One strategy I recommend for growing yourself and your business is to focus on building trusting relationships with your fellow indie & remote workers. Start by getting to know each others’ strengths, perspectives, and preferences.
First understanding your own strengths, and then understanding others’ will help you collaborate, connect, and enjoy your creative productivity more fully.
Learning my top three VIA Character Strengths helped me recognize what elements to capitalize on as I design my work experiences.
Character #1: Love of learning (core virtue: Wisdom)
Description: Mastering new skills, topics, and bodies of knowledge, whether on one’s own or formally; related to the strength of curiosity but goes beyond it to describe the tendency to add systematically to what one knows.
Character #2. Humor (core virtue: Transcendence)
Liking to laugh and tease; bringing smiles to other people; seeing the light side; making (not necessarily telling) jokes.
Character #3. Honesty (core virtue: Courage)
Speaking the truth but more broadly presenting oneself in a genuine way and acting in a sincere way; being without pretense; taking responsibility for one’s feelings and actions.
Anytime I feel frustrated with my work, I look to see if any of these top character strengths are neglected. It’s been very reliable in helping me identify an incongruence.
About VIA Survey
The Science of Character
The VIA Survey is a psychometrically validated personality test that measures an individual’s character strengths. Character strengths are viewed as our positive personality in that they are our core capacities for thinking, feeling, and behaving in ways that can bring benefit to us and others.
A word of caution
This is one of many tools used to assess an individual’s strengths, abilities, style, and perspective. As a coach, I use this and other tools to help individuals increase their self awareness. Be careful not to label yourself nor others based on this or any assessment. My philosophy is to take each tool or assessment as a starting point for exploration and conversation.
Want to identify your VIA Character Strengths? Do it now (for free!)
