How to Use Virtue: 10 Evidence-Based Coaching Practices

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For How to Use Virtue, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Practices that may help

1. Virtue Ethics, Made Practical
   Virtue ethics, developed by Aristotle and extended by thinkers like Alasdair MacIntyre, holds that ethics is primarily about who you are rather than which rules you follow or which outcomes you produce. The practical core: identify the virtues a flourishing human being needs, and train them through deliberate habitual action — because character is what you repeatedly do, not what you occasionally decide.
2. Practice virtues as interconnected, not separate
   When a virtue feels absent, look for which related virtue is also being neglected.
   Virtue Ethics, Made Practical
3. Cultivate virtue through deliberate habituation
   Do the virtuous action — even imperfectly, even without the feeling — until the disposition follows.
   Virtue Ethics, Made Practical
4. Embed your virtues in a practice community
   The virtues needed for excellence in any serious practice (craft, sport, relationship) are real virtues — find the practice that calls them out.
   Virtue Ethics, Made Practical
5. Identify the virtues you most need to cultivate
   Name the three character traits whose absence most limits you — those are your practice targets.
   Virtue Ethics, Made Practical
6. The virtue audit
   Ask which of the four Stoic virtues you exercised — and which you neglected — today.
   The Stoic Daily Review
7. View your life as a narrative, not a sequence of choices
   Ask: what story am I living, and does it reflect the character I am trying to build?
   Virtue Ethics, Made Practical
8. VIA Character Strengths, Made Practical
   Peterson and Seligman’s VIA Classification identifies 24 character strengths organized under six virtues, and multiple randomized trials find that using your top "signature strengths" in new ways reliably increases well-being and decreases depressive symptoms. The effect is most robust when strengths are deployed in engaged, relational ways — not just recognized but actively applied.
9. Connect individual strengths to the broader virtues they serve
   Understand which of the six VIA virtues your signature strengths express, and what that reveals about your character.
   VIA Character Strengths, Made Practical
10. Building character through deliberate repetition
    Choose one character quality you want to embody and perform one specific act of it daily until it no longer requires effort.
    Aristotelian Eudaimonia: Flourishing Through Virtue

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• I keep trying to fix one trait→
• I keep waiting until I feel brave or patient or generous before I act that way, and the feeling never reliably shows up→
• I work on my character all in my own head, by my own standards, and it stays abstract and unproven→
• I want to become a better person but "be better" is too vague to act on→
• I want to actually become a better person, not just vaguely intend to, but "be better" is so fuzzy I never know what I’m working on→

Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.