Without the well-being model, many people are a bit lost in their thinking about happiness. Some think that if they have prosperity, then that will bring them happiness. Others think that if they have health, then that will bring them happiness. But you, dear reader, know how well-being works. You know that being poor or sick can prevent a person from being happy, but no amount of prosperity or health can make them happy.
But who can blame them? They know they can focus their attention and energy on building prosperity or health in life, and they’re likely to get results. They can use knowledge and specific approaches to improve their finances, their environment, their biological health, and how they access medicine. They can create results in those areas, directly.
This chapter reveals a similar way of thinking about creating our happiness. That’s because recent breakthroughs within the research field of psychology offer knowledge and specific approaches for learning how to become happy. These are ways of focusing our attention and energy on building happiness directly, similar to the ways we can build prosperity or health, directly.
There’s a special challenge, though, for the topic of retirement happiness. When people dream about creating a happy retirement, it’s usually based on a version from the old retirement. Society still puts some pressure on us to simply go after carefree fun and enjoyment. But that’s an outdated idea for worn-out old people. This new chapter in psychology tells us that lasting happiness is linked to a critical factor that the fun-and-enjoyment approach overlooks: engagement. The old retirement was sometimes even described as a process of disengagement. That’s definitely not what we want for the new retirement!
Engagement is the missing ingredient in lasting retirement happiness. And the key to engagement is identifying our strengths—those talents and abilities that we receive great satisfaction in using.
We can certainly get lucky and be happy without knowing how we did it. (If you win the lottery you can be prosperous without knowing anything about money.) But because the new retirement offers the greatest opportunity for our fulfillment in life, we shouldn’t count on luck. Science is a better bet.
As it turns out, psychology is finally learning as much about happiness as unhappiness. Instead of studying happiness, most psychological research studies over the past five decades looked at its opposite: depression, addiction, neurosis, and so on. Some very smart and well-intentioned people have spent billions of dollars to create a mountain of detailed knowledge about the thousand and one ways that people can be unhappy. This is important information, to be sure. It’s also why, when we think of psychology, it’s usually in the context of fixing people’s problems, to help them lead normal lives. If you’re already normal (or at least somewhat normal), then psychology hasn’t had much to offer you. Psychology couldn’t help you learn how to create happiness in your life. Trying to prevent or avoid unhappiness isn’t at all the same as creating happiness.
To balance out all this knowledge about unhappiness, a new discipline called positive psychology emerged around the turn of the new millennium. This is not just a variation on “positive thinking.” The inquiry into positive psychology was championed by the renowned research psychologist Martin Seligman and others. They take a clear-thinking, hard-nosed, let’s-measure-it-and-see-if-it-stands-up approach to the study of human strengths, positive emotions, and other aspects of optimal human experience. Positive psychology has really caught on, and these days there are many more researchers who are studying how humans thrive.
Thanks to systematic research in other fields, we know about approaches for increasing our “economic well-being” as well as our “health and well-being.” Finally, there is systematic research into our “psychological well-being,” too.
Seligman suggests that there are, essentially, three approaches to happiness; that is, three basic ways to be happy. Although there are, thank goodness, an unlimited number of specific ways in which you can be happy, each comes under one of these three basic approaches.
What, you ask, are these three approaches to happiness?
• Pleasure
• Engagement
• Meaning
Let’s explore them one by one.
This one sounds obvious, doesn’t it? When you first think of happiness, it’s usually pleasure and enjoyment that come to mind, right off the bat. An afternoon at the ball game. Eating a delicious meal. Watching an entertaining movie. Buying something that you want. These involve being comfortable and having fun in an easy or relaxed way. Pleasure like this brings a burst of positive emotions that come and go quickly, though, usually not lasting much longer than the event itself. When you use this approach (and I sincerely hope that you do), you need to keep going back and doing enjoyable activities, over and over again, to get more of that happiness.
This one isn’t very obvious. Another word for engagement is involvement. Positive psychology researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi uses still another word for this experience that you can almost feel: He calls it flow. (His name, by the way, is actually easier to say than it looks; it sounds like “Me high. Chicks sent me high.”) Flow happens when your abilities are well matched to some challenging task. You get so deep into the activity, whatever it is, that you lose all track of time. You may feel like it’s been only a few minutes, but it’s been much longer. Or a few seconds may feel like an eternity. Either way, when you’re that engaged, you lose yourself in what you’re doing. You may not even be aware that it makes you happy while you’re doing it, but afterward you say, “That was great!”
