Embodiment · “Being Precedes Having”
Using a Signature Strength in a New Way
Turn knowledge of your top character strengths into action by deploying one of them in a fresh way each day for a week, to lift wellbeing and lower low mood.
Signature Strength in a New Way in 4 lines: Take one of your top character strengths and, every day for a week, use it in a way you never have before. Plan it briefly each morning; a few minutes is enough. Notice the energy and authenticity as you act. The week is the tested dose — keep going, or rotate strengths, since the modest gains fade if you stop.
What it is
Using a signature strength in a new way is the most famous of the strengths-based positive-psychology interventions, and it follows directly from identifying your strengths (the companion practice). The instruction is simple: for one week, take one of your top character strengths and find a new, different way to use it every day.
It is deliberately an embodiment practice rather than an insight — the wellbeing effect comes not from knowing your strengths but from enacting them, freshly, so they don’t stay abstract or rote. It rests on the idea that flourishing grows from living out what is most authentically you (All Is One), and that novelty keeps the practice from going stale.
The Method
As tested in Seligman, Steen, Park & Peterson’s intervention study and grounded in the Character Strengths and Virtues framework:
- Start from a signature strength. Pick one strength from your top few — identified via the VIA survey or honest self-reflection (see the companion practice). Choose one that feels genuinely yours.
- Each day for a week, use it in a new way. The core instruction is novelty: don’t just do what you already do. If your strength is curiosity, take a different route home and study what you pass; the next day, learn one fact about a stranger’s job. If it is kindness, do an unplanned good turn you’ve never done before. If it is love of learning, teach someone something today and read outside your field tomorrow. The strength stays the same; the expression changes daily.
- Plan it, lightly. A few minutes’ forethought — “how will I use this strength differently today?” — is enough. The barrier is forgetting, not difficulty.
- Notice the effect. Pay brief attention to how using the strength feels, especially the sense of energy and authenticity that marks a true signature strength. This is what reinforces the habit.
- Continue past the week if it helps. The week is the tested dose; the practice is designed to be carried on. Several strengths can be rotated over time. (Sourcing note: the “use a signature strength in a new way every day for a week” protocol comes from Seligman, Steen, Park & Peterson, “Positive Psychology Progress: Empirical Validation of Interventions,” American Psychologist (2005); the strengths framework is from Peterson & Seligman, Character Strengths and Virtues (2004). Short quotes used under fair use.)
Source & Lineage
The intervention emerged from the same project that produced the VIA classification, co-led by Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman, and was tested in their 2005 American Psychologist randomized, placebo-controlled comparison of positive interventions — the study that put strengths-use, the gratitude visit, and “three good things” on the empirical map.
Peterson treated the underlying classification as provisional, and the intervention literature he helped seed shares positive psychology’s later replication scrutiny.
The Traditions' versions
Seligman’s companion interventions — the gratitude visit and “three good things” were tested alongside this one in the same study.,
- Lyubomirsky’s happiness activities — kindness, savoring, and goal-pursuit done with variety to beat hedonic adaptation; the “use it in a new way” twist is the same anti-staleness logic.
- Csikszentmihalyi’s flow — using a high strength tends to produce absorbed, energizing activity, a near-relative of flow conditions.
- Aristotle’s virtue-as-activity — virtue is not a possession but something exercised; the ancient root of “flourishing is character in action.”
Common refinements
Repeating the same act. The tested ingredient is new way each day; doing your usual version flattens the effect through adaptation.
- Choosing a strength that isn’t yours. Picking an admired-but-borrowed strength rather than a genuine signature one undercuts the energy that drives the benefit.
- Treating one week as the whole cure. The week is a starting dose; gains fade without continuation, so carry it on or rotate strengths.
- Over-effort. Grand gestures aren’t required — small, fresh, daily expressions are what was tested.