CHAPTER 3

The Engaged Life: How Your Strengths Can Help You Soar

We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about.

—Joseph Campbell

John was no stranger to success. Exuberant, intense, and bright, he had captained his high school baseball team to the regional championship, had been admitted to a number of top-tier schools, and was electrified by all that college had to offer. But by the time he arrived for his sophomore year, he found himself, for the first time in his life, directionless. John had stepped away from playing baseball; he realized that days at school that were once so engaging had become a grind; and it seemed that the harder he tried to seek out fulfilling activities, the more they eluded him.

“I thought college would be the answer to everything I’d been through to get here, but I frequently checked out of classes. Plus the pressure to choose a major, pressure about a career path—basically pressure to succeed—was deflating,” he explained. “Without a sense of engagement, the day-to-day didn’t carry much significance. I felt smaller. I struggled hard.”

Two years later, John is killing it. He has created his own major (The Power of Story and Critical Pedagogy), is a head RA, and is having a blast coaching baseball for city kids. What turned the tide? John realized that he had been relying on “outward definitions of success” rather than looking inside to engage his personal strengths. Once he stopped “going through the motions” and followed his gut instead of adhering to some invisible set of one-size-fits-all guidelines, the narrow door of success he had been trying to squeeze through was flung wide open. College is no longer about “what major” or “what job” he should be chasing. Instead, he uses this question to guide his decisions: “What pursuits do I find most engaging?”

Once he had his picture of success in a frame that fit, the next steps became more tangible. Success is easier and more natural to achieve for John now. It’s more gratifying as well. Today John is living the engaged life.

The engaged life emerges when we are using our strengths and talents to meet challenges. Learning something new, demonstrating bravery in word or deed, working closely with others, appreciating something of great beauty, and simply being kind are just a few pathways. When we are engaged with our highest strengths and talents, it even has its own term: flow. Just as John discovered, without engagement in our life, we often feel adrift, but when we cultivate this element of well-being, we can truly thrive.

This chapter will help you understand how to cultivate an engaged life on campus and off. The studies, stories, and solutions will give you a window into the lives of college students who have realized benefits such as:

Deeper levels of concentration

Greater levels of personal initiative

Greater motivation to learn

Higher levels of performance

A sense of authenticity (“the real me”)

Happier lives

In the process of writing this book, we reached out to the more than four thousand students who have graced our classroom over the past five years, asking them what topic in our course had the most positive impact on their college experience.

The results weren’t even close.

Stories about engagement flooded our inboxes. As one student summed up: “Putting my strengths to use has helped put me in the best place that I’ve ever been… a strong, independent, resilient woman.” This chapter will provide the blueprint that will help you join the ranks of college students who enjoy the advantage of living a fulfilling, gratifying, and truly engaged life.

You’ve Got Talent

Maybe you’re athletic, or you can draw, or you can move like Beyoncé. A talent can be any skill that comes more easily to you than to most people, and it could have been one of the first things in life that garnered you a lot of praise. It also may have led to your earliest experiences of engagement. Being told that you were good at something likely pushed you to dive in more deeply, try to improve, and hone your focus. Identifying an activity as something that “feels right” is a sign that you are engaged.

But full engagement requires more than just talent.

Michael Jordan is famous for his basketball skills, but what propelled him to be the greatest player of all time were the character strengths that he employed throughout his life. After he didn’t make the varsity team at Laney High, it was bravery that compelled him to quit crying in his room and get back on the court. When we are truly engaged with something, we concentrate on the process rather than on the outcome, a state for which Jordan was famous. Throughout his career, perseverance pushed him to be the first at practice and the last to leave. This was reflected in Jordan’s most famous statement: “I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

You wouldn’t be in college if you didn’t have a talent. But if you want to become talented—if you want to live an engaged life—for that you will need your character strengths.

Character Strengths: Strong Inside and Out

In his 1999 inaugural speech as president of the American Psychological Association, Martin Seligman (yes, the PERMA guy) called psychology “half-baked” because of the field’s near-exclusive focus on illness, and failure to consider “what makes life worth living.” Seligman and the University of Michigan’s Chris Peterson then set about leading over fifty scholars in the study of more than 250 cultures, societies, and religions to create a system for classifying human strengths that were ubiquitously valued. This would culminate in Character Strengths and Virtues (CSV), a seminal work in positive psychology and an eight-hundred-page tome that can serve as a guide for anyone who is striving for optimal development. At the heart of it all are the twenty-four strengths of character: two dozen pathways to engagement.

