Find Your Top 5 Signature Strengths

We tend to count what is missing first. We look for the lowest score on a report card, we read the areas for improvement before anything else in a review, and even our New Year resolutions concentrate on correcting our faults. In effect, we spend a lifetime repairing our defects with the goal of reaching average.

Yet what carries a person a long way comes not from the hole that was filled but from the muscle already firmly developed. Lifting a weakness to average consumes enormous energy, and the average so gained differentiates nothing. What is already strong, by contrast, delivers overwhelming results after only a little more refinement.

Character strengths are not the same as talents. If talent is the ability to do something well, a strength is the disposition that makes you feel most like yourself while exercising it. A curious person meets unfamiliar material with interest rather than fatigue. A persistent person completes the tedious stretch where others give up. It goes beyond a sense of competence and gives the conviction that this is who I am.

Category	Details
Content	Measures 24 character strengths (48 items)
Scoring	Each strength scored out of 10 points
Key result	Identifies your top 5 signature strengths
Shift of view	A low score is not a defect but an area you need not push on

Choose the answer that reflects who you are now, not who you wish to be. The longer you deliberate, the more the result is distorted. Trust the first response that comes to mind. Share your result with colleagues or post it on your own channel, and use it as a way to make your distinctive value known.