Positive psychology research studies have identified many benefits of personal strengths, which some psychologists have termed "signature strengths"; others call them "realized strengths." Among the many benefits, understanding and proper utilization of personal strengths can be a cornerstone of professional career development planning.
What are Personal Strengths?
Personal strengths are often defined as those skills and competencies at which a person excels. Application of a strength usually results in excellent results. Other people may depend on an individual's strengths in key situations. Careers can be made when an organization's needs align with an employee's strengths.
Martin Seligman, author of the landmark Authentic Happiness (Free Press, 2002), past-president of the American Psychological Association, and sponsor of the formation of positive psychology, coined the term signature strength, recognizing that people are often identified by their strengths: such as the problem solver, the humorist, or the computer wizard.
Signature strengths are measured along twenty-four abilities drawn from an exhaustive study of virtues common to nearly all cultures. Signature strengths include such things as: love of learning, perseverance, fairness, humility, and spirituality.
Popularizing Understanding and Use of Personal Strengths
Advancement in a professional career is enhanced by excellent performance and peer recognition, both of which result from demonstrated performance using one's personal strengths.
Seligman's research highlighted personal or signature strengths and brought the term signature strengths and its benefits to the general public through Authentic Happiness. Introduction of a free, online self-assessment questionnaire made a personalized report of one's strengths readily available to anyone with Internet access.
Strengths in Professional Development Plans
With increasing media and professional focus on the benefits of using one's personal strengths, it was a logical next step to focus professional career development planning on strengths. Furthermore, positive psychologists recommended abandoning the traditional wisdom of devoting time and energy to improving weaknesses, advising instead to focus on strengths and minimize dependence and utilization of weaknesses.
Based on the understanding of strengths as abilities at which a person excelled, a career professional could be inclined to continue and even increase dependence and utilization of strengths in her career. Recent research extends the understanding and classification of personal strengths and identifies a cautionary aspect.
A Strength with Implications for Job Burnout
According to the Mayo Clinic online, job burnout syndrome is a state of physical, emotional and mental exhaustion caused by long-term exposure to demanding work situations. Though the helping professions are at high risk for job burnout, any career professional who identifies strongly with work, has little control over workplace situations, and faces continual workplace stress is at risk of job burnout.
Positive psychology researcher and entrepreneur Alex Linley has identified another possible cause of job burnout, that of depending upon a personal ability he terms a "learned behavior." Linley's Centre for Applied Positive Psychology (CAPP) describes a learned behavior as a competence yielding strong performance while simultaneously draining one's energy. Competencies yielding strong performance were heretofore lumped in with strengths, without regard to whether using the competency was energizing or draining.
Identification of learned behaviors yields an important component to professional career development planning. Linley notes that a career built on dependence of a competency which is actually a learned behavior is likely to result in career burnout.
Successful Professional Development Plans
Based on recent information and identification of the role of learned behaviors, a successful professional development plan should identify and build on true strengths — Linley terms these realized strengths and unrealized strengths — while minimizing dependence on both learned behaviors and weaknesses.
Linley's online self-assessment questionnaire, Realise2, provides a personalized report of characteristics in a four-quadrant model: realized strengths, unrealized strengths, weaknesses, and learned behaviors. Personal abilities and competencies are measured and reported along sixty characteristics.
Professional Career Development Plans
The availability of online self-assessment questionnaires from two widely respected positive psychology researchers provides foundation information useful for building an effective professional career development plan. The career professional can build a development plan on continued utilization of true personal strengths, expanded utilization of unrealized strengths, minimization of dependence on weaknesses, and moderation of the use of learned behaviors.
Readers may find this Sample Development Plan helpful.
Jerry Lopper - IPPA member, business and engineering degrees. Jerry's passion for personal development shows in 5 books, hundreds of articles & ...
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