Coaching practices for Via Character Strengths After a Loss
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Via Character Strengths After a Loss, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- The very thing I’m best at turns on me under pressure
- It’s been long enough that I can quietly admit something in me has shifted since they died
- When everything fell apart, a few people really showed up for me and we got so much closer
- They handled the money, or the cooking, or were just the person I leaned on
- When I think about that hard chapter I swing between “it was pure loss” and “it was secretly a gift,” and neither one feels honest
Practices that may help
- Map how your strengths distort under stress
Identify the "overuse" and "underuse" of each signature strength — how they show up when you’re at your worst.
VIA Character Strengths, Made Practical - Look honestly for what has grown or changed for the better
Without minimising the loss, notice any growth, change, or perspective that has emerged from it.
Meaning Reconstruction in Grief, Made Practical - Recognize and reinvest in deepened relationships
Notice which relationships grew closer through the hardship, and deliberately invest back in them.
Benefit-Finding: Locating Meaning and Growth in Adversity - Task 3: Adjust to a world without the person
Actively develop new skills, roles, and identity elements to navigate the changed life.
Worden’s Tasks of Mourning, Made Practical - 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. - Name the genuine benefits — without erasing the cost
List specific real positives that came from a hard experience while still acknowledging what it cost.
Benefit-Finding: Locating Meaning and Growth in Adversity - Access positive emotion during adversity, not after
In the midst of stress and difficulty, finding even small genuine positive moments is a resilience mechanism, not a betrayal of the difficulty.
Broaden-and-Build, Made Practical - Use a signature strength in a new way each day for one week
Apply one of your top character strengths to a context or relationship where you don’t normally use it.
VIA Character Strengths, Made Practical - Learn from suffering rather than managing it away
Let a period of difficulty become a curriculum — ask what it is teaching you about yourself.
The Eulogy Virtues: Building a Life of Character - Identify the strengths the hardship revealed
Name capacities you discovered in yourself only because the situation demanded them.
Benefit-Finding: Locating Meaning and Growth in Adversity
Related concerns
- Via Character Strengths After A Setback
Identify the "overuse" and "underuse" of each signature strength — how they show up when you’re at your worst.
Map how your strengths distort under stress
- Benefit Finding Locating Meaning And Growth In Adversity After A Loss
Benefit-finding is the coping process of identifying genuine positives — closer relationships, new priorities, personal strengths — that emerged from a hard experience. Research, much of it in health and illness, associates it with better adjustment, though the effects are modest, time-sensitive, and only helpful when the benefits are real rather than forced.
- Broaden And Build After A Loss
Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory proposes that positive emotions — joy, curiosity, love, gratitude, awe — temporarily broaden thought-action repertoires (making thinking more flexible and creative) and, over time, build durable psychological resources including resilience, social connection, and cognitive flexibility. The theory is supported by experimental evidence for the broadening effect; the longer-term building effects are primarily observational.
- Naming Character Strengths
Notice and explicitly name the character strengths you observe in people around you.
Spot and name character strengths in others
- Positives From Hard Times
List specific real positives that came from a hard experience while still acknowledging what it cost.
Name the genuine benefits — without erasing the cost
- Reflection After Hardship
After any voluntary hardship, reflect on what it taught you — not just that you survived.
Debrief every discomfort practice
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