Tag Archives: Character strengths

Empower Yourself: Align Your Intentions and Goals With Your Strengths

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January is a month for setting new intentions and goals. These intentions reflect our higher aspirations. A major challenge in carrying them out is handling the obstacles, disappointments, and setbacks that inevitably occur. Success is more than setting an intention and visualizing the positive. It requires us to persist in following our goals, transforming our challenges into a positive direction.

When considering your intentions for this year, consider aligning them with your character strengths. Your strengths are the places where you naturally feel happier, are in the flow, and are enthusiastic about developing projects. When you align your intentions with your strengths, your setbacks can form the corner stone for the further development of your character. They help you to see the deeper truth about yourself. You can discover your strengths by taking the VIA strengths test at www.authentichappiness.org.

For example, one of my intentions this year is to focus. One of my big challenges is dealing with techology. Technology is not my strength. It frequently leaves me overwhelmed, seeing myself in a negative light. My strengths are in the areas of perspective and wanting to serve a higher purpose. By working with web master, I found I could better meet my challenges with technology. This allows me to honor my intention with a spirit of adventure and purpose rather than hesitation and fear. Then when setbacks and obstacles occur, instead of constricting or avoiding dealing with them, I can face them with co-creative teamwork and a sense of purpose.

Honor your strengths, use them to help you accomplish your intentions and goals. You will find yourself more productive, happier and joyful in the process.

Warm Regards,

Dr. Alice

Tips for Managing Family Differences

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I recently visited my roots, my family of origin. We had a successful gathering. We enjoyed being with each other, and also had to make decisions regarding our larger family goals, such as managing the family farm. In almost every family, individual members often can have different views. While this can give rise to potential conflict, it can also lead to stronger and more effective teamwork. The challenge is to stay positive, working in individual perspectives, while also looking at the best interest of the whole. Here are three tips for managing differences so as to create success.

Focus on the Positive

Celebrate your strengths. We all have individual strengths and at the same time share deeper values and strengths with the people we love. Recognizing your character strengths, such honesty, love of learning, sense of humor, is important because it focuses on what you love to do that also serves the greater good. Family is a good place to discover and share them. When you can use your strengths to serve a cause greater than yourself, it is deeply gratifying. You can learn more about the power of the character strengths in my article, “The Hidden Power,”

Express your appreciation and gratitude. It builds positive energy, broadens your perspective, and facilitates your productivity and creativity. It will help you become more inclusive, considering the views of everyone, rather than fighting over one solution or another. Over time, the positive is more powerful than the negative. When you express your appreciation, it brings out the higher positive power of life.

Be Aware of the Ghosts

Every family has ghosts. These are old patterns from the past, not fully resolved, that threaten to destroy the family unity and joy. Suspect a ghost if you are picking up negative vibes, gossip, blaming, or a constricted view. Be curious, is this really true? Then work to take positive action. You cannot change another person, but you can change yourself. Facing challenges and choosing to transform them is deeply empowering. A major success in any family is to keep the ghosts away.

Ask yourself, what can I do to create a more positive solution? Often, negativity stems from false assumptions from the past. When you release them, it creates a much brighter future and helps you to communicate more effectively. Even better, the work of any one person in the family has a positive impact on the whole.

If you are having difficulty staying positive, check out Barbara Fredrickson’s positivity website, www.positivityratio.com and take the online test. Fredrickson discovered that experiencing positive emotions in a 3-to-1 ratio with negative ones leads people to a tipping point towards flourishing and resilience. Successful businesses have a positivity/negativity ratio 2.9/1. Successful marriages have a positivity/negativity ratio of 5/1. If you find your ratio is negative, then look for ways to raise it. If you need help, call me.

Let Solutions Emerge

I have found in my family that decisions are much easier when we have short and long range goals. Some decisions need to be made immediately while others can wait. Think through your priorities and sort out your short-term goals from the long-term goals. Then create a holding space for the longer term goals. When you are positive, this holding space allows for the goodness of life and necessary time for new solutions to emerge. It keeps you minds open, allowing for creativity and resilience, rather than fighting over one or another position. You will be surprised at the success of your ability to work together.

Warmly, Dr. Alice

© 2015 Alice Vlietstra. All rights reserved.

Family Success: Tap Into Your Hidden Power

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If there was one key factor that you would focus on to make your relationships great, what would it be? One of the greatest strengths you and your family can bring to your family and community are your values. When translated into behavior, they form a Code of Honor. It is a cornerstone for family and business success.

