When you align your strengths with your values, you create a roadmap for living authentically, with purpose and fulfillment. You are better able to navigate challenges because you have a clear compass to guide you in tough situations.
Title Photo by Katrin Bolovtsova
An Experiment
I’ve known about my Signature Strengths for years but I’m not always aware of using them. So last week I decided to focus on putting them into action. My unique Signature Strengths are: gratitude, love of learning, perspective, hope, forgiveness, and Love.
I decided to start with my top strength, gratitude. I needed a friend’s help with a project on the day before election day. Now, I know his political leanings which are far different from mine. So I may have shaded the truth a bit about who I supported in the upcoming elections. After we finished the project, I brought in my strength of gratitude, thanked him for his help, and told him I couldn’t have completed the task without it.
But inside, I felt “off” and even a little deceitful. I realized that I had ignored my Valid Value of integrity. I had implemented a strength without paying attention to my values. I saw that if I continued to do this, it could lead to a moral conflict or compromise on my values. It could even weaken my commitment to integrity. I decided to do better next time.
Next day, I began with a focus on love of learning. I wanted to add more physical movement during the day, so I researched different exercise methods: HIIT routines, strength training, aerobic exercises, yoga, stretching . . . you name it and I read about it. I kinda went down a rabbit hole but I was so enjoying reading and learning about different ways to exercise that I forgot to actually do any of them.
I got so engrossed in my love of learning that I completely ignored my Valid Value of health and vitality – the reason I had started the research to begin with. And it slowly dawned on me that, without balance, the love of learning could become unsustainable. I not only needed to learn ways to improve my health and vitality, I needed to honor that value and actually do the work.
Learning the Lesson
After those two ineffective days, I finally understood that putting my Signature Strengths to best use required me to live into my values at the same time. I decided to start with the value of self-mastery as I obviously hadn’t been doing that very well.
So I began by embracing my strength of forgiveness as part of the journey. Looking back on the mistakes of the last two days, rather than criticizing myself harshly for failing, I practiced self-compassion and forgiveness. I found that this helped me move forward without being weighed down by guilt or regret, and allowed me to learn and grow from the experience.
This combination of strengths and values strengthened my resilience, supported my value of self-mastery, and allowed me to bounce back from the setbacks of the earlier days. Forgiving yourself and others is a sign of inner strength and helps you stay focused on continuous improvement.
Excelerated Strengths™ + Excelerated Values™
Combining your VIA Signature Strengths with your personal values can lead to a powerful alignment that fosters growth, purpose, and fulfillment. As I learned from my experiences, when your strengths and values are effectively combined, they work together to guide your decisions and help you create actions that are aligned with your life’s purpose and intentions. On the other hand, when they are not combined, you risk creating inner conflict, becoming increasingly ineffective, and indulging actions that may not fully reflect who you are or what you stand for.
Your Signature Strengths
The VIA (Values In Action) Character Strengths originated from a group headed by Dr. Martin Seligman, founder of the Positive Psychology movement, and the late Dr. Chris Peterson, a distinguished researcher and scientist. Seligman, Peterson, and their team surveyed all the wisdom literature: Aristotle and Plato, Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, the Old Testament and the Talmud, the Quran, Confucius, Buddha, the Tao, Benjamin Franklin — about 200 “virtue catalogs” altogether. Through this process, they discovered that these wide-ranging traditions spanning over three thousand years and “the entire face of the earth” all endorsed six virtues: wisdom and knowledge, courage, love and humanity, justice, temperance, and spirituality. [Seligman]
The six virtues are further classified into 24 strengths of character. While we have all 24 character strengths to some degree, we generally tend to use some of them more often and more naturally, without thinking about them too much. The VIA Character Strengths Test allows you to see how these 24 strengths are displayed in your unique personality. The top five or six character strengths that are most natural for you to use are called your Signature Strengths. These are the innate qualities that energize you and come most naturally. They are your go-to ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving
Your Valid Values
We all value some qualities over others, but we aren’t always aware of what those are. Values are principles or qualities that we find worthy and desirable. They define what matters most to us. A value is a feeling, a belief, or a behavior that you are naturally drawn to – principles that you consider necessary to a well-lived life. They represent behaviors and activities that bring us joy, contentment, and feelings of well-being when we engage in them. You could think of values as a pair of glasses through which you view your life and world. Or your values could be a compass that points you in the right direction on your journey . . . if you remember to look at it.