Identifying Your Strengths

Marlowe, who took our course in the fall of her junior year, had so many interests that she was scared she would never be able to settle on just one. “I was intensely interested in the music business,” she said, yet “I found myself registering for courses in art history, but all the while was totally immersed in the study of French language, and was constantly thinking about how to make travel a part of my life.” Like many students, Marlowe was having a hard time identifying her strengths, much less pursuing them with any sense of direction.

To resolve this conundrum, Dr. Ryan Niemiec, education director at the VIA Institute on Character, recommends a three-step process: awareness, exploration, and application. So, first things first: Do not pass go, do not collect $200… dare we say, don’t even turn the page until you become aware of your strengths and familiarize yourself with how they suit you. C’mon, we don’t ask much of you; in fact, this is the only assessment we will ask you to take all book long. Head over to www.uthrive.info and take the free VIA Strengths Survey (did we mention free? Because it is). It should take ten to fifteen minutes, but the benefits will begin the moment you get your results.

When Marlowe took the survey, she found that her top strength was “love of learning.” Then it hit her: “I didn’t have a disorder and I wasn’t lost—I was simply at my best when I was learning new things. Just being able to name it gave me real freedom to be comfortable in my own process, and school has been SO much more satisfying ever since.”

Marlowe’s experience is hardly unique: simply identifying one’s top strengths (AKA signature strengths) has been shown to increase college students’ confidence and sense of purpose. While it’s a shame that only about one-third of people are familiar with their strengths, given their accessibility and clear advantages, we can’t urge you enough to get to know yours and make the most of them.

For the 99 percent of you who didn’t jump online to take the survey, please see the complete list of character strengths below. Take a look and check off the five that stand out as feeling like “the real you.” Look for options you might use to describe yourself when you have been at your very best.

 

The VIA Classification of Character Strengths

CREATIVITY: Thinking of novel and productive ways to do things.

CURIOSITY: Taking an interest in ongoing experience; finding subjects and topics fascinating; exploring and discovering.

JUDGMENT: Thinking things through and examining them from all sides; not jumping to conclusions.

LOVE OF LEARNING: Mastering new skills, topics, and bodies of knowledge (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.

BRAVERY: Not shrinking from threat, challenge, difficulty, or pain; speaking up for what is right even if there is opposition.

PERSEVERANCE: Finishing what one starts; persisting in a course of action in spite of obstacles.

HONESTY: Speaking the truth but more broadly presenting oneself in a genuine way and acting in a sincere way.

ZEST: Approaching life with excitement and energy; not doing things halfway or halfheartedly; living life as an adventure.

LOVE: Valuing close relations with others.

KINDNESS: Doing favors and good deeds for others.

SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE: Being aware of the motives and feelings of other people and one’s own comfort.

TEAMWORK: Working well as a member of a group or team.

FAIRNESS: Treating all people the same according to notions of fairness and justice; not letting personal feelings bias decisions about others.

LEADERSHIP: Organizing group activities and seeing that they happen, and at the same time maintaining good relations within the group.

FORGIVENESS: Forgiving those who have done wrong; accepting the shortcomings of others.

HUMILITY: Letting one’s accomplishments speak for themselves.

PRUDENCE: Being careful about one’s choices; not saying or doing things that might later be regretted.

SELF-REGULATION: Regulating what one feels and does; being disciplined.

APPRECIATION OF BEAUTY AND EXCELLENCE: Noticing and appreciating beauty, excellence, and/or skilled performance in various domains of life.

GRATITUDE: Being aware of and thankful for the good things that happen; taking time to express thanks.

HOPE: Expecting the best in the future and working to achieve it.

HUMOR: Liking to laugh and tease; bringing smiles to other people; seeing the light side.

SPIRITUALITY: Having coherent beliefs about the higher purpose and meaning of the universe; having beliefs about the meaning of life that shape conduct and provide comfort.