Engagement involves challenge, and it demands something from you, so it’s not as simple as pleasure. It can’t be purchased or consumed in the way that pleasure can be. When you use this approach (and you may be using it more than you realize), it can stick with you longer than pleasure does. Over time, it can build up into a lasting satisfaction with life.
This approach to happiness is somewhat more obvious than engagement, but it’s not so easy to pin down. Of course having meaning in your life would make you happy! But how do you get it? The way you get it, my friend, is to use your abilities in the service of something larger than yourself. This approach requires something from you, too. Note that meaning doesn’t come from just believing in something larger than yourself; it comes from being in service to that something. This is part of living your life in alignment with your core values.
What’s larger than yourself? Take your pick, depending on your belief system: God, your family, the environment, your political party, your ethnic culture, the free enterprise system, your community. It may not be service to something larger than yourself but to something beyond yourself: a neighbor who needs help with chores, a child who needs help with school, a litter-free walking path, a safer neighborhood, the sick, the needy. You can’t buy or consume meaning, just as you can’t buy or consume engagement. And contributing your money to something you believe in doesn’t provide the same sense of meaning or happiness that working for it provides (although giving money is still a good thing). You can be aware of this happiness before, during, and after a meaningful experience. When you use this approach (and I highly recommend it), the sense of satisfaction can last a lifetime.
Look carefully at the three approaches to happiness. You’ll notice that “fixing your weaknesses” appears nowhere on the list. Rooting out and eliminating your imperfections is not an approach to happiness. With the best of intentions, your loving parents, your well-meaning teachers, and every straight-shooting boss you’ve had since high school have attempted to correct your deficiencies. It’s finally OK to place a bit less emphasis on that. In retirement, you won’t need to focus on fixing your weaknesses. So take a lesson from positive psychology—develop and expand what’s right with you. Focus on what you like about yourself, rather than what you don’t like. Concentrate on what you do want, instead of what you don’t want. Those are the scientific recommendations, anyway.
By the way, Seligman suggests there’s a fourth way to be happy, which he calls victory. He’s right. If this book were focused on the First Age or Second Age, victory would be a whole section. On the other hand, for a book that’s about designing the Third and Fourth Ages of life, we’ll focus on the other three paths to happiness.
If you’d like to increase your happiness in retirement (or even right now!), you can use the three approaches to design your life. All three are equally valid—one of them is not better or more important than the others. But there is a connection between them, and what society tries to tell you retirement happiness should be about. Society may still be thinking in terms of the old retirement. For people who didn’t have all that many years to live and weren’t in the best of health, just retiring from work was a blessing.
So society has created expectations about what kind of happiness is appropriate for worn-out old people in retirement: the easy, relaxing, leisure-oriented kind of happiness. The message from society has been that happiness in retirement should be based on pleasure.
That message may have made sense years ago (and still may for those who earn their living with hard physical labor), but for the legions of modern workers whose sedentary lives require the intervention of gym workouts, a good long rest is not what they need. At retirement age now, most of us are burned-out but definitely not worn-out.
So even though there is no hierarchy among the three approaches to happiness, society has created a hierarchy for retirement happiness. Society’s expectations are that enjoyment and pleasure should be enough. If your expectations are higher than that and you want engagement and meaning in retirement, you have some work to do.
If a pleasant retirement is all that you want, that’s perfectly OK. But if you decide that you’d like to set your sights higher and plan for a retirement that’s engaging, or possibly even meaningful, that’s OK, too. You should realize that if you haven’t worn yourself out on the job, those two approaches give you a better chance at achieving a more lasting kind of happiness—the true well-being that this book is all about.
You can see that the Three Levels of Retirement Happiness look like a mountain.
Does all this sound like you’re hoping for too much happiness from retirement? After all, many of your friends and coworkers will be relieved to simply not have to drag their sorry rear end back and forth to work every day. They will be content just resting their duffs, like on that old three-legged stool. They will wonder why you’re putting so much thought and energy into planning for your happiness in retirement. Isn’t discovering your strengths a lot of work? And just who do you think you are, climbing mountains of happiness? Who are you to climb beyond pleasure to engagement, and beyond engagement to meaning? Why do you deserve to have all three levels of retirement happiness? You will get push back, and resistance, and pressure from many of your friends and coworkers for even trying to design the new retirement.
The answer, of course, is that we all deserve all the approaches to happiness. But you may not be able to talk with some of your friends about it. They’ll notice later, when you’re out having the time of your life, and they’re just “relaxing.” That will be the time to invite them along!
When you initially imagine the retirement you want, it’s probably a pleasant retirement. You want to be secure and comfortable and simply enjoy yourself. You want to spend time with friends and family. You want to play. A pleasant retirement is based on leisure, relaxation, and finally getting a chance for some fun in life. Like a vacation.
