certainly a lot of it came from my parents. This was one of the traits that they stressed to me from an early age. They provided me numerous opportunities to lead, from helping to plan family vacations to helping organize a petition for a community garden that I presented to the city council. They also encouraged me to start my own tutoring company. This last is a very important example of the strengths that they tried to instill in me. The company was not a success in financial terms in that I did not earn enough to buy the computer that I had hoped to get from the proceeds. However, the lesson that my parents helped me to learn was that learning important lessons and skills can itself be a success.

Leadership is not the same thing as success, a fact that many people do not learn early on. If my parents had not helped me to understand that sticking out with the company for six months -- which I had decided to do in advance, even writing up a simple business plan for the project -- demonstrated a high degree of success for someone my age.

I would like to expand my leadership skills over the next three months as I also work to expand opportunities to expand the practice of the other strengths as determined by the survey. I believe that I can best combine a practice of leadership skills with an emphasis on fairness. I will work on these traits in the context of helping organize a tutoring service at my old elementary school. On the grounds that no experience is ever wasted if it helps one do something better in the future, I will use what I learned about what makes a successful tutor-students match to help set up a program that will benefit students who are falling through the cracks because school-funded tutoring programs have been dropped because of budgetary constraints.