Focus on core strengths

This teleclass is coming in 2019! Prerequisite: Happiness and the Highly Sensitive Person, parts one and two

Why are your strengths so important? Because it’s unlikely you’ll have nearly as much joy and satisfaction without using them as often as you can. This five-week teleconference class, Focus on Core Strengths, identifies what you do best and how you most like to approach work, relationships, and leisure.

Every week will bring you additional exercises in identifying and using your signature strengths. Instead of focusing on a lack of support, you can capitalize on what you do best.

Realizing our strengths is the smallest thing we can do to make the biggest difference. This is according to Alex Linley, Ph.D., one of Britain’s top positive psychologists and coaches. In his studies, he found that:

• -People were more likely to attain their goals using their strengths.
• -The better the fit between strengths and goals, the more likely they were to attain those goals.
• -This goal attainment also created greater well-being than when using other approaches.

After fifty years of focus on dysfunction and the models of disease, psychology began, in the late 1990s, to offer benefits for healthy people. It now provides research-backed suggestions on how to be happier and have a more productive life.

One of the best ways is to know and use often the abilities, strengths, and virtues that make you uniquely you. The more those strengths can be used at home, at work, in every part of your life, the more you can experience a happiness that is authentic, lasting, and values-based.

The early research showed five strengths--gratitude, zest, optimism, curiosity, and the ability to love and be loved--were the greatest contributors to your overall life satisfaction. More recent research focuses in on zest, optimism, and love as most strongly connected to happiness. We'll use some of the exercises from the Authentic Happiness Coaching Program by top psychologist Martin Seligman to increase those characteristics.

Research from the Gallup organizations turned the ordinary “focus on and correct your weaknesses” approach on its head. With results from half a million people in many companies, it was clear that attempting to shore up weakness just makes people grumpy and unproductive.

Giving people more training in what they’re best at pays better than attempting to train those who don’t have a particular strength in the first place. The people who benefit the most from training are those that already have a strengths framework in place on which to hang the new learning.

Focus on Core Strengths gives you more options. You might do an end run around your weaknesses, hire a helper, delegate out, plan for an approach that suits you better, or altogether stop doing whatever it is you’re not good at. 

A study by Seligman, Park, and Peterson found using one’s signature strengths in new ways increased happiness and reduced depression. That applies in general. The happiness exercises, however, are not a therapy for depression, although they might be part of a therapeutic approach. A licensed psychologist is the one who can diagnose and treat depression. Depression should be considered a medical issue, even a medical emergency. Treatment is more effective and longer-lasting if it is started sooner, rather than later.

This teleclass on strengths is especially helpful for:

• -An HSP who feels a lack of fit in the workplace or in the social order.
• -Job-changers wanting a better fit in their next employment.
• -Niche specialists who want a custom-tailored career.
• -Anyone who wants to better appreciate co-workers, family members, or themselves.

Values in Action Institute director Ryan Niemiec says that strengths are the "river that runs through positive psychology." Valuing and using those strengths often is one of the keys to a successful and fulfilling life.

"I believe that the highest success in living and the deepest emotional satisfaction comes from building and using your signature strengths" writes Martin Seligman, Ph.D., considered the father of positive psychology.

Focus on Core Strengths will be offered in 2019 for those who have completed Happiness and the Highly Sensitive Person parts one and two. Tuition will be the same as the other five-week classes. More details will be available later. I hope you will keep it in mind. There are few classes that combine an awareness of the needs of the HSP with the best of positive psychology.

I'm available to answer all your questions--and I love talking to HSPs--we'll talk about your goals and how the teleclasses can help you reach them. Just click on this contact button to schedule a free, no-obligation twenty-minute conversation. 

Let me know if you want to be on the "wait list" for Focus on Core Strengths. There's no obligation, and I'll be sure to let you know when it's scheduled.