Your strengths profile has a “Top Ten”; they reveal the essence of who you are. Continue to cultivate stories that help you identify your strengths, intensify your focus and build on your successes.
Curiosity is a Top Ten strength from my profile, like my appreciation of music and poetry. My mother had insatiable curiosity and found joy in “making things,” and we spent countless hours enjoying our love of learning and crafting together. She and her two older brothers were reared by their grandmother, and my mother spent most of her childhood alone with her imagination. She made clothes for her paper dolls and taught herself to sew with cloth and do fine needlework when she was a young mother. She taught me how to make clothes and bedding for my Barbie dolls, and we shared the joy and challenge of finding a beautiful bolt of cloth or spotting a gorgeous design in a magazine and transforming a dressmaker’s form or a bare set of windows.
Curiosity is in my Top Ten, and although my mother has passed, my daughter has joined me in continuing our story and sharing our love.
My friends share my curiosity about human behavior and how we can all work together for the greater good. We esteem the best in ourselves and others and “make things” better for everyone. I surround myself with people whose grace and positivity feed my soul. My nearest and dearest believe in the power of We, and their activism for good causes and wholehearted spirits feed my soul. Like transforming cloth into function and form, my mentors and friends turn possibility into thriving communities that serve everyone beautifully and well.
My focus on 2015 and beyond is to search for opportunities I can engage my curiosity and experience more joy and deepen my sense of accomplishment. What’s your focus from your Top Ten?
Taken the VIA Survey of Character Strengths yet? Here’s the link https://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/home
