Personal strengths and resilience
Helping students to be aware of their personal character strengths improves their understanding of themself, their actions and their decisions and can lead to greater wellbeing and resilience.
Theme: Mental Resilience
Type: Link
Implementation timeframe: Quick Win
Helping students to be aware of their personal character strengths
Helping students to be aware of their personal character strengths improves their understanding of themself, their actions and their decisions and can lead to greater wellbeing and resilience. Character strengths include a wide range of attributes such as kindness, honesty, loyalty, creativity and empathy. Students can identify their personal character strengths one of two ways: One way is to complete an activity where they look at a list of character strengths and they self-select the ones they feel are their top personal strengths. Alternatively they can complete an online questionnaire that will identify their top five strengths for them, such as at www.viacharacter.org or www.authentichappiness.org
Once the students have identified their top five strengths, they can do some of the following activities:
- Creating a ‘family tree of strengths’ by asking students to talk with their family members and ask them what they think their top character strengths are and adding them to a family treen start using the strategies under the ‘Me’ column and move on to the other columns if and when they are needed.
- Brainstorm all the ways they use their strengths in school and at home.
- Consider whether they might use a particular strength too much e.g. being loyal to people who are not treating you very well.
- Identify one or more strengths that aren’t in their top five, but they would like to develop and consider how they might find opportunities to develop and use the strength/s in their everyday life. For example, wanting to develop perseverance and identifying that this could be practised in Math’s class when they find a sum difficult.
- Identifying strengths in others – once a student is familiar with the different range of character strengths, they can work with others to share what strengths they believe others show and why
- Identifying how they can use their strengths to overcome challenges
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