Use your signature strengths in a new way
Identify your top character strengths and deploy one of them differently each day.
Key takeaways
- What it is: Identify your top character strengths and deploy one of them differently each day.
- Why it works: Engagement and accomplishment rise when you work from your strengths rather than grinding against your weaknesses. Identifying signature strengths makes them salient, and using one in a novel way each day forces fresh application instead of passive recognition. This produces frequent experiences of authentic, absorbing activity, which feed well-being over time.
- Evidence: Backed by randomized trials / meta-analyses.
- Avoid: Treating the strengths survey as the exercise and stopping there — recognition alone does little; the effect lives in the deliberate, novel daily use.
Why it works
Engagement and accomplishment rise when you work from your strengths rather than grinding against your weaknesses. Identifying signature strengths makes them salient, and using one in a novel way each day forces fresh application instead of passive recognition. This produces frequent experiences of authentic, absorbing activity, which feed well-being over time.
How to do it
- 1Identify your top character strengths (e.g. via the VIA framework).
- 2Each day for a week, use one signature strength in a new, deliberate way.
- 3Notice which applications feel most energizing and lean into those.
What the evidence says
RCT / meta-analysisUsing signature strengths in a new way is another exercise from Seligman’s randomized study that increased happiness and reduced depressive symptoms over follow-up, and it has been replicated in later trials.
Honest caveat: The "novel use" instruction seems to matter; simply knowing your strengths without applying them shows weaker effects.
Common mistake
Treating the strengths survey as the exercise and stopping there — recognition alone does little; the effect lives in the deliberate, novel daily use.
IX Coach helps you name your signature strengths and suggests a fresh way to apply one each day, fitted to what’s actually on your calendar.
Practice this with IX Coach →