A Code of Honor

What holds a family together when it faces a crisis? What holds a business together when cash is tight? It is something deep. It shows its face when the pressure is on and when the stakes are high. It shows up when we are put to the test and have to deliver. Blair Singer calls it, a “Code of Honor.”

A Code of Honor is a set of powerful values and beliefs that we are willing to take a stand for and defend. They form the standards whereby we hold ourselves accountable. They are heart and spirit of any successful organization. They are values acted upon, the values that are extended into real, physical behavior.

A Code of Honor affects little things, like “deal direct,” focus on what works, take responsibility, acknowledge and say “Thank You” and the big things, like the Declaration of Independence.

Uplifting Power

A shared Code of Honor comes from our most deeply held values. It represents our higher motivations and aspirations and it helps us to move forward to accomplish our higher goals. It helps a business accomplish the broader vision that goes beyond the bottom line. Organizations that have lasting success typically honor a higher motivation that enables its members to feel pride and to believe in what they are doing to serve the community.

A Code of Honor defines the “glue” that holds a family or team together, In every family and business, conflict will ALWAYS arise. Conflict can destroy a group or it can pull the group to work together as a team at a higher level.

When “push comes to shove,” individuals can criticize and blame each other or they can choose to take personal responsibility to do what is needed. It is our shared values and personal Code that holds us accountable to do our work.

While values help us define our higher ideals, they also help us acknowledge our humanity. We all have moments when life goes crazy. A set of rules with clearly defined values, developed in the SANE moments, helps us see our way through this craziness to a higher level of functioning.

Your Code of Honor

Every individual, family, and business has a set of values that is deeply meaningful to their lives. It arises from our real experience and our deepest strivings.

Are you committed to being your best? All of us have a greatness waiting to be revealed. The challenge is to find it, develop it, train it and use it to better your life and those around you.

Families also have strengths that are deeply meaningful and that benefit the community. They can be discovered by listening to the challenges that have been overcome, the stories,
and the struggles faced by previous generations.

One way to discover the values that are important in your life is to take “Values in Action” survey at www.authentichappiness.org and have family members take it as well. It will help you identify your signature strengths as well as those in your family. Then check them out and see if they are consistent with your experiences.

Your values and your Code of Honor can bring out the best of yourself, your family, and your team. When you make a conscious decision to create a Code of Honor you set the stage for greatness to emerge. You can facilitate this by playing your strengths and by learning how to form a shared Code. This with be the subject of the next two e-newsletters.

Warm Regards,

Dr. Alice

Resources:

Singer, Blair. The ABC’s of Building a Business Team That Wins. New York: Warner Books, Inc., 2004.

Build Your Self Esteem – Discover Your Strengths

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Each person has character strengths that are at the core of who they are.
You can tell when you are in your strengths when you find yourself “in the flow,”
enthusiastic, and become deeply absorbed in what you are doing. Character strengths
are deeply held, and are at the core of your being. They are so central to your
identity that suppressing or ignoring any of these strengths seems unnatural and
very difficult.

When you do not honor your strengths, you feel diminished. It takes energy from you.
For example if you have strengths of integrity and authenticity, not speaking your
truth makes you feel less than who you really are. When you honor your strengths,
you are more productive, and excited about new challenges.

One way to discover your strengths is to take the VIA Signature Strength Survey
at (no cost) www.authentichappiness.org. It will give you a description of your
top five character strengths. Then take a moment to reflect on how they have shown
up in your life. You will discover that they have helped you to rise to the occasion
to meet your challenges. Once you how they have helped you in the past, use them they more
frequently. You will discover you are a lot more happier and confident.

Know Your Strengths – Build Your Self-Esteem

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What is it that enables you to cultivate your talents, build deep lasting relationships with others, feel pleasure and contribute to the world? We all have character strengths that empower our lives. When you tap into your strengths, it leads to a solid foundation of self-esteem and increases your optimism, enthusiasm, and joy.
Can you challenge yourself TODAY to make that list of what enjoy and when you felt the most enthusiastic and strong? These activities build your self-esteem. Whatever we focus on, increases. When you focus on what’s good about you NOW, you start to become your own “cheerleader” and best friend. Personal growth begins with a decision that you are worthy of the time, money and effort it takes to grow your self-esteem. I would be honored to be your guide.
Tips to Build Self-Esteem:
1. Watch your negative self-talk. Put a mental “STOP” sign up when you catch yourself being self- critical.
2. Write down negative thoughts. It helps to face the habit and change it.
3. Replace them with written, positive thoughts, such as “I am a happy person today.”
4. Surround your environment with positive thoughts (signs, notes etc.)
5. List five things that are good about you and read them often.

Dr. Alice