Lea Waters || Strengths-Based Parenting

excited to have Professor Lee Waters on the podcast. Lee's an Australian academic researcher, psychologist, author and speaker who specializes in positive education, parenting and organizations. Waters holds the Jerry Higgins Chair in Positive Psychology at the Center for Positive Psychology at Melbourne Graduate School of Education at University of Melbourne. Her latest book, The Strength Switch, offers parents and educators

free resources to better build the strengths of young people. Lee, it's just so awesome to have you on the podcast today. It's wonderful to be here. Thanks for having me, Scott. We've been planning this for a long time we have. Isn't it good to see when a dream comes true? Oh? Yes, yes, Well the real dream here is that you publish this book. You did it. Now, how does that feel to actually have that come to fruition after so long in the

planning stages and writing stages. Well, it's such a nice question for you to start with, and I mean, you've I don't know how you've done this. You've published multiple books, so you would have your own answer. But for me, I mean, it's a deeply meaningful feeling because the book, for me is my gift to as many parents and

as many families as the book can reach. I think I've been really, really fortunate in that I've been a psychologist and a researcher for over two time decades but also a mum, have a fourteen and a half year old son and a ten year old daughter. And I think I've been very lucky in that the field that I research in and that I practice in the field of positive so much to offer me as a mother in raising my son and my daughter to be resilient

and optimistic little human beings. And so for me, the book is really about bringing together what I was learning and what I was seeing in schools and what I was seeing through the research and other families, and really being able to provide that to as many families as I can, but it's deeply meaningful experience. Writing books is hard, you know, and I did it on top of a full time job and being a mother to two children.

It took me three years to write the book. I think I had various confectionery companies alive and kicking with profit because I would write the book late at night and on weekends and prop myself up with coffee and sugar and to get the book out. You know, that was like a full time job on top of full time job and mothering, which is also a full time job. I see that it's now. Seeing it on the shelves

in Australia was a big kick. And the biggest kick, of course, is getting feedback from parents who are letting me know that they're reading the book, that you know, finding it easy to read, and that they're using changing their conversations with their kids. They're changing the way they see their children. They're setting in front of the activities and the techniques. And I had a lovely father the

other day. He was using some of my techniques when he picked seven year olds up from school and they had a lovely trip on the way home and he was taking his child. He's taking his son to swimming lessons that that evening, and in the protic his son said, you know what, Dad, I take back everything mean I've ever said about you. I know, just from one evening of him putting in play some of the peperful to fear of the books, that part of it is super

meaningful to me. Well, that's just so wonderful to hear. And you are in a lot of ways correcting this negativity bias that exists in parenting. Where did that negativity bias? Where did that come from? What are the roots of it? Why has it been so pervsive? Well, I mean, I think there's kind of two reasons. So that one is to do with the biology of our brain, and one is to do with our society in the way that we've been socialized to understand processes like development and improvement.

So starting with the biology of the brain, you know, neuroscientists have now shown us that we have this in built negativity bias whereby our brains notice and are alerted to and pay more attention to the negative things in our environment more quickly than the positive things in our environment.

And this is an important feature of our brain, of course, because it gives us a survival advantage, certainly from a beefist perfect but also just in our own day to day basis, it's our negativity bias that alerts us to a potential threat, potential harm, stops us from stepping out onto the street because we've got this little bit of a gut instinct that maybe a car's about to come around the corner. And so it's a really important feature

for our survival. It's not the best feature of our brain when it comes to having a positive relationship with our children, because our brain is wired to look first for problems in our children before it looks at the potential in our children. And a lot of what I do in the book is, you know, a range of different techniques and exercises for parents and for kids themselves

to sort of counteract that negativity bias. I mean, in the end, our brains are pattern detecting organs, and so it is about just repatterning our brain to look first for the positives before the negatives. But I think in addition to the biology of our brain, there's an overlay of society in terms of why it is that we tend to parent more or by correcting the weaknesses in our children than we do by amplifying the strengths in

