#Define habits of character how to#

#Define habits of character how to#

Much of the task of prevention in this new century will be to create a science of human strength whose mission will be to understand and learn how to foster these virtues in young people.Īnd it was not long before this science of human strengths began to flourish, thanks in part to one of these founding fathers. Prevention researchers have discovered that there are human strengths that act as buffers against mental illness: courage, future mindedness, optimism, interpersonal skill, faith, work ethic, hope, honesty, perseverance, and the capacity for flow and insight, to name several. In Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s (2000) introduction to the field, they write: Personality characteristics and traits are topics that fit comfortably in traditional psychology, but the focus on strengths-uniquely positive characteristics-give the topic a firm grounding in the positive.Ĭharacter strengths have been a pillar of positive psychology since it was founded. It was also one of the first topics to fall solidly within the positive side of psychology. It is a concept that applies to everybody unlike resilience or gratitude or optimism (constructs where you fall on a spectrum from “high” to “low”), everyone has character strengths, and everyone can use them. Their popularity as a topic of interest is driven by their applicability and their history in the field of positive psychology. If you have given any positive psychology resource even a cursory glance, you have probably read about them in some capacity-what they are, how they fit into the field, how to improve them, and how to capitalize on them.

One of the biggest topics in positive psychology is character strengths.