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The International Day of Strengths

The International Day of Strengths is about channeling our psychological strengths into kindness to self and others and strengths-based community building. “Hope (practical hope) is a perceived capability to derive pathways to desired goals, and motivate oneself via agency thinking to use those pathways,” ~C.R (Rick) Snyder. Practical hope can be a form of play when practiced with non-attachment. Unconditional positive regard is the other side of that coin. Practicing non-attachment is a way of practicing unconditional positive regard to ourselves, both being forms of compassionate kindness to self. Practical hope and other strengths are coming to be seen as mental wellbeing itself. When we use our strengths, we are already practicing kindness to ourselves as our strengths are where we find the greatest sense of joy, interest, and meaning. We can use our strengths as tools to help us find and refine our values. Developing values thinking can be thought of as building whypower. Research on the benefits of values thinking goes by the the name self-affirmation theory. When we are intentional about using our strengths for kindness we are also building the strength of practical hope twice over, first by intentionally (goals thinking and pathways thinking = waypower) using our strengths and secondly by creating kindness goals and pathways (teaching a hobby to a neighbor, block party, food drive, etc.). The recommended dose of volunteerism is 1-4 hours weekly. Tending to our social health is another way to practice kindness to ourselves. Kasley Killam recommends a 531 approach:

  • 5 – Interact with five different people every week.
  • 3 – Always be strengthening three close relationships.
  • 1 – Spend one hour daily in high quality social interaction.

Celebrating the first Saturday in December as the International Day of Strengths happens in a constellation of other days where there is strong connectedness with wellbeing science like the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) in 2015 (SDG 3 is Good Health and Wellbeing). December 5th, 2025 – December 5th, 2026 is the International Volunteer Year, so 2026 is a special because the The International Day of Strengths and International Volunteer Day fall on the same day – Saturday, December 5th, 2026:

The first Saturday in December cycles through several International Days:

“…all life is interrelated, and in a real sense we are all courting an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. For some strange reason, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality. John Donne caught it years ago and placed it in graphic terms: “No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” ~Martin Luther King, Jr. | from a speech he delivered at the Methodist Student Movement Conference on December 30th,1964 in Lincoln, Nebraska www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkmethodistyouthconference.htm