This is the original idea of retirement, as people have imagined it, for generations. You probably already know a lot about what it would take to create this level of retirement happiness. It’s usually based on your interests in the world outside of work. It’s the same kind of stuff that you pursue whenever you have enough free time: hobbies, entertainment, spectator events, travel, socializing. It’s the WHAT, from chapter three. These things are enjoyable partly just because they’re not work. And they’re enjoyable partly because there’s something about the subject or pastime that you find interesting.
Some of these interests may keep you tuned in for years or for a whole lifetime. Others you may casually pick up, explore, and let go again, moving on to new explorations and new interests, as those interests aren’t necessarily a very fundamental, or lasting, aspect of yourself. (Think how much your interests have already changed over the years.)
During your working life, these low-involvement activities bring a welcome counterbalance to your work. In retirement, though, these activities are no longer counterbalancing work (unless you are still doing some work to pay the bills), and they may not have enough weight to stand on their own. They may not be rich enough to bring the amount of happiness that you expect from them. They were up to the task of filling your all-too-short weekends and a week or two of vacation. And it helps if you can choose from a wide range of pleasurable activities that you’ve already lined up and experienced. But they may not be up to the task of filling weeks and months and years and decades of retirement.
How do you go about actually planning for the first level of happiness—pleasure and enjoyment? You’d think it would be as easy as falling off a log! After all, you’re naturally drawn toward what’s fun and enjoyable, and no doubt you’ve found ways to fit it in during your free time. You’ve done it during the Second Age, so you should be an old pro at planning for it in your Third Age, yes? (If you’re one of those who has taken little or no time out for fun and enjoyment during the Second Age—and sadly, there are more than a few—it will take some effort to reconnect with your natural inclinations and rekindle your interests.) So for your retirement, can’t you simply imagine how to do more of it—a lot more of it?
The answer is yes, you can and should use your imagination. And that’s the tricky part. It’s easy to imagine all sorts of new activities for the first level that seem like they would be fun, but you’ve never tried them before. They’re unrelated to your actual experience. It’s great to try new things and discover new ways to have fun. However, the bad news from the research front is that we humans are spectacularly inaccurate at predicting what will make us truly happy. It’s not often that we appreciate something completely new. When we like something that seems new, it usually has elements from our past experience that we enjoyed. There’s just enough new to make it feel novel and exciting.
Low-stakes experiments into new ways to have fun are ideal. Think of them as experiments into what you find to be fun. No big risk. (For example, trying a new sport or a membership organization.) On the other hand, high-stakes experiments that aren’t based on some elements of your past experience can be disastrous. (Such as buying a boat, an RV, or a vacation home. We’ve all heard horror stories, haven’t we?)
So when you’re planning for the first level of retirement happiness, don’t rely solely on your imagination! Use this three-step process:
1. Remember previous fun experiences. After all, when you plan how to create a pleasurable retirement, you have lots and lots of information to go on. You’ve been accumulating data on yourself whenever you pursued your favorite leisure activities outside of work. So the first step is to search your memory bank. Cruise back in time for some of the most fun experiences you can remember having.
2. Identify, specifically, what it was about these experiences that brought you the most enjoyment. Use the basic questions you learned in high school: Who? What? Where? When? How? These are hints, or clues, based on your real experiences for how to create more enjoyment like this.
3. Now imagine new ways to have fun in retirement. You’re not trying to re-create the old experiences, of course. But by using the hints and clues from your real life, you’re pointing yourself in the right direction. Find opportunities to test out, in a low-stakes way, your ideas for new types of retirement fun.
In addition to the first level of happiness that comes from pleasure, people are beginning to imagine something more: a second level that comes from engagement. This level introduces a new element: challenge. This is definitely part of the idea for the Third Age of Life. So it’s an essential part of the design for the new retirement!
Here’s what Csikszentmihalyi’s research discovered. When the challenges in your life are too far above your level of skill, they create anxiety. You’ve probably had a job like that at one time or another. But when the challenges in your life are too far below your level of skill, they create boredom. You probably wouldn’t want a retirement like that. (Remember, the old retirement is dying.) Perhaps you’d like more of a middle ground? That’s what an engaged retirement is about. The secret is regularly finding interesting challenges that are a good match for your favorite skills and strengths. When you find these interesting challenges and become actively involved in them, you get a sense of accomplishment from doing them well.
Because pleasure can easily be packaged and sold to you as a product or service, the first level of retirement happiness is a very big business (as we explored in chapter three). Magazine advertisements and television commercials are filled with entertainment, travel, and luxury goods that were developed and marketed based on the narrow view that retirement happiness is based only on pleasure. It’s a big business because the marketing works—we consume pleasure, and it generates a healthy profit.
