Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Moving from a Place of Strengths

Various factors play into making career decisions and managing its development.  While goals, interests and education play key roles in career development, it is strengths that are often untapped when making career considerations. Qualitative strengths (character and cultivated virtues) are perhaps a more accurate place for reflection when visioning one’s self in a life-career whether vocational or avocational (gratifying work that contributes to human fullness and fulfillment). 

Parker Palmer encourages the search for authentic vocation that “turn[s] inward and downward toward the hardest realities of our lives, rather than outward and upward toward abstraction, idealization, and exhortation." These inscapes are the stories of simple accomplishments along the lifespan that reveal our innate resources and strengths that when embraced have the greatest potential to reveal the deep gladness that meets the world’s deep need. 

Western modernity has taught us to focus on pathology, weakness and deficiencies (quantitative aspects).  While it should and is intuitive with trained minds, it is strengths (traits, character and virtues) that when assumed and developed yield genuine, intrinsic success and effectiveness.

By example meta-analyses shows that curiosity accounts for approximately 10% of the variance in academic learning and performance and 36% of the variance in self-selected career choices. Greater curiosity-related behaviors and cognitions are consistently associated with greater learning, engagement, and performance in academic settings and work organizations.[1]

A study reported that those who develop more in justice reasoning report more career fulfillment, continue their intellectual stimulation, are more involved in their community, and are more socially conscious in young adulthood.[2]

A powerful strength that can have an immense impact on ones work is attention or flow, “a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”[3]

I myself have a followed serious questions derived from the depth of  personal formation and being that landed me in a seminary where I cultivated various practices that highlighted strengths and virtues that now make up my person in relationship to the customers I serve. I am not in a “ministry” in the conventional sense, but facilitate challenging contexts with people with complex needs in a community of care.   

Today there are few decent models for reflecting on personal strengths. You can try Virtues In Action, Institute on Character. VIA Survey of Character Strengths is a self-assessment that results in a report that can be vital for creating a plan for charting or developing a career, building on signature strengths and for reflecting on improved human functioning in all of life domains.  

Gallup’s StrengthsFinder profile asks: What's the right career for me? What should I consider doing now? What is my best fit? It supports movement for the vantage of strengths

Move from strength.
   i] Assess your talents, knowledge, experience and capabilities. Sort out what you can learn from that which is innate and enduring.
  ii] Don't rule out a career possibility because you lack knowledge or experience. Those things can almost always be acquired. Evaluate whether you have the needed strengths or talents instead.
 iii] Take a close look at why the role seems attractive to you. Resist being drawn to a role for the wrong reasons (for example, by prestige, glamour, or power). Make sure you love to do what the role requires.



[1] Christopher Peterson, Martin E. P. Seligman, Character Strengths and Virtues:a Handbook and Classification. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004, 135.
[2] Rest, J., Deemer, D., Barnett, R., Spickemier, J., & Volker, J. (1986), “Life Experiences and Developmental Pathways. In J. Rest, Moral Development: Advances in Research and Theory (pp. 28-58). New York: Praeger.
[3] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper Perennial, 1990.

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