Patience. It’s not one of the twenty-four strengths classified in Character Strengths and Virtues, by Christopher Peterson with Martin Seligman. The CSV (or anti DSM-IV), classifies specific strengths under six broad virtues that consistently emerge across history and culture: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence.
Discovering your Values-in-Action (VIA) strengths, through the survey on www.authentichappiness.com, sticks out in my mind as one of the key lessons in positive psychology. To increase your engagement (and therefore happiness), gain insight into your individual strengths, and find ways to use these strengths more in your daily life.
I remember a class taught by Chris Peterson in the Master of Applied Positive Psychology program, where we brainstormed the 25th strength, absent from the exhaustive search carried out by the CSV authors. Strengths such as tolerance and compassion were proposed and batted around; to be considered a strength, several criteria must be met, and I’m sure that patience was considered and somehow denied. However, recent events in my life have made me reconsider the virtue of patience, and come to a new appreciation of this under-appreciated but much needed strength.
In the CSV, perhaps patience is closest to the strength of “persistence (perseverance, industriousness): finishing what one starts, persisting in a course of action in spite of obstacles; ‘getting it out the door’; taking pleasure in completing tasks” (29). But that doesn’t quite capture it. Lately, patience has taken on a spiritual quality to me—an ability to trust that life works out as it should, to surrender to what is at the moment, while having faith in the future. It’s the ability to wait peacefully, when everything in you wants to rush forward, take action, do something.
The concept of surrender has always been tricky to me, difficult to do and to understand. To me, patience is in the service of surrendering. How do you “let go” and still have faith that things will work out how you want them to? Patience. Let me know if you have any thoughts on how to develop patience, or if you have other candidates for the under-appreciated 25th strength!
Topics: All, Strengths, _2 Positive Traits
5 comments
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Dana,
What sticks out for me in the VIA classification is how our language is so nuanced. Take the word happiness. Maybe the dictionary has a clear-cut meaning for it. It sure seems like a piece of saltwater taffy in the real world.
Take patience. Is it a waiting room strength or linked to the larger issue of tolerance? I guess it has a negotiated meaning for whomever is involved.
Dana,
I think you are talking about mindfulness.
Dana,
I remember this exercise. I think I selected Endurance … which is certainly a close cousin to Patience, if not a great overlap.
Persistence is part of it, but misses a warmth and other-focus that are part of Patience. I associate the word Patience with good parental behavior and good teaching. Not rushing things that take time to unfold. I think I learned the word patience as a descriptive term for the way my mother sometimes was — and sometimes was not.
Mindfulness certainly overlaps Patience — with the ability to observe without judging. But I don’t think they are the same. Patience is more nurturing.
Of course, God didn’t hand Moses a tablet with the 24 strengths written on it. I sometimes think that there is a male bias in the 24 strengths that are in the first cut, not just because Marty and Chris are both male — after all, Katherine Dahlsgaard was instrumental in the early work and Nansook Park has also been very involved. But the very basis of the 24 strengths on philosophical and religious texts across time and place means relying on the points of view of people who were actors and instigators rather than the ones of the people who were patiently picking up the pieces and putting them back together (reminds me of Zainab Salbi’s description of the role of women during war — http://www.womenforwomen.org/zainab.htm).
Do you still have your Patience essay? Perhaps you could extend this post with the ways Patience matched the criteria for a strength.
Kathryn
I think patience best fits in with temperance. If we consider temperance (restraint/moderation in action, thought, or feeling), patience seems to be a particular manifestation of it. The impatience man is incapable of restraining themselves; something overcomes them. Endurance also seems to be a great fit as Kathryn points out.
Ernesto, so you recommend that patience is closest to prudence? I’m pretty sure prudence is a temperance strength.
My best,
Senia