Use your signature strengths in a new way

Identify your top character strengths and deploy one of them differently each day.

Why it works

Engagement and accomplishment rise when you work from your strengths rather than grinding against your weaknesses. Identifying signature strengths makes them salient, and using one in a novel way each day forces fresh application instead of passive recognition. This produces frequent experiences of authentic, absorbing activity, which feed well-being over time.

How to do it

1. Identify your top character strengths (e.g. via the VIA framework).
2. Each day for a week, use one signature strength in a new, deliberate way.
3. Notice which applications feel most energizing and lean into those.

Evidence

Using signature strengths in a new way is another exercise from Seligman’s randomized study that increased happiness and reduced depressive symptoms over follow-up, and it has been replicated in later trials. (rct)

The "novel use" instruction seems to matter; simply knowing your strengths without applying them shows weaker effects.

Common mistake

Treating the strengths survey as the exercise and stopping there — recognition alone does little; the effect lives in the deliberate, novel daily use.