On Saturday, I gave a talk at the First Australian Positive Education Conference. One of the key themes that all speakers, and workshop facilitators spoke about was that of character strengths.

24 Character Strengths were identified by Martin Seligman and Chris Peterson as being valued across all cultures, races and religions.

 

Each of us have all 24 strengths to some degree but some are more dominant than others.

 

The five strengths that feature the most prominently in an individual are referred to as your signature strengths.

 

Seligman argues that the way to have a meaningful life is to identify which of the twenty four strengths are your Top 5 signature strengths. And then seek to engage these strengths in your personal and professional life as much as possible. The trump card is if you can do this in the service of something bigger than yourself.

If you are aware of Seligman’s PERMA model, you’d know that meaning is a key factor in ensuring one’s wellbeing.

 

The conference brought together researchers and practitioners from all over the world to share their experience and ideas around how to embed wellbeing into every schools pedagogy.

 

The notion of teaching wellbeing took on a whole new form for many and I’m looking forward to seeing more and more schools adopt an approach that places engagement and wellbeing at the centre of teaching and learning.

The best way to start to understand character strengths is to take the test and find out what your signature strengths are!

Author: Dan Haesler, he is a teacher, consultant, and speaker at the Mental Health & Wellbeing of Young People seminars He writes for the Sydney Morning Herald and blogs at http://danhaesler.com/ and tweets at @danhaesler