A Last Word From Angela
The partnership between Character Lab and Training Week commenced in April 2020 within the early days of the pandemic. A lot has occurred within the intervening 4 years.
Now, as Character Lab prepares to sundown its operations, this glorious partnership, too, should come to an finish. It’s with gratitude and pleasure that we glance again on almost 200 co-published articles—all written for academics in search of actionable recommendation, based mostly on science, for serving to children thrive.
Right here is the final of those articles, revealed at Character Lab as our last Tip of the Week:
Right here’s an adage you might have heard earlier than:
Watch your ideas, for they turn into your phrases.
Watch your phrases, for they turn into your actions.
Watch your actions, for they turn into your habits.
Watch your habits, for they turn into your character.
Watch your character, for it turns into your future.
Aristotle likewise conjectured that character is the sum of our acquired habits. Good character, he argued, was constantly appearing, considering, and feeling in methods which might be useful to others in addition to ourselves.
What does psychological science have so as to add to those age-old questions: What’s character? And why does it matter?
Like scientists who examine something, scientists who examine character discover loads to disagree about. One space of unanimous settlement, nevertheless, is that character is plural.
Any mum or dad who makes a listing of the qualities they hope their youngsters will develop as much as embody will need a lengthy piece of paper to do it.
In my analysis, I discover three households of character strengths.
Strengths of coronary heart encourage regarding different folks in optimistic methods. They’re interpersonal—both within the sense of an moral and loving posture towards buddies, household, and shut others or within the sense of civic advantage, together with our obligation to our neighbors, our nation, and the world past our borders.
Character Lab is grateful to the scientists who wrote our Playbooks on gratitude, kindness, honesty, function, social intelligence, and emotional intelligence.
Strengths of thoughts encourage lively and open-minded considering. At the present time, these mental virtues could appear briefly provide. All of the extra motive to deliberately help their growth.
Character Lab thanks the scientists who wrote Playbooks on curiosity, judgment, decisionmaking, creativity, and mental humility.
Strengths of will encourage the achievement of targets. These are intrapersonal insofar as they allow you to conquer self-doubt, indecision, inertia, and different obstacles to a desired future.
Character Lab is proud to share its scientist-authored Playbooks on development mindset, proactivity, self-control, and grit.
There was a time when your character was assumed to be an inherited disposition that, good or unhealthy, would by no means change. However trendy analysis suggests the alternative. As Eleanor Roosevelt has been credited with saying: “Character constructing begins in our infancy and continues till dying.”
At any age—and most critically throughout our early life—our interpersonal, mental, and intrapersonal habits might be cultivated. That is why our 15 Playbooks embrace over 200 particular Suggestions—actionable recommendation, based mostly on science—for the way to take action.
Though Character Lab as a nonprofit is sunsetting this June, the content material now we have curated will proceed to be out there at characterlab.org. And so will the weblog at this very URL. The solar has solely simply begun to rise on the imaginative and prescient of a psychologically clever grownup within the life of each baby—a chance that guarantees to make the world a greater place for everybody.
Don’t assume that character is fastened. And don’t get hung up on whether or not the correct time period is “character” or “social-emotional competencies” or “noncognitive abilities.” A rose by some other title would odor as candy.
Do mannequin, have a good time, and allow character strengths of coronary heart, thoughts, and can. When he was simply 18 years outdated, Martin Luther King Jr. had the knowledge to declare: “We should keep in mind that intelligence is just not sufficient. Intelligence plus character—that’s the aim of true schooling. The whole schooling offers one not solely energy of focus, however worthy aims upon which to pay attention.”
With limitless gratitude,
Angela
