I think your post captures how powerful a gratitude intervention can be in our lives.

Congrats again on the coverage your received in the news!

Enjoy the cruise!

Best,

David

Say life is an original painting, wouldn’t it make sense to dabble in different paints vice limiting yourself to brown? Maybe a Matisse favors vivid color combinations (Heart strengths) while a Picasso favors the starker hues (Intellectual strengths). I value gratitude, but is it singly as powerful as a rainbow palette that you can blend and mix?

What would you call a zesty gratitude? Or a grateful zest? How about a hopeful, zesty gratitude? Does any language have terms for these compounds? Joie de vivre? Who are the paragons of Joie de Vivre? You might surround yourself with people with joie de vivre and soak up some. It’d be more fun than hanging with Debbie Downer or Bobby Bummer.

I mean no insult, but I am trying to figure out workable lifestyle improvements. I can’t imagine regularly using one signature strength in isolation. If you pay a Gratitude Visit to someone and you’re shy then you’ll need bravery and self-regulation, too.

If exercising signature strengths overcomes challenges and produces flow, could you forego learning your strengths and just look to what makes more or less flow for you?
That might sidestep some of the sticky situations above.

You might assume if you are deeply absorbed that you are flexing your best strengths. Flow appears easier to track than a bevy of strengths. Plus let’s say you are bored by chairing a meeting but love to teach, (like the vignette in Seligman’s Authentic Happiness). If in both you use the same signature strengths, maybe the satisfying power of signature strengths is sensitive to context, so perhaps flow is a better gauge of effective strength use in different settings.

While I have had trouble with exercising a single strength and I like the idea of flow a bit more, I really appreciated your well-written article. It made me think deeply about gratitude.