Cues Can Heighten Awareness of Character Strengths

(Feb. 20, 2009)

By Neal H. Mayerson, Ph.D., Chairman, VIA Institute

Research has shown that there are positive benefits when people deliberately think of new ways to use their signature strengths – generally defined as their top five VIA character strengths – in their lives.

One of the greatest challenges in making behavioral changes is keeping our intention top of mind while attending to the many things in our lives that compete for consciousness bandwidth. Constructing our personal environments to include cues about our signature strengths and our intention to express them robustly c an help promote positive behavior change.

To aid in this, the VIA Institute has developed some items that can serve this cueing function, and suggestions for using them.  They are available to practitioners through this link.

All proceeds support VIA’s nonprofit mission: to advance the science of character and to provide practitioners with tools to help clients improve their lives via building upon and building up personal character strengths.