Blog Post #4

“Parigi giugno 2007 027” by lula1977 is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0 

My Top signature Strength was humor and I think that does make sense. As I was talking to those around me I realized that we shared the similar view that humor helps us get through harder times. I try to lighten things up in situations I’m in and with the people I’m around, and I generally value humorous traits in others and seek out friends and relationships where we can relate and laugh with one another. I did think that I was going to have creativity on a higher mark, I received it at a 12, but overall I think that tests like these can vary depending on different days, there are days when I’m in a more humorous mode, and days where I’m in a more loving and kindness mood and those when I want to be engaged in something. It was interesting to see how well our group of transcendence strengths seemed to have gotten along and could generally get a conversation going while staying open minded to each other’s thoughts. I decided for my activity today, I would watch a couple comedy videos, I watched a John Mulaney special on Netflix which was just such a struggle (only joking.) I tried to think about what exactly his tactics were when approaching a joke-or just comedy in general. He always comes at humor as experiences, with him being an objective observer, and I think when you do that, your more likely to find what’s funny in life. If we’re in a bad mood, it’s easy to dwell on something or someone bringing you down or making your day worse, but it risks you seeing the world through sad, rose-colored glasses(I think?) Allowing yourself to turn something not so good about your day into a funny story just by trying to be a more objective observer of life, can help with transcendence, coping and in my belief-healing. I love watching comedy specials in general, so I don’t think that’s something I’m going to stop doing, but I will try to be more objective with my experiences in the future. But I feel like I’m about to get sick right now, so we’ll see how long that lasts.

I don’t know about how my values could have been correlated and I’m interested to see how they relate to my character strengths, because as we talked about in the lecture, character strengths are the reflection of ones morals and values. I did think that we were going to get more into depth on how to hone character strengths that we weren’t as highly placed in. For me, I was surprised, or maybe I was just feeling bad about my performance lately, but perseverance was lowest on my list. That shocked me a bit, but I guess that is one of my biggest insecurities, that I can’t really push myself to finish (mostly creative) tasks that I set out for myself to do and that I was at one point so motivated to complete.