I enjoy bringing my strengths to my work. I express my curiosity as I open up each new e-mail message, I express hope as I help clients work through struggles, and I express love (warmth and genuineness) with my colleagues as we discuss new ideas and process daily work happenings. This fills me with a greater passion and commitment to my work.

How about you? Do you express your highest character strengths each day at your job?

The research has been clear:

What are your strengths?

What is best about you?

What qualities make up who you are?

Too many times in my work as a clinical psychologist these questions would be met by blank stares from the person in front of me. And, when the question was answered at all, the response was something vague like “I like baseball” or “I’m good at cooking.” This is consistent with survey research that has found that 2/3 of people do not have a meaningful awareness of their strengths.

Strengths-spotting is one of the best, initial activities that deepens our understanding of our strengths and the strengths of others.

There are 2 general levels to strengths-spotting:

Just in time for 2013! Looking for a New Year’s resolution? Feeling a holiday lull? Wanting to increase your happiness?

New research from the science of positive psychology has found a number of practical exercises you can do to boost your happiness and decrease your depression.

Choose one of the following 7 exercises and practice it for 1 week:

There are many positive psychology exercises individuals can practice to boost their well-being and help them achieve their goals. The Best Possible Self exercise is one of the stronger happiness exercises because it has good research support (see below) and people tend to find the exercise captivating and at the least, illuminating.

This exercise has been shown to boost people’s positive emotions, happiness levels, optimism, hope, improve coping skills, and elevate positive expectations about the future. It involves two basic steps:

Perhaps nobody has brought more clarity to how mindfulness can manifest in our daily lives than Thich Nhat Hanh.

Thich Nhat Hanh offers five mindfulness trainings that help individuals bring more depth, purpose and meaning into their lives.

Keep in mind:

• These are mindfulness trainings not mindfulness commandments. The idea is to move toward the training and to practice the training as an ongoing process, not something to be perfectly achieved.
• The practice of the mindfulness trainings is for everyone to enjoy.
• For a full description of the Five Mindfulness Trainings, click here.

This blog entry focuses on the second mindfulness training, called True Happiness. It begins:

I used to lead a laughter group a few times a year for clients at a psychotherapy clinic. The group was interactive and educational. The purpose was to highlight the therapeutic benefits of laughter. Participants were encouraged to bring jokes, funny stories, and come dressed in costume. There was one main rule: You have to laugh. Laughter was not an option, it was a requirement!

This rule helped participants to feel relaxed and comfortable. It released the social pressure of worrying whether someone would laugh at their jokes and funny stories.

Need a happiness boost? Discover your signature strengths and use them in a new way each day. Research has found this intervention gives a boost to happiness and a decrease to depression, with some studies finding effects lasting up to six months.

Below are examples of how this intervention might be applied with each of the 24 universal, character strengths of the VIA Classification.