Have you ever taken a personality quiz just for fun, only to wonder afterward what you’re actually supposed to do with the results? Lisa has taken more assessments than she can count—including on the corporate side, where discovering she’s an ENFJ made total sense to her. But the real question isn’t whether these quizzes are fun. It’s whether they can actually help you live a better life. Lisa believes they can, which is exactly why she has clients take a number of assessments before they ever start working together.

In this episode, Lisa draws a clear line between talent-based assessments like Clifton Strengths, which measure how you work and get things done, and character strengths, which measure who you are and why something feels meaningful while you’re doing it. She introduces the Via Character Strengths framework, developed by psychologists Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson along with a team of 55 scientists, organizing 24 character strengths into six broad virtues: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence. She explains signature strengths—the three to seven strengths that are truest to who you are—and shares research showing that using a signature strength in a new way each day for a week increased happiness and decreased depression for up to six months. Lisa offers three simple ways to spot a signature strength on your own: it feels energizing rather than draining, it feels natural rather than forced, and you lose track of time while doing it. She walks through practical ways this shows up in real life, from choosing a productivity system that fits your strengths, to designing your week around them, to using them as a tiebreaker for hard decisions, to recognizing when burnout comes from spending too much time in your lower strengths. Lisa also gets personal, sharing her own top five signature strengths (gratitude, honesty, love, humor, and creativity) and the story of finally embracing humor publicly in her business after years of hiding it, worried it might undermine her expertise. She closes with a simple challenge: take the free Via assessment, pick one signature strength, and use it in a new way this week.

Character strengths, Lisa reminds us, aren’t a ranking against anyone else, and they’re not about fixing what’s broken. They’re about noticing who you already are at your best, and building more of your days around that.

Character Strengths: Focus on What Makes You Come Alive

Have you ever taken a personality quiz just for fun?

Not the corporate kind—the “what kind of potato chip are you” kind.

Lisa is a little obsessed with them. But joking aside, she’s taken plenty of the more serious ones too, even on the corporate side. Discovering she’s an ENFJ made total sense to her. But the question that always lingers is this:

What can you actually do with that information?

Is it just for fun? Just for corporate team-building exercises? Or can it genuinely help you live a better life?

Lisa believes it’s the latter—which is exactly why she has clients take a number of assessments before they ever start working together. It can seem unusual at first, and many of her clients are surprised. But once they see how it fits into the bigger picture of productivity coaching, it becomes both fun and functional.

If you’ve taken assessments before but still can’t get a productivity system to actually fit you, this one’s for you.

Talent Tells You How. Character Tells You Why.

Before going further, it’s worth being clear about what “character strengths” actually means, because strengths get used in a lot of different ways.

If you’ve taken the Clifton Strengths Assessment, developed by Don Clifton at Gallup, you’ve experienced one version of this. It sorts you into 34 themes based on how you think, work, and get things done. It’s genuinely useful, and it’s about performance—how you operate.

Via Character Strengths asks a different question entirely.

Via stands for Values in Action. Instead of measuring talent or performance, it measures character—the traits connected to who you are, not just what you’re good at producing.

Talent tells you how you work. Character tells you why it matters, and what feels meaningful while you’re doing it.

The Framework Behind It

The Via Character Strengths framework was developed by psychologists Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson, working alongside a team of 55 scientists. It organizes 24 character strengths into six broad virtues:

Wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence.

Think curiosity, kindness, persistence, humor, fairness, gratitude. Unlike a skill you build through repeated practice, these are positive traits that show up across cultures, religions, and philosophies—which is part of why the framework has held up so well over 20 years of use.

If you’ve done core values work before, this will feel familiar. Values tell you what matters to you. Strengths tell you how you naturally show up when you’re moving toward what matters. Both give you a much clearer view of yourself, and tapping into that side of yourself tends to mean a more satisfying life.

Your Signature Strengths

Here’s where it gets practical.

Out of the 24 strengths, you have what’s called your signature strengths—usually three to seven that are the truest version of you.

Research from Seligman, Steen, Park, and Peterson found that using one of your signature strengths in a new way each day for a week increased happiness and decreased depression for up to six months. That’s a meaningful result for something so simple.

You can usually spot a signature strength on your own in three ways:

It feels energizing, not draining. Using it gives you a little lift instead of leaving you feeling depleted.

It feels natural. You don’t have to talk yourself into it. It’s already how you operate. It’s built in.

You lose track of time doing it. Whatever it is, you sink into it instead of clock-watching.

Your lower strengths, by contrast, simply take more effort and don’t light you up in the same way. Knowing the difference matters more than people think, because so much productivity advice assumes everyone should be equally strong in everything.