When your life is aligned with your “valid values” – the principles you deem as important and desirable – you feel in harmony and balanced. One of the keys to creating your Excelerated Life™ is to choose your values, then consciously take steps to live them.
How Character Strengths and Values Work Together
When strengths and values work in harmony, they boost your effectiveness and lead to fulfillment.
Strengths bring values to life. Your strengths are tools you can use to express and act on your values. For example: If one of your top values is family well-being and one of your strengths is gratitude, you can express this value by regularly acknowledging and appreciating your family members. Gratitude becomes a way to nurture and reinforce the importance of family well-being.
Values give strengths direction. Your values give your strengths a meaningful purpose and ensure you use them wisely. If hope is one of your signature strengths but you don’t prioritize values like service or courage, your hopeful nature may lack focus or depth. But when aligned with service, your hope might inspire others to overcome challenges and believe in a better future.
Used together, they create integrity and alignment. When you use your strengths in service of your values, you’re living in alignment with who you truly are. This builds authenticity, consistency, and a deep sense of purpose.
Why It Matters
When you align your strengths (the how) with your values (the why), you create a roadmap for living authentically, with purpose and fulfillment. It creates a sense of harmony between what you do and why you do it.
- You are better able to navigate challenges. Now you have a clear compass to guide you in tough situations.
- It helps you build consistency so that your actions will reflect your principles, creating trust and authenticity.
- You begin to experience fulfillment. You find that acting from a place of alignment between strengths and values leads to a deeper sense of meaning and purpose.
- And you maximize impact. When strengths and values align, your actions become more focused and effective.
Ways to Combine Character Strengths and Values
Here are some practical examples of how strengths and values can work together effectively. These examples use my Signature Strengths and Valid Values.
Gratitude + Family Well-Being: You regularly express thanks to your family members for their support and presence, fostering a close and loving environment.
Love of Learning + Health and Vitality: You prioritize learning about nutrition and fitness to improve your physical and mental health.
Perspective + Integrity: You use your ability to see the bigger picture to make fair, ethical decisions that align with your principles.
Hope + Service: You inspire others to persevere through challenges by sharing your optimism and taking action to help them.
Forgiveness + Courage: You bravely let go of past grievances, building stronger relationships and emotional resilience.
Love + Self-Mastery: You nurture your self-discipline with kindness and compassion, creating a balanced approach to self-improvement.
Using these examples, consider your strengths and values and begin to think of ways you can combine them to work effectively together.
Action!
The first step in harnessing this synergy between strengths and values is to know your Signature Strengths and your Valid Values.
If you haven’t taken the VIA Signature Strengths survey, do that here.
And if you haven’t discovered your Valid Values, this tool can help.
Once you have the necessary information (your strengths and values), explore the connection between your strengths and values with these questions.
- Which of your values resonates most strongly with your current priorities or challenges?
- How can you use your top strengths to express or reinforce this value?
- Are there any areas where you feel a disconnect between your strengths and values? How might you realign them?
- What would your daily life look like if your actions consistently reflected both your values and strengths?
- How might you use this alignment to contribute meaningfully to your family, community, or work?
Aligning Strengths with Values
To effectively put your Signature Strengths to use, pair them with your Valid Values. Otherwise, you risk running into the problems I had when I tried to implement my strengths without taking my values into account. This isn’t to say that you can never rely on your strengths alone. You are likely doing that now. But you can be even more effective by using your strengths and your values in conjunction with each other.
Take time today to reflect on your strengths and values. Write down your top 3 strengths and your top 3 values, then brainstorm one specific way to align each strength with a value this week. Small, intentional actions lead to profound changes over time. In fact, that’s how you embrace your Excelerated Life™!
What are your strengths? What are your values?
What could you accomplish if you combined the two?
Share your comments by leaving a post below.
Excelerated Strengths™ — discovering and using your Signature Strengths — is one practice for creating your Excelerated Life™, a life of flourishing and well-being, and a life of meaning, purpose, and service.
Read more about the Excelerated Life™.
Resources:
Seligman, Ph.D., Martin E. P. Authentic Happiness. New York: Free Press, 2002
This blog post includes research information and suggestions provided by ChatGPT, an AI language model developed by OpenAI. The content was generated with AI assistance and is intended to provide information and guidance. Please note that the suggestions are not official statements from OpenAI. To learn more about ChatGPT and its capabilities, you can visit the OpenAI website. https://openai.com/