 

Signature Strengths: Which Strengths Help You the Most?

Those strengths that will help you be at your best—those that were most helpful in the studies and student stories alike—are called signature strengths. Most people have between three and seven signature strengths, and you’ll find them among those ranked at the top of your assessment results. If you have any doubt about which are yours, walk through your top strengths with these questions in mind for each:

Do you feel particularly excited when putting this strength to use?

When you use this strength, do you feel like “the real me”?

Do you have a strong desire to use it frequently?

Does your energy get renewed when you use it?

Do you feel particularly happy, enthusiastic, or even ecstatic when this strength is part of your process?

If you are beginning to see a connection between using your strengths and being your best, you are not alone. A recent study led by Lucy Hone of nearly ten thousand New Zealanders found that people who were highly aware of their strengths were 9 times more likely to be thriving than those who did not share such awareness. Even better, those participants who frequently used their strengths were 18 times more likely to thrive than their peers who rarely put them to use.

Waaiiit a Second—How Can THAT Be a Strength?

More often than not, people find top strengths that they have trouble seeing as their own—or even as strengths at all. For example, take a guess at what strengths predicted military performance in West Point cadets. Bravery? Self-regulation? Perseverance? Yes, indeed. But we have yet to hear any student ever guess that a key predictor for accomplishments as a leader is love. Yes, love! After initial hesitancy, soldiers realized that one of the only things powerful enough to make one risk their life for another would obviously have to be love. Beyond bravery or justice, it’s the love they have for the person right next to them. Oh, and a bonus question: What strength predicted the greatest loyalty to their commanders?… Wrong. No. Try again. No. Third time’s the charm? No. We say no three times because there is no way that you guessed humor—which is the answer. We can all be leaders in our own way: Gandhi may have led through love or spirituality, Steve Jobs through creativity, and Barack Obama through hope. So before dismissing a strength, think through times when you have been at your best—they may be a key to how you shine.

What Do I Do with My Lesser Strengths?

Alan’s lowest strength was forgiveness. Now, Alan is a child and adolescent psychiatrist, constantly talking to parents and children alike about forgiveness as an essential component of relationships, but there it was on paper, his lowest strength of all. It made instantaneous sense: the family Alan comes from holds grudges like a judge handing down a sentence—twenty years to life, minimum, no parole. Does this connect with anyone? Note that we describe forgiveness as Alan’s lowest strength—not as a weakness. Strengths are measured by degrees, not as absolutes. You can have a lesser strength, one that is lower on your list, but it’s always there when you really need it.

Alan realized that a life with little forgiveness was getting in the way of his relationships and began to concentrate on exercising this strength more often. Some worry that working on a lesser strength will be painful or won’t bring any of the benefits you get from working with your signature strengths; after all, there is a reason it’s down there at the bottom. But in a study of undergrads at Lewis-Clark State College, researchers saw that this does not have to be a chore. Students were randomly assigned to work on two of their top five strengths, or one top strength and one in their bottom five. Both groups found the same increased life satisfaction. Something has to be at the bottom of the list, but if you feel a lesser strength is diminishing your happiness, remember: it can be improved. Pair the lower strength with one of your top five, and not only can it move on up, but your well-being can rise with it.

From Exploration to Engagement

Getting a handle on your strengths is step one, but the real adventure begins when you start to explore them in greater depth. This not only helps you understand the strengths, it also helps you understand… you, and not just any you, but you at your best.

Exploration can begin by getting an outside perspective. When Damon, a student in our class, received his VIA results, he couldn’t see how any of them applied to him at all. In fact, he told the class that he thought them so ridiculous, he’d shown them to his girlfriend to get a good laugh. She’d taken one look at the results, pronounced them dead-on, and proceeded to tick off a list of examples demonstrating each one of Damon’s top five strengths.

Sharing the language can help, too. Whitney convinced her parents to take the assessment. “The conversation about how we have seen our strengths play out was one of the best that we had in years,” she reported. “My dad reminded me that since I was little, I wanted to take care of everyone around me. I figured that was just what people did, but his insights showed me how I always thrived when using my love and kindness. Since then, I’ve been volunteering at shelters more often and have made a point to send a note to someone that I love each morning. It’s an amazing feeling.”