Marketers know that we want other forms of happiness, too, like engagement or meaning, but those are difficult to package and sell because they require more involvement from us than just buying something. However, let the buyer beware: the marketing messages for products that can really provide only pleasure often imply that you’ll get engagement or meaning if you buy the product. That’s just hogwash.
It’s not easy to buy engagement or meaning—they’re more self-created. You need to build these kinds of happiness yourself, even if you do use a product—tools, books, sporting goods, learning opportunities—in conjunction with the activity. Even the simplest approach to retirement happiness—pleasure—has been a do-it-yourself project for most of human history. Not until the twentieth century did packaging and selling it become such a gigantic business.
When you plan for your retirement happiness, you can make a choice about how much to consume and how much to create yourself. It’s a little bit like making food choices. The Second Age of life is so hectic that many of us end up eating a lot of fast food along the way. But the Third Age opens up new possibilities, so with planning (and a bit of luck) we’ll all have the time for more of those good home-cooked meals.
But what about actually planning for the second level of retirement happiness, engagement? What about designing it into your life? Remember, flow is about enjoyable effort; it isn’t even remotely like the laid-back, whatever attitude of “go with the flow.” No, the second level is more like “make the flow.”
Here’s how you can begin to make plans for going beyond the first level to the second level. Pure enjoyment is most closely linked with your interests. And your level of involvement with an interest can be passive or active. Let’s say you’re interested in baseball. You could choose to be a spectator at a baseball game, or you could choose to be a player on a team. The low level of skill needed to be a spectator would produce a pleasant experience. But the higher level of skill needed to be a player would produce an engaging experience (not to mention the boost to your health from being physically active).
So when you’re planning for the first level, you need to know what your interests are. But when you’re planning for the second level, you need to know what your skills and strengths are. When you get an opportunity to use those parts of yourself, you tend to experience engagement—you go into the flow state. The surest way to successfully plan for the second level of happiness is to set up ways to use your strengths. It does take more research and planning. You need to discover your strengths so that you can begin to investigate opportunities to use them in your retirement. The Ideal Retirement exercise in this chapter will help you identify your top five strengths so you can be on the lookout for where to use them in the world.
What’s the difference between skills and strengths? Since you have more experience with skills, let’s start there. Skills are the abilities or talents that you use to accomplish tasks with people, data, or things. In the world of work, skills are king. A key aspect of the job hunter’s What Color Is Your Parachute? is helping you identify your skills (especially the ones that you love to use). Knowing your skills and being able to effectively communicate them is the basis for showing a potential employer what you can do. How valuable you are as an employee depends, to a large degree, on your skills. In the workplace, skills have a paycheck attached to them. As you may already know, it’s possible to have skills that you absolutely hate to use. Perhaps you became an expert at something, somehow, but you don’t like to do it. Or you may have loved that task at one time and developed the skills to do it, but now you don’t like it anymore. Or you may never have liked it. Competent, conscientious person that you are, though, you retained the skills.
However, for the most part, you probably like using your skills. If you found a job made up entirely of tasks that used your skills, and those tasks had just the right level of challenge (this is obviously a fantasy), you’d be in job heaven. You wouldn’t be spending (wasting?) your time on tasks that didn’t make use of your skills. Because the challenge wouldn’t be too high for your skill level, you wouldn’t feel anxious. And because it wouldn’t be too low, you wouldn’t feel bored. In fact, you’d be feeling engaged all the time. You’d probably be in a perpetual flow state (if that’s humanly possible). You’d be a model employee. Employee of the Month, over and over and over. (Could your job in the new retirement be like this?)
Of course, for regular jobs, it doesn’t work that way. And yet, people are more likely to experience flow at work than outside of work! How can this be? Because they typically get to use their skills more at work than they do anywhere else. If you experience much flow in your work, you’ll undoubtedly miss it when you retire. The first level of a leisure-based retirement just ain’t the same thing.
Now let’s make some distinctions between skills and strengths, as we did in chapter three. Your skills are mostly useful within some context—usually work. Your strengths are useful across all contexts—your whole life. Skills are narrow and specific enough that they often can have a paycheck, or some type of responsibility, attached to them. Strengths are broad and general enough that they may not. (Yet your strengths are the parts of yourself that you’re happy to use, whether you’re supposed to or not.) Skills are usually related to being a worker, while strengths are related to being a human. Strengths are more fundamental.