For the record, when Lisa last took the assessment, her top five were gratitude, honesty, love, humor, and creativity. Those who know her aren’t at all surprised—and she can attest that the more she leans into those, the more satisfied she feels.

How This Plays Out in Real Life

Choosing your systems. If curiosity is one of your signature strengths, a rigid system will probably fight you every step of the way. A flexible, exploratory system will work much better.

Designing your week. If you’re high in love of learning, blocking time to read or research isn’t a distraction from your goals. It’s fuel for them. That’s energy management, right there.

Making harder decisions easier. When you’re stuck between two paths, ask which one lets you use more of your signature strengths. That question alone tends to clarify things quickly—it’s a great tiebreaker.

Noticing burnout sources. A lot of exhaustion comes from spending most of your time using lower strengths, because a job, a role, a relationship, or a season of life demands it. You can’t always avoid that, but naming it gives you a better understanding of what’s happening, and just as importantly, takes the shame out of it.

Working with others. Once you know your own character strengths, you start noticing them in the people around you too—building more patience and appreciation for people who show up differently than you do, and a deeper connection with the ones who are similar.

A Personal Example: Embracing Humor

Humor, as mentioned, is in Lisa’s top five. And for the longest time, she hid it in her business, because being silly or goofy felt like it might undermine her expertise. It wasn’t how you did things. It wasn’t how she was taught. She didn’t want it to color how people saw her, or whether they trusted what she knew.

But when she realized that hiding it meant missing out on things that were second nature to her—speaking fluent sarcasm, diffusing tension with witty retorts, just the sheer joy of how she interacts with people—she felt a real loss without those things. So she threw caution to the wind and chose to be authentic.

What she found is that her realness, whether admitting mistakes (which taps into her other signature strength, honesty) or being goofy, resonated with her audience. It was the best choice she could have made. Because that’s how people connect with you better.

To this day, she still posts the most ridiculous reels on Instagram. Her family rolls their eyes at her. Sometimes she says they’re simply for her, but she realizes they’re not—because plenty of people love them too. If you scroll through and get a laugh, even something with nothing to do with productivity, there’s still an appreciation and understanding underneath it: I get you, and you get me. That’s worth it.

Signature Strengths Are Innate, Not a Ranking

As you consider your own character strengths and signature strengths, keep in mind: those signature strengths are simply the ones strongest and most prominent in your own profile. It’s not a ranking against anyone else. It’s not a measure of how hard you’re trying.

It’s innate.

And that matters, because so many of us were taught to focus on our weaknesses—things to fix, to smooth out what’s rough. Character strengths flip that script entirely. You get more traction, more energy, and more satisfaction by leaning into what’s already working in you.

That’s positive psychology, by the way—and it’s no coincidence that Martin Seligman, one of the founders of Via Character Strengths, is also closely tied to the research on gratitude. There’s something deeper here in terms of life satisfaction when we tap into these things.

This is also why the low-strengths conversation matters so much. If organization or self-regulation isn’t naturally a higher strength for you, you don’t need to work on it until it becomes one. You build support around it instead. That’s working with your design—finessing, not forcing.

From Fun Quiz Results to Decision-Making Tool

If you want to find your own signature strengths, the Via Institute offers a free assessment, available in the assessments workbook of the Positively Productive Toolkit, which you can request for free at positivelyproductive.com/resources.

The assessment takes about 10 minutes, and your results rank all 24 strengths so you can clearly see your top five.

Once you have your results, try this: pick one signature strength—the top one, or one of your top five—and use it in a slightly new way this week.

If gratitude is one of yours, write a note to someone you don’t usually thank. If humor is one of yours, look for one moment today where you can lighten something instead of pushing through it. (You could even send Lisa a joke. She’ll respond happily.)

Think about ways to match your actions with that top strength, and pay attention to how you feel when you do.

Final Thoughts

To be your most productive, happiest self, you don’t need to change who you are.

The opposite, in fact.

Notice who you already are, and what it looks like when you’re at your best. Then build your days around more of that.

Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this episode, take a screenshot of the episode to post in your stories and tag me! And don’t forget to follow, rate, and review the podcast and tell me your key takeaways!

Learn more about Positively Living^Ⓡ and Lisa at https://positivelyproductive.com/podcast/

Stop trying to fit into someone else’s productivity rules! Grab my free Productivity Toolkit, a collection of workbooks designed to help you explore how you work, uncover what truly matters to you, and create your very own energy-friendly systems. Get it here: www.positivelyproductive.com/plpkit

CONNECT WITH LISA ZAWROTNY:

LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Episode 88 Play to Your Strengths with Julia de’Caneva

Episode 298 How Your Strengths & Personality Can Be Your Advantage

Episode 296 Core Values: A Foundation of Sustainable Productivity

Positively Productive Resources Library

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