"To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man"  Polonius in Shakespeare's "Hamlet"

I have been writing a series of blog posts about character strengths - most recently "Twelve practical suggestions for exploring our character strengths (12): building up specific strengths exercise".  In today's post I give a personal example of using this building exercise with the character strengths of kindness and hope.

More to follow ...

                        (this blog post is downloadable as a Word doc and as a PDF file)

In June I went to the biennial European Conference on Positive Psychology running this year in Angers, France.  I've blogged about this meeting - see, for example "European Positive Psychology conference: 1st day - a disappointing start & caution on over-selling mindfulness" and "European Positive Psychology conference: better 2nd day - culture, use of strengths, education & passion". It's been said that if you go to a conference and come away with one good idea and one good contact, then you're doing well.

                        (this blog post is downloadable as a Word doc and as a PDF file)

                        (this blog post is downloadable as a Word doc and as a PDF file)

                         (this blog post is downloadable as a Word doc and as a PDF file)

I wrote yesterday about the "European Positive Psychology conference: 1st day - a disappointing start & caution on over-selling mindfulness" ... but today's conference presentations rapidly kicked my doubts about being here into touch. We started with a couple of fine keynotes ... Claudia Senik on "The cultural dimension of happiness" and Willibald Ruch on "Character strengths: Unresolved issues, new frontiers".  Both talks were excellent.  

I wrote a post a few days ago entitled "Resource activation: using clients' own strengths in psychotherapy and counseling - background (1st post)" giving some of the research basis for suggesting this territory is very relevant for therapists who are pushing to help their clients more effectively.  In order to follow up these ideas further I bought the short 'how to do it' 70 or so page book by Fluckiger, Wusten, Zinbarg & Wampold.

A bit over two years ago I wrote a sequence of three blog posts starting with "New research suggests CBT depression treatment is more effective if we focus on strengths rather than weaknesses".  This was triggered by the fascinating paper by Cheavens & colleagues "The compensation and capitalization models: A test of two approaches to individualizing the treatment of depression" - with its abstract reporting "Despite long-standing calls for the individualization of treatments for depression, modest progress has been made in this effort.

WOOP is an acronym for Wish-Outcome-Obstacle-Plan.  This sequence is based on the very impressive body of research on how to boost motivation, goal setting & goal achievement assembled over many years by professors Gabrielle Oettingen & Peter Gollwitzer.