Strengths may sound a bit like something else that humans have: personality traits. These are intrinsic and enduring behaviors, such as introversion and extroversion. Personality traits are partially inherited, like the color of your eyes. Strengths are a little like that, because you also have tendencies toward certain strengths, developed through both nature and nurture. But here’s a big difference between traits and strengths: expressing your personality traits is more automatic, and you just do it. But using your strengths is more of a choice, and you can choose to develop them or not. (Skills are that way, too.)
Here’s another distinguishing characteristic of strengths: They are always positive. In contrast, personality traits and skills can be either positive or negative. For example, the most widely validated personality test measures the level of neuroticism as a trait that’s present in each person. Neuroticism is useful in the world of personality traits, but it would never be classified as a strength. In the same way, there are workplace skills that would be valued only by unethical employers. For example, cooking the books and roughing up adversaries are certainly skills but not positive ones. In contrast, strengths are abilities that are recognized and esteemed by the individual and by society at large.
Deep down inside, you know what your greatest strengths are. You are, without a doubt, the world’s leading expert on yourself.
But you are also so accustomed to some of your strengths, so familiar with them, so at ease in using them, that you may have kind of forgotten about them. Perhaps you noticed when you were young that you could do something in life easily and effortlessly while others struggled trying to do the same thing. Then, because doing that thing or acting in that way was effortless, you didn’t need to focus on it. It receded into the background of your awareness as you focused on the things that didn’t come easily and effortlessly. You needed to really apply effort and attention to the areas that were not your strengths (we won’t call them weaknesses), and so those other things may have stayed in the foreground of your awareness.
You probably have other strengths that you’ve never been aware of, even when you were young. They’re so much a part of you, so automatic, that they’ve been in the background all along, quietly helping you to effortlessly excel in that particular area. What’s more, they haven’t stayed the same over time. As you’ve used them—whether you were aware of them or not—you’ve continued to develop them. You’ve probably gotten better at using them over time. In fact, the Third Age may offer life’s greatest opportunity for you to develop them to their fullest potential.
You can think of your strengths as being like the paint colors on an artist’s palette (or in a kindergartner’s watercolors box). If you were to look back at the scenes of your life, you’d notice that over the course of time you’ve been painting with mostly the same colors. You may have used red or blue over and over again. That’s the way you use your strengths—they’re your favorite colors in the pictures of your life. In the scenes of your life, sometimes your favorite colors, or strengths, were in the foreground. In other scenes they were in the background—less obvious, but there just the same. You may find it helpful to line up a bunch of your scenes alongside each other to notice which colors are the most recurring. Once you do, they just jump out at you: Those same colors, those same strengths, are in so many of your life’s pictures and in your best work—your greatest achievements.
The three different methods in this chapter’s exercise are designed to help jog your awareness of your own strengths so you can plan how to incorporate them into your next stage of life (or right now). The picture of your Ideal Retirement needs to include those best parts of yourself, so it’s well worth a bit of reflection to identify them. Although, again, deep down you know what they are, these exercises are about naming them and more clearly articulating them, so they’ll be easier for you to plan with.
The naming system we’ll use is the VIA (Values in Action) Classification of Strengths. This classification was developed through the collaboration of dozens of experts, all focusing on the best of human nature. It’s the most thoughtfully conceived, broadly researched, thoroughly articulated, and painstakingly validated system of character strengths that’s ever been created. As an online survey, it has now been taken by more than a million people! This classification is a very powerful tool for identifying what’s best about you so you can design your next stage of life.
This system consists of twenty-four individual Signature Strengths, which are organized into six groups. The system’s developers, Chris Peterson and Martin Seligman, call these six groups Virtues; for our purpose here, you might also think of them as Strengths Themes. Each of these six broader Strengths Themes contains three to five of the more specific twenty-four Signature Strengths. You could spend years learning about the relationship of all these (and some people have), but you’ll get the general picture just by looking over the Strengths list on the following pages. Which sounds most like you?
