A Personality Test Helped Me Be a Better Parent — And Find Happiness
My 7-year-old son stood happening the beach, looking out on the lake. His cheeks bloomed with freckles and his striped bathing suit hung dejected limp over his skinny legs. Helium looked contemplatively at the kids splash in the shallows.
I liked sighted him that way. I hold dear the glimpses I get of my son's face in his quietest moments.
Still, I was slightly self-aware of both my thoroughgoing and my sentimentality. I had confiscated a personality test several days prior as part of a personal effort toward self-reformation and recovered that my chief character strength was an "appreciation of sweetheart and excellence." This interested me for two reasons. Firstly, I'm as egotistic as the next guy rope and love to hear myself described. Secondly, this diagnosis — such as it was — offered a potential drop path to happiness. And I ma like I'd been falling behind on that figurehead. I just needed to make time for lulu and excellence. Easier said than finished, course, but still doable, particularly on a sunny day.
The personality test was developed by the VIA Institute happening Theatrical role, which is consecrated to helping the great unwashe uncovering (and researchers explore) character reference strengths, which the institute defines American Samoa "sum capacities for thinking, feeling, and behaving in shipway that can buoy bring benefit to us and others." I establish the VIA Institute through Yale professor Laurie Santos' online course on well-being. She explained that the idea of understanding your character strengths is to supporte boost wellbeing away engaging in activities that support those strengths.
The VIA Institute's psychometric personality exam categorizes people by 24 character strengths, which admit oddity, honesty, teamwork, prudence, promise, and, rather curiously, zest. The Institute claims that every person has all 24 strengths to various degrees. Their test is designed to tease out which ones feature most prominently in our personality.
After the test, I discovered my top five traits were Appreciation of Beauty & Excellence, Love of Learning, Fairness, Creativeness, and Humor. Fair adequate. I like books and jokes and progressive legislating.
Prof Santos suggests that everyone do one thing every day connate their strengths in order to chase their happiness. Thusly I took time to enjoy, and ascertain about, the birds foreign my authority window and wrote a poem and erudite a jape and made a slender donation to a charity promoting fair wages. At the end of the week, I felt happier. But I also felt like-minded these things were at something of a remove from my Clarence Day-to-day. I'm not publishing a poetry chapbook surgery a guide to the birds of Ohio any clock soon. How, I wondered, could I incorporate this powerful thought exercise into my life history as a parent? After all, I spent the bulk of my spare time with my kids or worrying about my kids. Could I meliorate my relationship with them by focal point on my experience of that relationship?
Elihu Yale Professor Laurie Santos' online flow from on well-existence can be found connected Coursera. The Via Institute for Character hosts their free personality test at viacharcter.org.
I started out with humor. It seemed the easiest. After wholly, my kids love a good put-o and I decided to start accommodative them. I started lowbrow at dinner one night.
"What time does the alligator attend the tooth doctor?" I asked. Later receiving a disinterested grunt from my kids, I hit them with the punchline: "Tooth-hurty!"
My 7-year-old chortled. My kindergartner looked at me without expression. "I don't twig," He said, which meant that we had to excuse time to him, something he's clean beginning to grok.
But then it occurred to me that this was the wrong approach. I was using humor on my kids rather than appreciating their humor. So I changed my maneuver. I asked them to tell me jokes.
"Why did the elephant attend the doctor?" my kindergartner asked. "Because he had elephant poops and farts." He laughed uncontrollably. I laughed too. Not because the trick was funny — though it's not not funny — but because he's funny, a fact I overly often undergo for granted. When I started to tune into his silliness and pay attention. I started to grin at him Sir Thomas More.
So what close to the do it of learning? I tried to think about how to convey this into my relationship with my kids. Then I realized IT was rather scorched into the experimentation. And yes, that may sound like a cop-out, but it's in truth not. Experimenting is crucial to learning. The process was helping me see my kids and myself differently and that made me happy.
We were two for two.
Creativity came just equally easy. My kids are always drawing and building. They ofttimes asked me to fall in and I, more a great deal than not, go down. And so, I stopped refusing and started collaborating. Single afternoon I was working with my kindergarten boy on a collaborative drawing off. What emerged was a scary tree monster. IT had grasping hands and swirling roots. My kid gave him crazy twirly eyes and a opened, sharp-toothed mouth. It was strange and wonderful and a intersection of both our minds. And more than that we talked during the process: near what we liked and didn't, about trees and roots and monsters.
This successful Pine Tree State terribly happy. Almost embarrassingly bright.
Candour came harder. I figured I would take on to this strength by teaching my kids to be bonny with one some other. All time they fought or scuffled ilk brothers I harped at them about loveliness. IT annoyed them. It annoyed me. I wasn't getting anyplace.
I tried to blame this on my children's behavior. How tooshie I be a cheery dude when they fight and cry and slam doors and whine? But I also know that the way my kids behave is veritable of their ages and their portion. It was unfair to expect better. I had to good tranquil down. I had to enforce that calm as an act of fairness and see if it would take. IT did.
And then we return to the beach. A idealised moment Sunlight. Water. My boy. And happiness.
Did it last? Nope. Later that evening I slammed down a smasher in choler as I considered the pile of dishes I had to wash. But in that respect's a misconception that felicity has to be staunch. IT doesn't. Constant happiness is a form of insanity. Life is shapely happening a spectrum of emotions, for each one matchless coloring our moments with its particular hue. But if I looked back on the experiment, I could reckon that happiness colored the years more sadness, anger or frustration. That was a switch.
Coiffure I think there is any particular magic to the VIA Institutes character strengths? No. But they did make me more mindful about what I find enlightening in life. And living in a sense that I actively tried to encourage those moments of edification had the effect of making life practically more pleasant.
So, I'll keep my heel of eccentric strengths handy. And maybe, when my boys are old enough, we'll solve theirs.
https://www.fatherly.com/love-money/personality-test-parenting-happiness/
Source: https://www.fatherly.com/love-money/personality-test-parenting-happiness/
0 Response to "A Personality Test Helped Me Be a Better Parent — And Find Happiness"
Publicar un comentario