Another behavior that really matters for our happiness is the times that we get to engage our signature strengths. When you hear the term strength, you might be thinking strength like Superman, strong. It's not exactly what we mean. What we mean is the kind of thing that we might refer to as character strengths, which we're going to define as some desire or disposition, a way to act or a way to feel that lets you exercise judgment that's a recognizable form of human excellence, that's a way to increase your flourishing. Researcher Martin Seligman and his colleagues tried to list 24 of these different kinds of strengths. In the abstract, it seems a little bit strange, but when you see them listed out you get the sense of what he means. Here are the 24 character strengths he identified. Things like bravery, creativity, leadership, kindness, social intelligence, the zest for life. As you look at this list though, you might think of some though like those are good, whatever. But there's some that you see and you're like, humor, that's me, or bravery, that's me. That gets past just any old character strengths to the ones that might matter for you, your so-called signature strengths. It turns out that there's a way to really look at these in detail. There's online survey known as the VIA Character Strengths survey that you can take and walk through all these questions. It'll tell you what your strengths are. You get to download this little profile. Here's mine, top-strength humor. Yes, memes, humor. Thank you. But yeah, you get to see them listed out, your top character strengths. The ones that are at the top are what he calls your signature strengths. Those are the strengths that feel essential to who you are. It's important to me that I'm funny. But the claim is that when you exercise these strengths, you wind up being happier than you expect. For you, an optimal experience will be cases where you're exercising those strengths that feel really core to who you are. We know that from studies that basically just force people to do this. One study had subjects use one of their strengths in a new and different way every day for a week, if your strength is bravery, you have to do some brave thing every day for a week, versus a control where you just list some happy memories. What does he find? Well, if you look at people's happiness, not just immediately after the test, but six months later, what you find is there's no difference between these conditions right before people do this strengths test. White bars are when you're using your strengths, the yellow bars are the control. One month later you see a big boost in people's happiness. But what's interesting is that he finds you get a significant boost in happiness for using your strengths even up to six months out. If you start using your strengths more on, it can give you a small but significant boost in your happiness. That raises the question of this seems awesome, small, but significant boost in our happiness. How do we get this? We've got psych pro tips to help us. But the biggest psych pro tip is that you just need to find ways to use all these signature strengths not just when you're at leisure, but also when you're working. Leisure using our signature strengths is pretty easy. Hopefully, many of you have extracurriculars that allow you to engage in this, maybe social intelligence or creativity or kindness or something like that. Maybe you volunteer. But the real key is that it's good to find ways to include these signature strengths, even when we're working. It can make work less boring and annoying. We know this from some lovely work on what researchers call job crafting. For high school students, I think we might want to call it school crafting because I think school rather than job. But job crafting is this idea that you take whatever your job description is and you fit it to your strengths. You don't ignore what your job demands are, but you try to re-frame what you're doing to fit with the strengths that are signature to you. There's a lot of wonderful work on job crafting by the Yale psychologist, Amy Wrzesniewski. She studied job crafting, this ability to use your signature strengths in your job, in a population you might not assume has a lot of flexibility in their job description. She actually studied hospital janitorial staff workers. These are people who are cleaning up vomit in a cancer ward or cleaning the linen of COVID patients. It doesn't seem like this is a job where you have a lot of flexibility. But what she found, interestingly enough, was that when she interviewed these cleaning staff, a lot of them thought about their job as you might stereotypically expect. They're like, this is just a job, I do it for the paycheck, I don't like it, it doesn't take much skill, I don't care, it's just a job. But the other half of the cleaning staff saw their job as a calling. They really liked what they did. When she did a deep dive, she found that they were naturally job-crafting. They were within the task they had to do, doing stuff that allowed them to exercise their signature strengths. She tells the story of one hospital cleaning staff member who cleaned up in a chemotherapy ward where people often get sick and vomit. And he said, "My job isn't to clean this stuff, my job is to make them laugh. There you are, this cancer patient, you're in pain, you just vomited, you're really embarrassed. I get to come in and make a joke like, you keep vomiting, I keep cleaning it, and we'll be in a good sabbatical." Then the patient laughs and he's like, that's my real job. Adds humor. Another hospital staff member talked about creativity. She said, "My job in the coma ward is to move the paintings around a little bit. I just had this sense that it might make people wake up a little faster." Nobody told these staff members to do it. They're just exercising their strengths, and it makes them love their job more and a little bit happier. The key, of course, is that you can be using this in high school too. If you do this test and you learn about your signature strengths and you find out it's bravery or humor or creativity or whatever, bring that into algebra too. Take that into your history class. Find ways to make your schoolwork map onto your signature strengths and you'll love it more. Think about this when you're thinking about your future too. As you're thinking about picking a future college major or down the line picking a career, this is the spot where you need to be thinking about your signature strengths. Ultimately loving what you do, the research suggests, is just exercising these traits that you feel are signature and core and essential to you. Using your signature strengths can bring you joy even in the hardest work you do.
