What you are good for

Yesterday asked what you are good at. Today asks what you are good for.

In 2004 Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman, the founders of positive psychology, published an eight-hundred-page book that did for virtues what the diagnostic manuals had done for disorders: a classification. They read every tradition they could find, Aristotle, Confucius, the Bible, the Bushido, the Talmud, looking for the strengths every culture praised. They found twenty-four, under six virtues: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence.

The survey is free, it's run by a nonprofit, and it tells you your top five signature strengths. The twenty-four include curiosity, love of learning, perspective, bravery, perseverance, honesty, zest, love, kindness, social intelligence, teamwork, fairness, leadership, forgiveness, humility, prudence, self-regulation, appreciation of beauty, gratitude, hope, humor and spirituality. Everyone has all twenty-four. The question is the order.

Signature strengths are the ones that feel like you, that give you energy when you use them, and that the people who know you would name without being asked. The research finding that made this instrument matter is small and has been repeated many times: people who use one signature strength in a new way each day for a week report higher wellbeing six months later. Not a new strength. The one they already have, pointed somewhere new.

That's the action today, and it's one of my favorites in the chamber, because it asks you to do more of what you're already made of.

This is also the first mirror in the month that your own tradition will recognize. Every faith on the 360 has a version of this list. Peterson and Seligman say so, and they credit them. When you look at your top five, you're looking at something much older than a survey, and your coach may ask whose list it reminds you of.