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The International Day of Strengths—1st Sundays in December

The International Day of Strengths is about turning our psychological strengths toward kindness — to ourselves and to one another — and toward strengths-based community building. It can range from a single act of kindness to sustained, patient work in a neighborhood. And its first move is inward: when we use our strengths, we are already practicing kindness to ourselves, because our strengths are where we find our deepest sense of joy, interest, and meaning. Practical hope and other character strengths may well be the very substance of mental wellbeing itself.

Strengths and moral beauty

There is a particular kind of wonder that rises not from mountains or galaxies but from people — the feeling that comes over us when we witness someone act from the best of who they are. Psychologists call it awe at moral beauty, and it does something remarkable: it quiets the small, defended self and turns us outward, toward connection, generosity, and the desire to belong to something larger than ourselves. To notice a person’s strengths and name them aloud is to open a small door onto that experience. It is one of the most ordinary and most reliable kindnesses there is, and it tends to leave both people a little more generous than they were a moment before.

A Nebraska inheritance

The study of strengths grew up in Nebraska. In the years after 1945, at the University of Nebraska, a school psychologist named William E. Hall began asking a question that would quietly reorganize a field: what if we studied what is good and strong in people, rather than only what is wrong? With his colleagues — the most notable of them Don Clifton, later recognized by the American Psychological Association as the father of strengths-based psychology — Hall built a way of identifying what a person does with excellence and genuine joy, and named it a strength. A strength, in his definition, is something a person does to a level of excellence and thoroughly enjoys, becoming energized and highly satisfied as a result: marked not only by fine performance but by the passion with which it is performed. Formally incorporated in 1956 as the Nebraska Human Resources Research Foundation, the work set out, in Hall’s own words, “to discover, study and expand the good that already exists in the communities of men and women.”

Hall’s positive approach rested on three principles that read, today, like a blueprint for kindness. The first is to study the best in people, on the conviction that to develop the best in a person you must first learn to see it. The second is to give recognition — to catch good in the act and name it when it occurs. The third is to invest in people, on the insight that the surest way to develop a person is to have someone who cares invest in them, so that they, in turn, become able to invest in someone else. That last principle names a quiet engine: help received becomes help given, and a strength seen in one person becomes a strength that person can see in another.

Beneath the strengths work ran a second conviction, drawn from the humanistic psychology Hall encountered directly in Carl Rogers’s teaching: that people grow best in the presence of unconditional positive regard — accepted and valued as they are, precisely so they can become who they might be. Strengths and unconditional positive regard turn out to be two names for one practice. To notice what someone is genuinely good at, and to say it aloud, is to regard them positively in the most concrete way there is. The idea traveled outward from that Nebraska root — into mentoring programs that pair one caring adult with one young person, into the plain finding that hope is the greatest predictor of a young person’s success and that hope is created through people, and, a few miles east, into one of the most influential strengths research organizations in the world.

Practical hope: the engine of it all

Underneath the whole practice sits practical hope. As C. R. (Rick) Snyder described it, hope is “a perceived capability to derive pathways to desired goals, and motivate oneself via agency thinking to use those pathways.” Practical hope can itself become a form of play when it is held with non-attachment, and unconditional positive regard is the other side of that same coin: extending non-attachment and acceptance to ourselves is a form of compassionate kindness to self.

We can use our strengths as tools to find and refine our values, and developing that kind of values thinking is one way to build whypower — the clarity about why a goal matters that gives it staying power. The research on its benefits goes by the name self-affirmation theory. When we turn our strengths deliberately toward kindness, we build practical hope twice over: first in the strengths we exercise, where goals thinking and pathways thinking together make waypower, and again in the kindness goals we set and the pathways we chart to reach them, whether that is teaching a hobby to a neighbor, organizing a block party, or running a food drive. The recommended dose of volunteering is one to four hours a week.

Tending our social health

Caring for our relationships is another way of practicing kindness to ourselves, and it can be made as concrete as any other health practice. Kasley Killam recommends a simple 5-3-1 approach to social fitness:

  • 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.

A day within a season of dignity

Held on the first Sunday in December, the International Day of Strengths sits within a constellation of observances closely tied to wellbeing science — the same tradition that gave us the Sustainable Development Goals, adopted in 2015, whose third goal is Good Health and Well-being. It arrives as a reflective pause between late-November gratitude and the season of giving, and the first Sunday in December falls within a cluster of international days that carry the same current of dignity and generosity:

Across the wider year, the same affirmative spirit recurs in the days that celebrate what people make and share and become:

The interrelated structure of reality

That same Nebraska ground holds one more voice. On a December evening in 1964, Martin Luther King, Jr. stood in Lincoln and named the truth that gives all of this its weight — that we come into our own not alone but through one another. Strengths psychology and his vision of mutuality meet on exactly this point: when you use your own strengths, you become able to help someone else see theirs.

— Martin Luther King, Jr., from a speech delivered at the Methodist Student Movement Conference on December 30th, 1964, in Lincoln, Nebraska (americanrhetoric.com)

“…all life is interrelated, and in a real sense we are all caught in 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.’”