our children. And if you think about you know, our parents' generation, the generation before them, there was this kind of default assumption that the processes of development and improvement, and you know they're the two key processes that we use to raise our children, that just by default, improvement is about correcting weakness. It's about fixing what's wrong with us. I mean, you tell me, Scott, if I use the expression areas

for improvement, what comes to your mind? What naturally comes to your mind when you hear the expression areas for improvement, that there's like room for growth, that there's hope for me. Well, that's nicely ring hope into it. I'm trying to. I'm putting a positive spin on that phrase. You really are, and most people don't, so certainly the idea that there's

room for growth. But I think, you know, we've been raised by a generation and they were raised by a generation where improvement is a process of fixing what is wrong with us. So no, but the point is true in that it is it's about room for growth, and most people see improvement as growing what's wrong with us.

And I think one of the biggest messages that the field, the science of positive psychology has given us be the last almost two decoys about is really expand and extend our understanding of what we mean by improvement and growth.

And so we previously would think we wouldn't think about improvement in terms of strengths because we think, well, it's already strong, there's no need to grow that, there's no need to improve that, and so we put all of our emphasis on improving what was wrong with us and fixing up our weaknesses. And that's the way we've been parented, and that's I think that's the factor that comes into why it is that as parents we tend to go first for fixing what's wrong with our children before we

look for amplifying what's right with our children. A lot of sense this idea. Also, it's easier to see overt signs of things that are wrong. It's usually typically easier to see yeah then to see ladent potential. But it doesn't mean that lead potential is not equally as important. It's more important to bring out. So the question is, like, what are the ways of identifying our capturing some of

these strengths. I mean, you do talk about that. I thought you could elucidate that for the audience a little bit. Mm hmmm. You mean the techniques that we use to start to actually see your strength in our children. You measure it, you know, you've identified it, you've helped develop tools. Right, yeah, what are things like parents can do to start to see that. You can't bring out things that you haven't

identified first, right, that's right. Okay, So I think I just want to pick up on your point about it's easier to say the problem behavior in our kids than it is to say the strengths and the good qualities and our kids. And I'm not even sure if that's true. It certainly is a truism in the sense that that's the case for most of us. But that's because we weren't bought how to see strength. So our biology makes us see the problem behavior and the weaknesses very quickly.

But once we're taught how to see strengths, it becomes a very easy process. And what we're looking for as parents is, you know, there are three kind of core elements to a strength, and that is that a strength is something that we have we perform well, we are energized when we're doing it, and we're self motivated to

do it. So I guess one important point to make about that immediately is that we've all grown up with a bit of a false impression of what strengths are, and we've all been taught that a strength is something that you're good at. And it's not that that's untrue,

but it's only part of the story. So as parents, if we're only looking for the things that our children are good at, we're missing a whole kind of range of strengths that our children have because we're not looking at the energy piece and we're not looking at the self motivation piece. So for something to be classified as a true strength, it's something that you perform well in, have energy and a self motivated to do. You might have a child, for example, who's performing well in piano,

but you know, is clearly not energized. You have to keep nagging them to practice they're not self motivated. Then in positive psychology we would say that's not a true strength. We would say it's a skill that they have, but

it's not a strength. And so the first thing as a parent is just to start observing your child's behavior and their actions, and start looking for these signs of high performance, meaning that the child is performing above average for their age level, or performing better than their peers, or has a quick learning and growth curve in a particular skill. And then you're also looking for you know,

what are the things that energize your child. You can see that as a parent, when your child has a lot of energy for a particular task, you can see you can see it in their body language. You can see it in their facial expression, you can hear it in their voice, they feed up in the way they talk. They're super palmed, super excited about a particular thing. And then look for what's self motivating. Look at what they're just choosing to do without you having to direct them.

