The VIA Character Strengths test is a useful way to quantify your progress toward living the virtuous life. You can use it as a tool to come up with a strategy for building on character strengths and working on weaknesses. I took the character strengths assessment online on the VIA website early on in my journey to learn how to live a virtuous life. Here is a look at how VIA organizes and define 24 character strengths within 6 categories of virtue.
When you take the assessment, VIA ranks your character strengths 1-24. Importantly for their framework, they don’t consider the lower ranked traits to be weaknesses. They organize them based on which ones you depend on and exhibit the most all the way down to the ones that you under-utilize and are underdeveloped. I guess that’s why they call it “positive” psychology. Don’t want anyone feeling too bad about themselves, right?
Information only matters when you do something with it. I will share my results and how I went about analyzing and using this information to give you an idea how it might be useful to you as well.
Analyzing the Results
My top three signature strengths were…
1. Prudence: Careful about one’s choices, cautious, not taking undue risks
2. Humility: Modesty, letting one’s accomplishments speak for themselves
3. Love of Learning: Mastering new skills, topics, and bodies of knowledge, whether on one’s own or formally; related to the strength of curiosity but goes beyond it to describe the tendency to add systematically to what one knows.
The interesting part about character strengths is that their overuse can hinder someone who is very strong in them.
– Those very high in prudence can sometimes use it to excess and become paralyzed in the decision-making process. They can sometimes be passive when they should take action.
– Humility can turn into something else when not balanced by other virtues and strengths—self-deprecation, excessive self-criticism, or subservience.
There is no question that these overuses or imbalances have caused me significant problems in my life. Another way I can see the overuse of prudence in my life is that I lean on it too hard to motivate me to get things done. To get more out of myself, I start to focus on extreme negative consequences of decisions or of not getting something done. This causes anxiety, guilt, and allows overuse of humility to come in and finish me off with excessive self-criticism. This, along with the high mental cost of thinking deeply through every decision, is both paralyzing, exhausting, and de-motivating.
Strongest Virtue Category: Wisdom
All five of the strengths categorized under the virtue of Wisdom were in my top 10, making it the most consistently strong category of virtue…
3. Love of Learning: Mastering new skills & topics, systematically adding to knowledge
5. Judgement: Critical thinking, thinking through all sides, not jumping to conclusions
6. Creativity: Original, adaptive, ingenuity, seeing and doing things in different ways
7. Perspective: Wisdom, providing wise counsel, taking the big picture view
10. Curiosity: Interest, novelty-seeking, exploration, openness to experience
Wisdom is my most developed virtue, and can be of immense use to me in forming any of the other strengths and virtues. Specifically, Love of Learning, Critical Thinking, and Ingenuity can be leveraged toward developing my lowest strengths of Courage or of Hope.
My lowest 5 strengths were…
20. Hope: Optimism, positive future-mindedness, expecting the best & working to achieve it
21. Bravery: Valor, not shrinking from threat or challenge, facing fears, speaking up for what’s right
22. Self-Regulation: Self-control, disciplined, managing impulses, emotions, and vices
23. Zest: Vitality, enthusiasm for life, vigor, energy, not doing things half-heartedly
24. Perseverance: Persistence, industry, finishing what one starts, overcoming obstacles
If I were to pick three underused strengths to focus on developing, I think it would be Hope, Self-Regulation, and Perseverance. These specifically will help balance out my toxic overuse of Prudence and Humility.
My lowest overall virtue was Courage, with three of the four strengths falling in my bottom five…
9. Honesty
21. Bravery
23. Zest
24. Perseverance
While this is my lowest virtue, since Honesty is high it can serve as a catalyst for developing the other strengths within Courage. I can use my love for authenticity, sincerity, and integrity to spur me to face my fears, overcome obstacles, and live with more vitality.
Here is my ranking of virtue strengths, along with the average placement of strengths in that category. In parentheses is the highest and lowest strength within the virtue…
1. Wisdom = 6.2 (3, 10)
2. Temperance = 9.25 (1, 22)
3. Justice = 12 (8, 17)
4. Transcendance = 14 (4, 20)
5. Humanity = 16.33 (15, 18)
6. Courage = 19.25 (9, 24)
In Summary
I plan to reduce my excessive dependence on and toxic overuse of Prudence and Humility by leveraging my Wisdom (Love of Learning, Judgement, Creativity, Perspective, Curiosity) to develop my underused strengths of Bravery, Self-Regulation, and Perseverance. Developing these strengths will balance out Prudence and Humility and guard against their excessive application.
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