VIA Signature Strengths Cards

Positive Leadership have developed the VIA Signature Strengths Cards to support their work with the VIA. Demand has led to the availability of the cards for sale.

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The VIA Signature Strengths Cards provide an easy card sort to enable people to look at their strengths profile, and easily gain much deeper insight than is available in the VIA results report. Each strength has a card that describes the strength and also when someone with that strength is both ‘at their best’ and ‘thwarted’. The card material is derived from the original scientific work and the comprehensive work by Peterson and Seligman: Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (2004).

No-one can tell us what our strengths are. Working with the cards enables people to easily ‘own’ their strengths rather than just fill in a questionnaire and await the magical interpretation. Clients are known to carry them around as frequent reminders of the need to ‘play to their strengths’.

Positive Leadership are pioneers in the application of the VIA Signature Strengths Inventory, and have found the VIA to be the most profound and valuable tool in Executive Coaching, Group Coaching and organisational work. Numerous clients have found their coaching work using their VIA Signature Strengths to be life changing. Since working with Positive Leadership in 2007, Tal Ben Shahar has introduced teaching the VIA to his most popular course at Harvard.

Strengths differ from our learned skills and inherited talents. We may not actually be ‘good’ at using them. But they fuel and fortify us and we need to use them. By deploying our strengths in everyday life we build intrinsic life and work satisfaction. Unlike other diagnostics that highlight ‘development needs’ we use the VIA to shine a light on what is great about individuals and ask Appreciative Questions about how to leverage strengths for maximum personal advantage.

The Via Signature Strengths Inventory was developed by the non-profit VIA Institute on Character (www.viacharacter.org), founded in 2000 by Dr. Martin E.P. Seligman and Dr. Neal H. Mayerson. With Chris Peterson from the University of Michigan they set out to create an intellectually and scientifically rigorous classification of character strengths and a way of measuring such strengths. 

From the VIA website:

Their work has been lauded by noted psychologists. 

Dr. George Vaillant of Harvard University said the publication of our work “is destined to become a classic both in the social sciences and in the humanities”. 

Dr. Howard Gardner, Hobbs Professor of Education and Cognition, Harvard Graduate School of Education, said VIA’s work is “ ...one of the most important initiatives in psychology of the past half century”.

Approximately 1 million people worldwide have taken the VIA Survey on Character Strengths and it has been translated into 10 languages.  

The VIA Classification identifies 24 character strengths that have been found to be universal – characteristics that define what’s best about people.  The VIA Survey is the measurement tool that has undergone significant scientific validation.  The Classification and Survey resulted from a three-year dedicated effort involving 55 noted social scientists.