Strengths that forge connections to the larger universe and provide meaning
Appreciation of beauty and excellence (awe, wonder, elevation) / Noticing and appreciating beauty, excellence, and/or skilled performance in all domains of life, from nature to art to mathematics to science to everyday experience
Gratitude / Being aware of and thankful for the good things that happen; taking time to express thanks
Hope (optimism, future-mindedness, future orientation) / Expecting the best in the future and working to achieve it; believing that a good future is something that can be brought about
Humor (playfulness) / Liking to laugh and tease; bringing smiles to other people; seeing the light side; making (not necessarily telling) jokes
Spirituality (religiousness, faith, purpose) / Having coherent beliefs about the higher purpose and meaning of the universe; knowing where one fits within the larger scheme; having beliefs about the meaning of life that shape conduct and provide comfort
Cognitive strengths that entail the acquisition and use of knowledge
Creativity (originality, ingenuity) /Thinking of novel and productive ways to do things; includes artistic achievement but is not limited to it
Curiosity (interest, novelty seeking, openness to experience) / Taking an interest in all of ongoing experience for its own sake; finding subjects and topics fascinating; exploring and discovering
Open-mindedness (judgment, critical thinking) / Thinking things through and examining them from all sides; not jumping to conclusions; being able to change one’s mind in light of evidence; weighing all evidence fairly
Love of learning / Mastering new skills, topics, and bodies of knowledge, whether on one’s own or formally; obviously related to the strength of curiosity but goes beyond it to describe the tendency to add systematically to what one knows
Perspective (wisdom) / Being able to provide wise counsel to others; having ways of looking at the world that make sense to oneself and to other people
Interpersonal strengths that involve tending and befriending others
Love / Valuing close relations with others, in particular those in which sharing and caring are reciprocated; being close to people
Kindness (generosity, nurturance, care, compassion, altruistic love, niceness) / Doing favors and good deeds for others; helping them; taking care of them
Social intelligence (emotional intelligence, personal intelligence) / Being aware of the motives and feelings of other people and oneself; knowing what to do to fit in to different social situations; knowing what makes other people tick
Civic strengths that underlie healthy community life
Citizenship (social responsibility, loyalty, teamwork) / Working well as a member of a group or team; being loyal to the group; doing one’s share
Fairness / Treating all people the same according to notions of fairness and justice; not letting personal feelings bias decisions about others; giving everyone a fair chance
Leadership / Encouraging a group of which one is a member to get things done and at the same time maintain good relations within the group; organizing group activities and seeing that they happen
Emotional strengths that involve the exercise of will to accomplish goals in the face of opposition, external or internal
Bravery (valor) / Not shrinking from threat, challenge, difficulty, or pain; speaking up for what is right even if there is opposition; acting on convictions even if unpopular; includes physical bravery but is not limited to it
Persistence (perseverance, industriousness) / Finishing what one starts; persisting in a course of action in spite of obstacles; “getting it out the door”; taking pleasure in completing tasks
Integrity (authenticity, honesty) / Speaking the truth and, more broadly, presenting oneself in a genuine way; being without pretense; taking responsibility for one’s feelings and actions
Vitality (zest, enthusiasm, vigor, energy) / Approaching life with excitement and energy; not doing things halfway or halfheartedly; living life as an adventure; feeling alive and activated
Strengths that protect against excess
Forgiveness and mercy / Forgiving those who have done wrong; giving people a second chance; not being vengeful
Humility and modesty / Letting one’s accomplishments speak for themselves; not seeking the spotlight; not regarding one’s self as more special than one is
Prudence / Being careful about one’s choices; not taking undue risks; not saying or doing things that might later be regretted
Self-regulation (self-control) / Regulating what one feels and does; being disciplined; controlling one’s appetites and emotions
Your choice of method for discovering your strengths depends on how much time and effort you can spare for it. However, there’s something you should know. The process of reflecting upon your character strengths is actually a way of developing them! Think of it as strengths training—but not for your muscles—for your character. Naturally, the more of yourself you invest, the greater your likely return, and the more personalized, relevant, and meaningful the outcome will be. Taking more time will begin to develop your strengths more. The good news is that the following three methods are not mutually exclusive. You could end up using all three methods over time. Speaking of time, they’re listed in order from the smallest to largest investment of time and effort.
The Fastest Method for Discovering Your Strengths
Choose them from a list. (Requires about ten minutes.)
You can use this method right now, with just this book. You’ll jot down your answers, notes, observations, and so on, in the margins and spaces around the strengths listed on this page through this page. Or if you prefer, make photocopies.
First browse the six Strengths Themes to get the big picture. The themes are a bit more abstract than the strengths, so you’re starting at the broader level, then narrowing things down. Even the strengths may seem a little abstract to you, because they’re more general than the kinds of narrow skills that relate to the context of work.
Next, browse through the twenty-four strengths, studying the synonyms and descriptions. As you consider each of the strengths, ask yourself, “Is this strength not like me? Is it somewhat like me? Is it very much like me?” Remember, you’re looking for the parts of you that have shown up, over and over, across many different life situations. Make note of the strengths that seem very much like you. There should be no more than ten of these.