So to use an example from my own home, my ten year old daughter Emily is very creative, very artistic, and she will sit and watch TV and almost always have pencils in her hand. She'll be watching TV, but she'll be doodling and drawing and creating a little masterpiece as she's sitting there. Even in her downtime, she can't help but want to kind of live out that creative purth that she has. And so that's the first thing

is to look for a technique called strength body. And as a parent, you're starting to observe your behavior and just wondering what is the strength that sits underneath that behavior. And what you're looking for is the three clues of high performance, high energy, and self motivation high energy. I like that. I want some of that in myself. Does this apply to adults too? Of course it does. Yeah, all of us. I feel like, no matter who we are, could use a parent in our lives, do you know

what I mean? Like even it doesn't have to be a biological parent, but like it'd be nice for her to be slen in each of our lives that has read your book and cares about bringing out We could be a relationship partner. I'm saying, it could be a good friend, you know, something like that, because we can't see it in ourselves. It's very true and I love that idea. In the book, I talk about strength helpers, So I who are the people in your life who

help you to see the strength? Because as you say, you know, and I want to pick up on that point, Scott, is that a lot of us have strength blindness. And this is a phenomenon that psychologists have identified where we are blind to our own strengths. And that's because what we know about strengths is they're partly nature and they're

partly nurture. So something that you have a natural aptitude for that sits under the performance basis of you, and because you're sort of born with it and you've naturally been good at it most of your life, you start to take it for granted. It becomes invisible to you, so you don't see it as a strength in yourself. One of my friends come over on the weekend and well, I'll start this story by saying, I'm not very domestic, I'm messy, I'm not a very good cook. It's not

my strength being domestic. She's an amazing cook. She came over to my house and she opened up my fridge, which was truthfully a little bit there, and she pulled out a whole range of things from my fridge that I would never have thought to put together in a million years, and she whipped up this amazing meal. And I'm sitting there saying, that's amazing. How do you do that?

But she doesn't see that in herself. That that's something that she's good at, that's something that she has a strength for, that she's energized by, because it's just who she is, So she has blindness towards that, whereas for me, I see it really clearly and so well, you know, it's interesting because you're mentioning strengths that wouldn't like be captured by like a Positive Psychology Character Strengths survey that

only has a limited amount of strengths. So are we allowed to be open to strengths that aren't listed on the Positive Psychology Character Survey? Like you know, like yeah, I mean people start to treat that stuff as though it's the Bible. You know, they're like, oh, have you taken the VIA? Have you taken the VIA? My top thick character strengths are creativity, creativity, and creativity. I'm so amazed at just how great I am in creativity, creative. And then it's like we kind of can ignore all

the things that fall outside of that boundary that we're measuring. Yeah, what's my point here? I think I'm trying to make the point that we don't always need a self report survey to reflect and hold a mirror back on us.

Sometimes we're allowed to because we do we act as though like the results of the survey like found some sort of deep and meaningful thing about us, when it's really us that are answering the questions to begin with, Like we don't forget that, you know, they're like we're allowed to discover strengths in ourselves all throughout the day, right, even without a formal test. Absolutely, it's going to be I mean, the benefit of the survey is it's a bit of a mirror. As you say, we're completing the

survey ourselves, so it's a mirror. It's a way of accessing our strengths. And there are a number of ways that we can do that ourselves, independent of a survey, and then there are also a range of ways that other people do that for us. So they become help where they become the mirror they see in us, when we're energized, when we're self motivated, when we're performing well in areas where we may have our own strength blindness. Yeah, that's good. I hope that everyone has something like that

in their life. Yeah. I mean, the course of about that is the strength spotting. The surveys are one way of identifying your strength, but just being tuned into yourself, being mindful of when are my energy levels high? When am I having a fast learning curve? When am I having like deep sense of flow and enjoyment in what I'm doing? What am I self motivated to do? Like where am I yearnings? If I'm not getting to do this particular thing, am I feeling frustrated that I'm being

