- Curiosity: Taking an interest in ongoing experience for its own sake; finding subjects and topics fascinating; exploring and discovering
2. Humor: Liking to laugh and tease; bringing smiles to other people; seeing the light side; making (not necessarily telling) jokes.
3. Creativity: Thinking of novel and productive ways to conceptualize and do things; includes artistic achievement but is not limited to it.
4. Love of learning: Mastering new skills, topics, and bodies of knowledge, whether on one’s own or formally; related to the strength of curiosity but goes beyond it to describe the tendency to add systematically to what one knows.
5. Judgment: Thinking things through and examining them from all sides; not jumping to conclusions; being able to change one’s mind in light of evidence; weighing all evidence fairly.
For the most part, I think my order is accurate. My favorites would have to be curiosity and love of learning. I’ve considered these my top strengths for a while, and I think they show themselves strongest in my intense interest in the natural world, be that birding, botany, geology, or anything else. I also love sharing this knowledge with other people, telling stories, and making people laugh. I think the combination of my humor, curiosity, and love of learning is what’s drawn me to guiding as a profession. When guiding, quick thinking (creativity), humor, and personal skills are equally if not more important than just the subject knowledge.
My lowest strengths were spirituality, humility, prudence, and self-regulation. I’d also agree with this. I have a lot of energy and ideas and impulsivity, but I sometimes fail to channel it well. I also don’t believe in any sort of higher power or plan. I wish I did, but I can’t and this means whenever I’m alone, I feel truly alone. This combined with my tendency to take risks can increase my problems with self-regulation and prudence.
Where I disagree with my VIA Strengths is on leadership. It ranked it as 19 for me. However, whenever I’m in any sort of group I often assume the position of leader naturally. It should be higher. My indignation at leadership being ranked low is probably an indication that my low ranking for humility is accurate.
The picture attached is a candid of me while I was photographing a volcano in Ecuador. The picture itself shows my curiosity and love of learning, but my time in Ecuador brought out a lot of different traits in me, and I consider it a transformational experience. I lived in Ecuador to try my hand at bird guiding. I went alone at the age of 16, and with the plan of learning the language and birds when I arrived. This utilized my curiosity (#1), love of learning (#4), and bravery (#6). Judgment (#5) and creativity (#3) were also important as I navigated a foreign country alone, and found creative ways to solve problems with clients and show them what they came to see. I could write in a lot more detail with a lot more introspection about my time down there, but it would go beyond the scope of this blog post.
As a final note, I don’t like that I’m posting this analysis of my strengths and weaknesses on a public forum for anyone to see. I feel like the goal of the assignment is to do some serious introspection, and having to put it out in the open stifles that. I’ve been split between writing honest assessments that I don’t necessarily want people to read, and writing some generic stuff and posting it for the 5 points as some others have suggested. Eventually I decided to be (mostly) honest on here with the idea that not many people are actually going to read my ePortfolio.