Now your goal is to identify the five strengths that are most like you. Go back through your list of “very much like me” strengths to narrow it down to five. One way is to ask yourself two questions:
1. Which strengths, when I’m using them, make me feel most engaged?
2. Which strengths, when I’m not using them, make me feel most frustrated?
The five that you ultimately select are your Signature Strengths, which you will fill in on the Life Circles exercise.
The Second-Fastest Method for Discovering Your Strengths
Take the VIA online survey at www.viacharacter.org. (This requires free registration and takes about thirty minutes to answer the questions.)
This method is the most high-tech; to use it you’ll need to set aside this book and go on the Internet. When you’re done, return to the book and fill in your Signature Strengths in the Life Circles exercise.
The VIA survey was designed to be used online. It’s the primary method for figuring out which of the twenty-four strengths are most characteristic of you. I strongly recommend that you take the free online survey, if you can. It provides a much more accurate way of discovering your top five strengths than browsing the names and descriptions. An in-depth optional report showing your Signature Strengths is available for a fee. A different online strengths assessment is available from the Gallup organization for a fee at www.strengthsfinder.com.
The Third-Fastest Method for Discovering Your Strengths
Find them in stories from your life. (This takes the longest—several hours.)
This method is the most thorough, because it requires you to write down stories about your strengths or tell them to another person who will take notes for you. The danger of this method is that, with the best of intentions, you may set aside reading this book to pursue writing your stories. Then you may not get around to finishing the stories right away, so time passes, and before you know it, the whole process of creating a picture of your Ideal Retirement has come to a halt. I strongly recommend that you first complete one of the two quicker methods. If you can’t resist the prospect of writing some stories, allow yourself a rough first draft, review it for your five Signature Strengths, then keep moving forward to finish this exercise, followed by the remaining chapters and your other Life Circles. You can always come back later for a deeper exploration.
Using this method, you’ll identify at least three stories from your life. The stories that you choose are ones that fit a very specific description, first articulated by Bernard Haldane, which forms the core of what he called the Dependable Strengths process. Each must be a true story from your own life in which you actively participated in something. (Remember the baseball game distinction between being a spectator and playing on the team?) Also, it must be a specific event, not simply a type of event or one of a series of events. (Not just “playing on a baseball team”; something more like “playing in that game on the Saturday before my birthday, two summers ago, when I hit a home run.”)
Now that you know what can qualify as a story, here are the criteria for the stories that you want to pick out. They are all experiences of something that you:
• Enjoyed doing while you were doing it
• Feel that you did well
• Are proud of
Notice that the story criteria get you to identify experiences that cover all three types of happiness. If you enjoyed it while you were doing it, that obviously relates to pleasure. If the story was about something you did well, it was possible to not do it well, meaning that there was a challenge. You met that challenge successfully, which relates to engagement. Finally, if you’re proud of what you did, it meant something to you—the definition of meaning. Essentially, a trifecta. At the same time, your stories don’t have to be big life-changing events. (That baseball game probably didn’t change your life, and you’re probably the only one who knows how important it was to you.) Are you getting a good idea of the kind of stories that you’re looking for? Remember the artist’s palette? This exercise lines up the best scenes from your life so you can identify which colors you used to paint them. These three stories are some of your greatest artistic achievements. Aren’t you curious which colors (strengths) you used? Think of these stories as though a gallery were showing a retrospective of your best paintings—your life’s work. If possible, the gallery would want something from your early period, as well as your middle and later periods. It would also want your works of art from different contexts. Not just from your job or hobbies or social life but ideally all three. So the stories you choose will be most helpful to you if they’re from different times, and different contexts, of your life.
You may be thinking that finding such particular types of stories will be a difficult search. But trust me, you have tons of these stories in your memory bank. An entire collection. True, these positive experiences are sometimes pushed farther back in the memory warehouse, whereas experiences of disappointment and defeat are much more readily at hand. So as you start your internal inventory system running and let these stories come to your mind over the next twenty minutes or twenty hours, realize that it’s perfectly normal to bring up all kinds of stories, not just those that meet the three criteria. Then you getto choose.
Now let’s begin with one of your stories. What do you do with it for this exercise? You can write it longhand or type it into your word processor and print it out to work with. If you love to write, you may tell it with perfect spelling, grammar, and syntax, but you can also just note phrases, fragments, and key words, as long as you use plenty of them. Remember, you’ll be trolling your stories for your strengths.
If you’re telling the story to someone else who is kind enough to take notes, there is one rule that they absolutely, positively must follow. They don’t have to write down every word that comes out of your mouth, but every word they do write down must be one that did come out of your mouth. The words that end up on the paper need to be your actual, exact words, from your own vocabulary. Your friend must not translate your words into other words or try to summarize your story. This is your story in your words. Ask your friend to take down as many of your important words as possible. You need enough material to comb through to look for your strengths.