thwarted in doing that? That's much more about your own internal introspection and being mindful of the clues the signals for strength and of course the strength s body you can apply to yourself where you can apply to others. And that's a big piece in the book for parents is how to engage in strength spotting so they start to see the strengths, the talents, the skills, the positive qualities in their own children. And you know, really at

its core strength based parenting. And this is why I call the book the Strength Switch, just about switching or shifting your emphasis from the direction that our negativity desires takes us to spending more of our time fixing the weaknesses in our children and shifting or switching that and flipping it so that you spend more of the time identifying and amplifying the strength in your kids. But you know, to come back to your point about the surveys, I

think surveys they're useful. They're a useful tool, but I agree with you that sometimes the usefulness of that tool gets over exaggerated and people kind of just stick to the survey. And the downside of that, of course, is that you're labeling people or you're not understanding that strengths of dynamic that they grow and change over time, and missing unique strengths in an individual that aren't necessarily in the profile. For the VA, for example, there's twenty four strengths.

Realize too and Gallop they have great profiles as well. Angela Duckworth she's got her character strength that she's brought in as well. So there's a range of different strengths. But the survey is just one tool, it sure as I'm really glad you made that point. So tell me more about your framework that considers problematic behaviors as resulting from both the overuse and under use of strengths. I think this really makes your model quite unique in that

you really address both of those aspects. The overuse in our use aspects. Can you talk more about that. Yeah, well, firstly, thank you for the compliment about the framework. I think it's really it's such a useful framework for parents because, I mean, when we take a strength approach, it's something that we need to learn to do. But it's sort of easier to do it when your kids are behaving well and everyone's happy, and everything's going beautifully and life

is rainbows and sunshine. You know, we all know that's not the reality of parenting. Those states are beautiful when we have them. But the question is, how do you take a strength based approach when you're facing life's difficulties, when your children are having combon behaviors or they have obvious bicknesses, And particularly in those moments and where I've really influenced around that is all the work of the

beautiful humanistic psychologists, you know, Maslow and ericson warning. Oh they're my peeps too, I love them, you know, and they really come from this very deep well you know, their philosophy is that every every one of us is motivated to evolve and develop. And so moving on from the sort of humanistic psychologist. As a parent, when we see problem behavior, when we see weaknesses, when we see our kids being naughty or misbehaving. Instead of immediately thinking,

you know, why is my kid always doing this? They're deliberately trying to annoy me. There's some fault or flaw in them is to think, okay, well, my child is programmed to be on this positive developmental trajectory. So the behavior is wrong, then maybe it's something to do with strength being blocked or thwarted, or maybe it's something to do with them not knowing how to apply their strength

appropriately in this situation. So in the book, I talk about asking as a parent, asking yourself, is there a strength that's missing? Is there a strength that being overused? Is there a strength that's being underplayed in this situation. I'll give you an example. My husband is very humorous. He hasn't taken the Veda Scott You'll be pleased to know he's never taken a survey. But we all know that that is a really core strength in my husband.

In fact, it's one of the reasons I fell in love with him, and it's one of the reasons why west together day because he's funny and he makes me laugh. But when he was in school, he had a lot of trouble with the teachers because he was overplaying his humor. He didn't know when it was appropriate to sort of tone things down a bit and maybe not be cheeky, not being mischievous, and so he got into a lot of trouble at school. The teachers were interpreting his behavior

as him being sort of deliberately disruptive. That sounds like me. So I do think that that is like you, Scott. I see some the same qualities between you and my husband. But the thing is that instead of interpreting that behavior as being deliberately disruptive or you know, trying to cause arguments by using humor or questioning, is just to see that you, Scott, my husband Matt. I mean, this is

an incredible quality to have. Humor brings forward so many positive qualities in people, Its perspective taking, it's bonding, its

