Character Strengths Interventions: A Field Guide for Practitioners

This book is the go-to resource for any helping professional—coaches, counselors, managers, and teachers—seeking to bridge the gap between the science of character strengths and its practical application. Authored by the Education Director of the VIA Institute, the global leader in character strengths, this guide provides a common language and a systematic framework for moving beyond a deficit-focused model. It offers foundational concepts on the science of character, unpacks the power of signature strengths, details common traps and advanced topics like overuse and underuse, and equips practitioners with 24 detailed strength handouts and 70 evidence-based interventions designed to boost well-being, resilience, relationships, and goal achievement.

What it argues

Character Strengths Interventions: A Field Guide for Practitioners

Key ideas it contributes

• Character Strengths Interventions (CSIs) — A set of intentional activities and practices designed to increase an individual's awareness, exploration, and application of the 24 VIA character strengths.
• Signature Strengths Focus — A specific type of intervention that prioritizes the identification, exploration, and application of an individual's highest character strengths—those that are most essential, energizing, and natural to use.
• Strengths Awareness — The degree to which an individual can recognize, label, understand, and appreciate their own and others' character strengths as they are expressed.
• Strengths Use — The frequency and deliberateness with which an individual actively and intentionally employs their character strengths, particularly signature strengths, in their daily thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
• Strengths Alignment — The degree to which an individual's character strengths are consciously and effectively integrated with their roles, tasks, and activities across key life domains, particularly work.
• Goal Progress — The individual's subjective perception of making meaningful progress toward their personally valued (self-concordant) goals.
• Positive Affect — The experience of pleasant emotions and moods, such as joy, enthusiasm, interest, and contentment, resulting from engaging in fulfilling activities.
• Well-Being (Flourishing) — A comprehensive state of optimal human functioning that encompasses high levels of positive emotion, engagement, positive relationships, meaning, and accomplishment (PERMA).
• Resilience — The capacity to effectively cope with, manage, and recover from problems, stress, trauma, and adversity by leveraging internal resources.
• Positive Relationships — The quality, satisfaction, commitment, and perceived support derived from social and intimate connections with others.
• Meaning and Engagement — The subjective experience of life and work as having purpose, significance, and value, coupled with a state of absorption and full involvement in activities.
• Goal Achievement — The successful attainment of desired personal and professional objectives and milestones.