Conscientiousness: Exploring Virtues and Strengths
Understanding and developing strengths leads to greater life satisfaction. What are yours?
To maximise our success, as we perceive it for ourselves, through living authentically by drawing on our signature strengths, we can also significantly improve our overall life satisfaction by developing our wider virtues and specific strengths connected to Conscientiousness.
The challenge is that people tend to assign strengths to themselves or accept them anecdotally based on other people’s opinions without actually questioning them or having any scientific back-up that gives this a true proof or definition of what these strengths actually mean in a practical sense.
Conscientiousness is one of the three cornerstones of the Focused Formula for Success ©.
In research by Nigel Fisher (2020) high levels of the personality trait of Conscientiousness, which can also be described as the “will to achieve” (McCrae & Costa. 1987), was found to be a significant positive influence on levels of satisfaction with life.
People high in Conscientiousness often display some of the following characteristics: conscientious, careful, reliable, hardworking, well organized, scrupulous, self-disciplined, neat, punctual, practical, deliberate, ambitious, emotionally stable, self-reliant, businesslike, energetic, knowledgeable, persevering, intelligent, fair, perceptive and / or cultured.
Someone who is high in conscientiousness has direction.
Modern research sponsored by the VIA Institute on Character has discovered 24 character strengths which are categorised into 6 high-level virtues.
Many of the characteristics of Conscientiousness can be mapped across to all the 6 Character Virtues of Humanity, Justice, Temperance, Wisdom, Courage and Transcendence and are accounted for by half of the 24 Character Strengths that form them.
Further, the VIA Institute state that an average of 5 of these character strengths makes up our own signature strengths, those that go towards us living “authentically”. Other non-signature strengths are drawn upon when we are called to “rise to the occasion” (Niemiec & McGrath, 2019).
This would indicate that 50% of your strengths lead to your level of conscientiousness, authenticity and ultimately your level of life satisfaction – Success.
The great news is that signature strengths are well defined, can be identified and applied to our everyday lives, and further, in addition to signature strengths, non-signature (or phasic) strengths can be developed and worked on so that they are ready to be called upon when we need to draw on additional resources in times when extra effort is needed.
Working on our character also has an added influence on another cornerstone of the Focused Formula for Success ©, Positive Relations with Others. As strengths form your character, this, in turn, contributes to your personality that other people tend to admire, respect and cherish, and which makes you trustworthy.
New Era Coaching work with the VIA Institute Strengths Survey to help you identify what your signature strengths are and how to apply them in everything you do, and further to work on all the other areas to help build on less-used strength to provide balance and a more resourceful collection of strengths for you to call upon, giving you more flexibility.
If you are curious about your signature strengths then get in touch now to learn more about how we can work together to bring about greater awareness and positive change.