relationship building. But in this instance it's being overused. And so as a parent, rather than thinking my child is naughty, is to think, Okay, this is a great quality, but I need to teach my child when to use humor when it's appropriate, when they need to dial it down a little bit, and you know, maybe not bring that strength forward, but bring a different strength forward, bring curiosity forward, for example, rather than humor. So it's an interesting way

of looking at misbehavior. Instead of saying there's something wrong with my child that's deliberately being naughty, is to say, Okay, we definitely need just overplaying a strength and we need to help them to dial it down a little bit. That makes so much sense. And then what about wait, help me with the under use of strengths that I guess that that is just more of what people tend to think of when they is that we're not giving people enough opportunities to be able to use it. So

it seems like opportunities is central to the under use aspect. Yeah, you're spot on. So I mean there's two elements to the underuth. One is that if you're seeing misbehavior in a child, maybe it's because they're not having an opportunity to bring forward strength. Remember that strength of the things that we're born with. They're sort of programmed into us and they're self motivated. We yearn to use them. They give us energy, they make us feel good about ourselves.

So if you're in a situation where you're unable to use the strength, where you don't have the opportunity where it's being forwarded, it's going to cause natural frustration. In the book, I have a lovely story about a friend of mine who is as an adult is a professional writer, but as a child, she really wanted to learn to read before she went off to school. And she had an older sister who was reading, and her parents who

were reading. They would sit down every night to read their books, and she would have a tantrum because she wasn't able to read yet, because no one had taught her, because she was raised in an era where you don't learn to read until you actually attend grade school. And when we look back at that behavior now, she understands that it was because she had this strength was being

blocked and that was leading to poor behavior. But a second way of looking at the under use of strengths is really more as a way of restoring good behavior. So rather than saying to your child, you know you're wrong, this is bad, you're disorganized, you're rude, you're impatient, it is just to think to yourself, Okay, what is the

strength that could fix this situation currently being underused? And to give you a concrete example, if you have your children arguing and fighting with each other instead of kind of yelling at them and saying, stop fighting, I'm sick of this. You're always fighting. Is to think, okay, well, maybe there's some strengths here that are being underused, that are not being used. So that is, hey, guys, you know,

where's the kindness. Let's bring forward some cooperation. I think a big source of this argument is that you're not being fair, So let's just bring forward some fairness in this situation. So the child is learning I'm not bad, It's just that I have these strengths that I should be using that I'm not using at the moment that underused.

But if I bring these forward, he's the solution. And the beauty of that is that over time, your child starts to internalize that they have the solution inside themselves. If they under use or overuse particular strength and they bring that forward in a more moderate way, it's actually

going to create change. So then you stop. You don't have to be the parent, the external parent who's kind of nagging all the time, because they start to learn that I can just bring forward these strengths, or I can dial them up, or I can dial them down, and that's the solution to moving forward. Well, your perspective is really a humanistic and I have a quote here that Lee Water's approach makes sense to parents looking to escape the corrective mindset that can make both them and

their children feel defective and broken. But with all this said, I am wondering, and this is a very cheeky and appropriate question. What if are you overplaying your humor? What if your child, well it's a bit dark humor. What if you have a little like a a horrible child, like a psychopath? You know, like, is it going to be helpful to be like, oh, let me just turn on your strength switch. Go, no, go, Yeah good. I'm really really glad that you asked this question, and it's

an important question to ask. I'm going to if you don't mind, I'm just going to slightly reframe it, but keep the truth, keep the NuGet of your question, psychologist. I am, I know I can't help it. I'm going to keep the question of like, well, what if there's a genuine problem, what if there really is a weakness that needs to be addressed. I'm going right, yeah, thanks good. I'm going to take it away from the idea that you might have a psychopathic child, and I mean some

people have you know, children that have serious behavioral issues. Yeah. Yeah, So the key thing about taking a strength based approach is that it's not an either or. So if you I mean, I hope that a lot of parents listen to your podcast and this is thought provoking for them,