Whether writing it yourself or telling the story to a “reporter,” what matters is that you record the parts of your story that answer the following questions:
1. What, specifically, were you doing?
2. What was fun about it? (Remember, you enjoyed it at the time.)
3. More important, what was the challenge, and how did you meet that challenge? (Remember, this is something you did well.)
4. What is meaningful to you about this, now, as you look back on it? (Remember, you’re proud of it.)
And one more question:
5. What did you bring to that experience that was unique? (That is, no one else would have brought quite the same thing that you did.) After you have your story down on paper, you can look for your strengths—the colors that you’ve used over and over—through two basic methods: color-by-numbers and freehand.
Color-by-numbers. Start with a small box of markers, colored pencils, or crayons. Assign the six basic colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet) to the six Strengths Themes. Make enough photocopies of the twenty-four strengths list to take notes on one for each story.
First, go back through your first story and underline the words that describe, or closely relate to, a Strength Theme. Don’t expect to find many examples of each; you may have just one or two of the Strengths Themes showing up.
Second, go back to the underlined words and think about what you were really doing in the context of the story. Which of the Signature Strengths within that Strength Theme is the best descriptor of what you were doing? Make relevant notes on one copy of the strengths list.
Do the same for each of your other stories. By the time you get to the second and third stories, you’ll be much better at spotting the Strengths Themes and the Signature Strengths within them. Whichever colors seem to you to be the ones you’ve colored with the most in the scenes of your life, those are the clues. Write them down in the Life Circles exercise.
Freehand. This method starts with the same markers, colored pencils, or crayons, but doesn’t use the Strengths Themes. Instead, you simply comb through your stories for your own words that describe your strengths. After reading this chapter and familiarizing yourself with the concept of strengths from the lists here, you’re completely qualified to select your own labels for these inner qualities that we’ve been calling strengths. Choose the words that you used frequently and that describe the best parts of you, then assign and mark each with its own color (your choice). Whatever language you use to capture those parts of you—your ways of thinking, feeling, or acting that make you feel engaged when you use them—is fine. When you think you’ve found the five colors from your palette that are most common in the masterpieces of your life’s experiences, those are your Signature Strengths. Write them in the Life Circle.
By the way, regardless of the quality of these scenes from your life, keep in mind that some of your best artistic achievements are still ahead of you.
In addition to a pleasant and engaged life, some people imagine having a meaningful life, too. Of course, they still want to be secure and comfortable and enjoy themselves. And they want to be actively involved in life, using their strengths in a personally rewarding way. But they also want a sense of meaning and purpose. This usually comes from feeling that you are part of something larger than yourself, something that makes you proud of the personal contribution you’re making. Which brings us to the third level of retirement happiness.
If pleasure is most closely related to your interests, and engagement is most closely related to your strengths, then meaning is most closely related to your values. You may well find that the third level of retirement happiness has a connection to your core values from chapter three.
If you already knew, in the Second Age of life, what gives you a sense of meaning—perhaps from a fulfilling career—congratulations! If your sense of meaning comes from something outside of your work, that’s even better, because you won’t leave it behind when you retire from your career or move from the Second to the Third Age. On the other hand, if you’re not sure whether you really have a sense of meaning in your life, the Third Age just might be your best chance to look for it. It could be your golden opportunity! In fact, discovering your purpose in life could be one of the most important parts of the new retirement. (More on this in chapter eleven.)
Of course, you don’t need to decide in advance how far up the levels of retirement happiness you want to go. But the clearer your vision of life and, especially, the clearer your vision of yourself in retirement, the more likely you will be to get there. And frankly, when it comes to developing a vision, sooner is better than later. You may even start to have a new vision of your life before you’ve finished reading this book.
So keep your mind wide open. In the picture of your Ideal Retirement, see yourself using your strengths in the service of something you believe in and really enjoying doing it. And if you see yourself not alone in these scenes but connecting with others, sharing the experience with people you hold dear, so much the better! You’re envisioning both elements of the happiness dimension: the psychological, which you’ve learned about in this chapter, and the social, the subject of the next chapter. The three levels apply to relationships, too—and in retirement, we generally need to make a more active effort to build relationships that bring us happiness and fulfillment on all three levels. That’s what we’ll be delving into in chapter ten.
Using one of the three methods to discover your retirement strengths, you should now have a list of five strengths. Enter these in the Life Circle to use for your One Piece of Paper in chapter eleven.
1. The VIA Classification of Strengths is adapted with permission of the VIA Institute.
“Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family: Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.”
—JANE HOWARD, American journalist