Talking, reflecting, or even journaling about how your signature strengths played a role when you were at your best can be a step toward understanding how to use them to their utmost—and a leap toward living a life of engagement.

To Engage Fully, Apply Liberally

Not using your strengths is like carrying a tube of sunblock with you but never putting it on. Having first assessed each participant for their strengths, Alex Linley and his colleagues asked 240 second-year college students to write down their “top three goals” for the semester. Primed with examples such as “Attend most of my lectures,” “Have fun and enjoy myself,” and “Stop drinking alcohol during the week,” participants were clearly instructed that the goals must be personally meaningful. It turned out that signature strengths accounted for more than 50 percent of the reason that they reached their goals.

But the engaged life goes deeper than just realizing goals. Shannon spent a semester applying her number one character strength—“bravery”—in a number of ways. “First I engaged in physical bravery—biking over bridges in NYC and bouldering. I had so much fun and felt a real high from the adrenaline rush I got from both of these activities. I also felt very proud of myself after doing hard bouldering runs, as I was simultaneously engaging in perseverance, another one of my signature strengths.” But Shannon took it a step further, applying her bravery in new and varied ways, like calling the son of a recently deceased Holocaust survivor she had befriended. “It was hard to call a complete stranger, but it turned out to be a really great conversation that I got so much out of,” Shannon said. “Mrs. Reizman was truly an amazing woman. It was nice to have a little closure speaking to her son. I am glad that I called him, because even though it was scary, it was the right thing to do.”

If your goals are more personal than academic, consider Sarah, an army veteran who took our course one summer, expressing her number one strength (“love”) by designing a “strengths date” for her artist boyfriend. Having taken the VIA assessment, they discovered that his number one strength had been “appreciation of beauty and excellence,” so Sarah took him to breakfast at a particularly lovely restaurant before surprising him with a day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, followed by a walk in neighboring Central Park. They finished their day by watching the sun set from the highest building at NYU. Sarah’s report: “Best. Date. Ever.” You can use your signature strengths to make the most of your relationships, be your best in the classroom, or enhance your life in every other way. At the end of the day, your strengths can lead to both happiness and engagement—literally: we had a student who credited his bravery for asking his girlfriend to marry him 6!

Flow: Knowing It, Sowing It, and Growing It

Imagine becoming so engrossed while volunteering at a soup kitchen that you become oblivious to the meal you skipped. So intensely focused while listening to a piece of music that you lose track of time. When you are utterly absorbed in what you are doing—exercising a signature strength such as kindness or appreciation of beauty and mastery, skiing or knitting a sweater—when all distractions have melted away and only the present place, time, and action exist, you are in flow. This is what psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi has termed “the optimal experience.”

As a ten-year-old boy during World War II, Csikszentmihalyi was imprisoned with his family in an Italian POW camp, where he found his escape from the everyday fear and misery by discovering a talent for chess, concentrating on the game for hours at a time and slipping into a totally different world. After the war, he observed this quality in people around him—artists and people who went rock climbing: when people pursued their talents or interests under certain conditions, they discovered a unique type of fulfillment. Csikszentmihalyi went on to devote his life to studying engagement.

Flow has been linked not only with the development of skills and higher levels of performance, but also with greater positive emotion and life satisfaction. Harvard University’s Teresa Amabile has found not only that people are more creative when they are in flow, but also that their heightened state of creativity on one day continues into the next.

Whether we are studying psychology, cycling in spin class, or cogitating on what to spell in Scrabble, when we are using our highest strengths and talents and the level of challenge meets the level of our skill (see the “Flow” graph), we become so absorbed in the process that our attention is focused like a laser. Too little challenge and we are bored, too much and we feel anxious, but when we find the sweet spot, we enter flow.

If staying in the zone were simple, we would all just live there, but as your skills improve, the challenges need to keep up, and that means flow is very fluid. Finding the right level of opponents or teammates is key, and for solo pursuits, you need the feedback and goal-setting that will push you far enough to keep you flying high. Skill level and challenge are essential characteristics of flow, but they are not enough. To ensure that you can reach the highest levels of engagement, you also need to focus on the process and your absorption.