they walk away thinking, you know it is true. I do tend to inadvertently spend more time fixing my kids' weaknesses and building up their strengths, partly because of my negativity, but bias is partly because of the way I was raised, with the assumption that improvement is about fixing weakness. I would like to spend more time on strength and strength plotting. It doesn't mean when you become a strength based parent, it doesn't mean that all of a sudden you are

ignoring problem behavior, You're ignoring weaknesses in your children. It's not an either or approach. It's an end both. But as I said at the start, the name the strength switch is about switching or shifting your attention, so more of it goes towards building up strength than fixing weakness. But let's get onto the fixing weakness. Yes, absolutely, there are none of us is perfect. All of us have weaknesses, flaws, faults, problem behaviors that do need to be fixed. The question

from a strength based perspective, there's two questions. The first is what proportion of my time am I spending on fixing? Is particularly in relation to is this a weakness that genuinely needs to be fixed? Is it going to block the development of my child in some way? And if it is, then absolutely, And we're very well equipped as a society and as parents to address weakness. We've been

doing it our whole life. So I don't need to say much more about how it is that we do that, because we've all got our techniques, and we've got extra tutoring, and we've got behavior management, discipline areas. We've got lots of things to already do in that regard. The second thing, and this I think is really new and it's very kind of opening for a parent, is the ask yourself, does my child have a strength that I can use

in this situation to address the weakness? Right? This is really new, and I know that lots of work I've done with lots and lots of parents. This is one of the biggest turning points for a parent and I'm going to start by giving you a bit of a kind of metaphor for that, and then i'll give you a Creed example. So, I have a very good friend of mine who's a remedial massage therapist and she works

with elite athlete helping them with injury management. And when I was talking to her many many years ago now about taking the strength based approach and most particularly about addressing a weakness by using a strength she relayed to me she said, you know, Lee, when I do the remedial massage work with these elite athletes, I never ever start with the weak tissue. I never go straight for

the injury. I always start the treatment by working on the strong and healthy tissue that is surrounding the injured or weak tissue, Because she said, if I go straight for the weakness, if I go straight for the injured tissue, the muscle seizes up and I'm unable to actually do the therapeutic deep tissue work that I need to do. So she said, I always start with the healthy tissue, and I work with the healthy tissue and then I

slowly massage into the week or injured tissue. And I found that just to be a really useful kind of parallel for what we do as parents. If we always start with the weakness in our children, and we're always going for their weak spot, and you know, the injury, so to speak, the fault in them, their muscle is going to seize up. They're naturally going to become defensive. They're going to block us, and that's a natural response.

We do it too as adults. You know, you said before, Scott that we all have our weaknesses as well, and if we feel like someone's just always pointing those out to us, we become defensive, we tune out. So as parents, when we see a problem behavior, one of the questions we can ask ourselves is does my child have a strength that they can use to help overcome this. So let's say let's use an academic example, and you have a child who's struggling with math. But you know that

they've got some character strengths. You know they've got grit, you know they've got persistence, you know that they're prepared to do extra work. So you draw on those other strength and bring them into part of the film of getting them better at matt through additional help. Well, let's say one of the examples that I use in the book again is with my daughter. Emily is ken and she's beautiful, she's got amazing strengths, but she's also got

weaknesses like all of us. And one of her kind of character weaknesses, which by the way, she knows and she was happy for me to put the story in the book, is that she's very impatient. She gets impatient with people quite quickly, and because she's quite fright, she gets impatient in the classroom, if she doesn't feel like the teacher is going fast enough for her, she gets impatient, she tunes out. Now she's ten, we've been spending a lot of time Matt and I as parents trying to

kind of like phone down and soften the impatience. We've invested a lot of time in that we haven't had that much success in reducing her impatience because it truly is just a core part of her. So what we've done instead is say, what is our best strength that we can use to help her with this weakness of impatience, And what we've done and in the classroom, for example, when she's getting impatient with the learning environment, is one of her strengths is that she's highly curious. She's just

