Your Strengths\’ calendar for June (6/12)

Hello and welcome (back) to my blog, dear friends!

And Happy Childrens\’ Day/Weekend! We all have a child in ourselves, no matter how old we actually are! And we need to love and protect and \”feed\” that child. Because that means we are actually offering love to ourselves! And we all need to do this!

I can not believe we are already in June: half of the year is soon gone, in other words, and so I really hope your 2024 continues smoothly and that you got a good sense of enthusiasm! But if your enthusiasm plays hard to get, I am here with another calendar filled with activities meant to encourage you to be more creative and brave. And, as usually, these activities are ways to use our character strengths intentionally.

In case you are new on my blog and don\’t really know what character strengths are, I will just say this: they are the backbone of Positive Psychology – the science that studies human flourishing, or what leads humans to peak performance. These character strengths have been researched intensely in the last 20+ years and the studies say that they are:

1. Universal – we all have them, no matter where we live
2. Cross-cultural – they exist in all cultures of the world
3. Easily recognized – we apply them without thinking
4. Elevating to self and others – they put us in a state of flow and lead to peak performance

The Strengths Calendar for June shares simple ways to help us approach life with Creativity, Bravery and Perspective. Almost all activities have a link attached to them, that you can access if you click on the image – each of them will lead you to an article or a video about that specific strength:

But for now, let\’s just see what each of them means:

Bravery – is a strength within the virtue category of Courage, one of the six virtues that include the 24 strengths. Courage describes strengths that help you exercise your will and face adversity. The other strengths in Courage are honesty, perseverance, and zest.

According to VIA, bravery is the ability to face your challenges, threats or difficulties. It involves valuing a goal or conviction and acting upon it, whether popular or not. A central element involves facing – rather than avoiding – fears.

There are 3 different types of bravery and one may possess 1 type or a combination:

Moral bravery – speaking up for what’s right, even if it’s an unfavorable opinion to a group

Physical bravery – i. e. firefighters, police officers, soldiers

Psychological bravery – i. e. facing painful aspects of oneself

Perspective – Perspective is a strength within Wisdom, one of six virtues in which the 24 strengths are included. Wisdom describes strengths that help you gather and use knowledge. The other strengths in Wisdom are creativity (also approached in this article, see below), curiosity, judgment and love of learning (we have approached these ones in previous articles).

Perspective is distinct from intelligence, and it represents a higher level of knowledge, the capacity to give advice and to recognize and weight multiple sides before making decisions. Perspective is the ability to see the bigger picture in life, being able to see the forest as well as the trees (quote from VIA).

Creativity is a strength within the virtue category of Wisdom, just like Bravery.

According to VIA, creativity is thinking of new ways to do things. It involves producing ideas or behaviors that are original.

However, originality is not enough: whatever is created, whether an idea or a product, must also be useful or adaptable. For example, you might write a blog post that is unique because it is entirely gibberish. That’s not going to be useful, so it would not be considered creative.

If you did not take your VIA Character Strength Test yet, by now you are probably excited to find out your OWN Strengths, and how you can apply them to Build The Life You Really Want. Then you will most likely want to know what makes you unique (your top 5-6 strengths are unique to you) and how to use your strengths to thrive and flourish.

Well, im looking forward to meeting you, so we can discover together how you can live your life from a position of strength, with more fulfilment.

Stay close for the next blogpost, where we will see what is the \”golden mean\” for each of the character strengths we talked about today – we will learn how each of them can be used optimally (not too little or too much).

Remember, 2024 will be (y)our BEST year yet ;)!

Until next time, stay positive and take care of yourselves!