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How Using Your Signature Strengths Contributes To Well-Being

You have the power to positively influence your well-being by focusing on your character strengths. Developing and using your Signature Strengths increases happiness, improves relationships, and builds resilience – the ability to recover quickly from setbacks when things don’t go as planned. Weaknesses need to be corrected focusing on weaknesses is the hard way to grow. Focus on using our strengths contributes to well-being and flourishing.

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How To Build Healthy Relationships – And Why

We need each other. We depend on each other. We literally cannot live without each other and we cannot be our happiest, our best, and our most productive without building healthy relationships.

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All Together Now

“We’re all in this together.” I can’t count the number of times nor the number of people from whom I have heard this sentiment over the past months of the pandemic. I suspect you’ve had a similar experience. From doctors on TV to product advertisements to personal injury lawyers to friends on Zoom, these words have been spoken again and again. “We’re all in this together.”

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Five Ways To Feel Good Now

Flourishing is not dependent on the weather, the current political environment, or one’s wealth and status. Flourishing isn’t dependent on any external factors at all. Aiming for a ratio of 3 positive experiences to 1 negative experience is the path to flourishing and for effectively dealing with whatever comes our way.

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Five Ways To Feel Good

The Covid-19 pandemic. Unemployment. The economy in shambles. Increased violence. Injustice for many of our brothers and sisters. Leadership crises.

Some lucky souls are blessed with naturally sunny, positive dispositions. But what about the rest of us? Well, as William Arthur Ward stated, “Happiness is an inside job.” Research in the field of Positive Psychology has shown that we have a fairly large influence (about 40%) over our own level of happiness. That’s right. There are things you can do . . . today . . . that can measurably improve your feelings of contentment and gratification. Here are 5 suggestions, to get you started.

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A Balanced Approach To Using Character Strengths

Use your Signature Strengths to improve your life, building on positives and learning from the negatives but don’t neglect your other character strengths. If fact, you can use your signature strengths to practice and build up your lesser strengths to better use all of the strengths.

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Strengths And Virtues

Signature Strengths are one of the foundational principles of positive psychology. Early proponents, including Martin Seligman, Chris Peterson, and others, combed through the wisdom literature of many of the world’s religions and philosophies. They identified six “virtues” that were common across all the cultures and thinking, ancient and modern, that they examined.

Then they identified 24 ways the six virtues are lived out. These they called strengths. We all embody all 24 of the strengths but we rely on and use our top 5 or 6 strengths more often and more naturally.

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Six Reasons To Choose Positivity

There are six facts about positivity — discovered through rigorous laboratory experiments — that can help you understand the importance and the pull of positive emotions. A thorough grasp of these facts starts you on an upward spiral.

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A Choice

We are living in dark times, some say, troubling times. But remember it isn’t the event that troubles us, makes us sad or angry or afraid; it’s our judgement of the event. For many of us, the world is a far different place than we’ve ever seen before. We could easily slip into a downward spiral of negative thoughts and emotions. Some wisdom from neuroscientist and author Dr. Alex Korb might be helpful.

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The Sand In The Oyster

Change your perspective and the way you think about and deal with irritations and you can transform your behavior from reacting in anger and frustration to responding mindfully with love. Choose your response to irritations with care.

“God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons we could not learn in any other way. The way we learn those lessons is not to deny the feelings but to find the meanings underlying them.” ~ Stanley Lindquist

Making Pearls

Have you ever admired an exquisite pearl necklace, each lustrous pearl perfect in shape and shimmering iridescence? Do you know how pearls are made? Natural pearls are created when an irritant, a grain of sand or bit of stone, gets inside the shell of a mollusk. The mollusk reacts to the irritant by coating it with a substance to reduce the irritation.

Over time, as layer upon layer is added, a pearl is formed. The source of a natural pearl is irritation. The mollusk responds to the irritation by creating something of beauty and value.

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