The 24 Character Strengths: Finding Your Signature Strengths and Using Them Well

For most of its history, psychology focused on what goes wrong with people. Positive psychology, which took shape around the year 2000, asked a different question: what qualities help people live well? One of its best-known answers is the VIA classification of character strengths. Nadapge’s strengths test uses IPIP-VIA items, public-domain questions from the International Personality Item Pool written to measure the VIA strengths (Goldberg et al., 2006).

The VIA classification: 6 virtues, 24 strengths

Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman reviewed moral, religious, and philosophical traditions from many cultures, looking for virtues that are valued almost everywhere. They then described 24 character strengths as concrete routes to those virtues (Peterson & Seligman, 2004).

Virtue	Strengths
Wisdom	Creativity, curiosity, judgment (open-mindedness), love of learning, perspective
Courage	Bravery, perseverance, honesty, zest
Humanity	Love, kindness, social intelligence
Justice	Teamwork, fairness, leadership
Temperance	Forgiveness, humility, prudence, self-regulation
Transcendence	Appreciation of beauty and excellence, gratitude, hope, humor, spirituality (a sense of meaning and purpose)

Strengths are not the same as talents. A singing voice depends a lot on what you were born with, while kindness and perseverance are closer to character that grows through choice and practice. Every strength is a positive quality, so the ones near the bottom of your list are not weaknesses. They are strengths you reach for less often.

Signature strengths

Among your top-ranked strengths, the ones that feel most essentially “you” are called signature strengths. Peterson and Seligman described them with features like these:

• Using them feels authentic, like the real you.
• Using them is energizing rather than draining.
• You learn related things quickly and want to use them often.
• You feel restless when prevented from using them.

So rather than accepting your top five automatically, check which of them actually fit these features.

Using a strength in a new way

Seligman and colleagues randomly assigned online participants to different exercises (Seligman et al., 2005). People who spent a week using one of their signature strengths in a new way each day reported higher happiness and fewer depressive symptoms than a comparison group that wrote about early memories, with benefits still visible six months later. Effects were stronger for people who kept practicing on their own.

That was an encouraging start, but one study is not the final word. A meta-analysis of randomized trials of positive psychology interventions found that effects were generally small (Bolier et al., 2013). Think of strengths practice as a habit that adds up gradually, not a miracle cure.

New ways to use a strength

• Curiosity: take an unfamiliar route on your commute; ask a colleague one question about their work.
• Kindness: do a small favor anonymously.
• Gratitude: end the day with a short thank-you message to someone.
• Humor: open a tense meeting with a light, kind remark.

Weaving strengths into work and relationships

Strengths last longer when they are blended into what you already do rather than saved for special occasions. Ryan Niemiec suggests a sequence of becoming aware of your strengths, exploring them, and then applying them deliberately (Niemiec, 2018). Someone high in love of learning can turn a dull routine task into a small research project on doing it faster. Someone high in fairness can take on the role of inviting quieter people to speak in meetings. In relationships, simply naming a partner’s or friend’s strength when you see it (“your humor really eased things today”) makes conversations warmer.

Overuse and underuse

Strengths shine when used in the right amount. Niemiec describes how each strength can be underused or overused (Niemiec, 2019):

Strength	Underuse	Optimal use	Overuse
Honesty	Evasiveness	Truthful and considerate	Bluntness that ignores feelings
Perseverance	Giving up easily	Following through	Clinging to what should be dropped
Curiosity	Disinterest	Exploring and asking	Prying into others’ private lives
Prudence	Impulsive choices	Weighing options	Endless postponing

Signature strengths are the easiest to overuse, precisely because they come naturally. If people say you are “a bit much,” that is not a reason to abandon the strength. It is a cue to adjust the volume.

How to use this

1. From your top five, pick one strength that feels truly like you.
2. For the next seven days, use it in a different way each day and jot down a one-line note.
3. After a week, keep the version you enjoyed most as a regular habit.
4. Recall a recent conflict. Were you overusing one of your strengths at the time?

See your ranking of all 24 strengths in the character strengths test, and explore them alongside your personality and values in your report.