Process

A flow activity is not done for the applause, not to get to the finish line, not because your parents told you to, and not because it feels good, but because the process—the moment-to-moment actions you take—fulfills you. If you are playing a game, you are immersed in the moment, not focused on the outcome. If it’s an instrument, there are times when you feel like nothing exists but the music. If it’s work—a job, an internship, or a volunteer position—your responsibilities are just the right blend of fascinating and challenging. It’s a pursuit you’ve chosen yourself: if you choose to go for a run, on go the headphones and off you go into flow, but if someone were to force you to run against your will, time would slow to a crawl (and you might as well). When we do what we love, flow is rarely far away.

Absorption

In flow, you are in a state of total absorption, concentration, and attention. You are so focused that you lose track of time and may not even hear when people address you (you realize that you didn’t glance at your texts, despite feeling your phone vibrate). You forget to eat or just don’t care to. To achieve this state, you need to be locked in with clear goals, whether that means hitting shots, communicating in a foreign language, or preparing for an art history exam. If you aren’t clear what you are trying to accomplish, it’s very hard to find the flow.

Junk Flow: The Candy That Rots Your Brain

If you are reading this thinking, “Wait, I become absorbed when I watch TV! Isn’t that flow!?”—the answer is no. No one gets up after bingeing on TV for five hours, brushes the orange Dorito dust off their belly, and exclaims, “Whoa! I feel amazing! What a rush!” Television is a type of junk flow. There is literally no challenge level, and instead of feeling invigorated, studies of junk flow find, folks feel more apathetic. Just as a Snickers bar has a few redeeming peanuts, junk flow activities have an element of flow, but sorry, they don’t truly satisfy.

Opportunities for Action

Exercise: Never Stop Exploring

Take ten minutes and write about a time when you were either at your very best or at your most resilient in the face of challenge. Explore the experience in great detail, making a point to focus on:

where you were;

whom you were with;

what you were proudest of, both in the process and in the outcome;

and how your strength played a role.

With greater awareness of how your strengths have played a role when you were at your best, the opportunity to appreciate their power—and your power—is that much riper, and your motivation to use them and your clarity about how they work will be stronger than ever.

Exercise: It’s Time to Apply

Studies show that applying a signature strength daily in new ways leads to benefits that include increased well-being and fewer depressive symptoms for as long as you keep it going. Review your list of signature strengths and then set the goal of using at least one of them daily in a novel way.

1. If humor is a strength, go to a comedy club, try improv, or volunteer at a home for the elderly with the sole purpose of making people laugh. If it’s curiosity, try a new food or visit a place on campus you’ve always wondered about. If you are still stumped, check out Tayyab Rashid’s 340 Ways to Use VIA Character Strengths (www.uthrive.info).

2. Simply observing someone who exemplifies one of your signature strengths can be elevating. Who is that for you? If you can hang out with them, great, but if not, check out a biography or watch a character on film. For ideas, check out Ryan Niemiec’s Positive Psychology at the Movies (www.uthrive.info).

3. Choose a class or an activity where you can more actively apply a signature strength. For example, with bravery, you might plan to speak up more frequently or challenge assumptions (nicely, please!). If teamwork is a strength, be sure to start a study group or actively look for classes that emphasize group projects. Planning which strengths you will use can help you make the most of them.

The Takeaway

The Big Idea

Knowing, exploring, and applying your talents and signature strengths provide the pathway to living an engaged life.

Be Sure to Remember

Engagement may not always include positive emotions, but it is no less fulfilling and is a key to thriving.

Just like muscles, your signature strengths grow stronger the more you exercise them.

Peak engagement (flow) is achieved when our highest strengths and talents meet just the right level of challenge.

Making It Happen

Pinpoint your signature strengths by taking the VIA Character Strengths Test (www.uthrive.info).

Watch films, read books, and observe role models who exemplify your signature strengths. You can find a comprehensive list at www.uthrive.info.

Experiment with your signature strengths by using them in new ways in class, with friends, and anywhere else you can. For suggestions, check out Tayyab Rashid’s 340 Ways to Use VIA Character Strengths at www.uthrive.info.