a naturally curious kid. She's always been that child who's asked a thousand questions about a thousand different things. And so what we're teaching her to do in that moment when she gets impatient with the teacher, with the learning environment, is to start asking questions, even if she's just asking them aside her own head. Because when we draw on her curiosity, then all of a sudden, that softens the impatience,

and so she's able to move forward. And likewise, in social situations, if she's getting a bit impatient, then we ask her to draw on her kindness. She is a very beautifully kind little girl, and so she starts to get impatient with her friends, and then we remind her to be kind, and the minute she be is kind, her impatience just disappears. That's a great, great, great answer you just give. Thank you. Yeah, I love that. And I was one of those problem child children in way

of acting out, was being class clown. But no one saw the strength there, you know. Yeah, Well that's why we are the learning disability. Sorry Scott, sorry to interrupt you in that. I mean, that's it's so important that his strength based work goes out to teachers, and it goes out to parents, and so that they do start to look for first, look for the strength before you look for the weakness and so and once you start

to do that, so many things get reframed. I mean, your behavior in class would have been reframed and the teacher would have seen this is a great strength. How do I teach Scott to channel it in a way so that it works for him not against him? And also what's sitting underneath that? You know, why is he acting out in the way that he is? And start to address some of those issues. Yeah, be great, be

a great approach for everyone. So I want to just list some of these strengths that you cover in your book, and you know, people should buy your book and find out more about each of these strengths. But you cover things like a tension, gratitude, mindfulness which is associated with attention, self esteem, optimism, and resilience. I want to follow up a little bit on the self esteem one, because all this research is showing it's really self compassion that is

more valuable than self esteem. And would do you agree with that statement? I would. I don't think they've actually featured self esteem too strongly. In the book, I told I've got a chapter on self control. And I think the two goal posts for me in terms of strength based parenting is building resilience and optimism. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, do you use that expression in the States, the goalposts or is that in Australia. No, that's totally Australia.

That's what I wondered. I just go with it. I'll just go with it. Yeah, Okay, well I think that. I mean, I think the two what we're trying to cultivate in our children is the outcome of optimism so they have a they're motivated towards creating a positive future for themselves, and the ability for resilience so they can bounce back when they experience loss and challenge and adversity.

And for me, as a parent and also as a trained psychologist, if we can parent our children in a way where we're cultivating their optimism and that helps them to reach forward, and their resilience which helps them to bounce back, they're just two really important psychological assets for anyone young children, teenagers, adults, because that's when you start to become self empowered. And I think I would probably talk more about self empowerment than I would about self

esteem per se. But I totally agree with your point got about self compassion and the need for self compassion.

It's not a topic I've spoken about directly in the book, but I certainly see that when we start to take when a young child is connected with their strength, when they truly understand who they are authentically in that strength and weaknesses, I think that that self compassion, that self kindness piece comes in more naturally more easily for them, because even when they've muffed up and you know there's a problem in their life, they can see you way forward,

and that is reach inside, use your strength. These are your anchor point to give you the roadmap to navigate out of the mistake that you've made. And that's a much more self kindness, self compassionate way of correcting mistakes you've made, rather than I've done this again. There's something deeply forwarding me. I always keep doing this. I'm such a bad person. Well, it's great. And then I also am wondering in your list here, where's to straight up

compassion other people compassion? Where's the ethical dimension in the strengths based approach such a beautiful question. There's a couple of levels to strengths. The first is the self awareness and self compassion and knowing who you truly are weaknesses

and strengths. Authentically, what I found in my own work in working with strengths, both with adults and in children, is that there's this really beautiful additional layer that starts to come when you take a strength based approach, and it's building on the kind of self awareness piece to look at how it is that you use your strengths to contribute to others. And I think that's the really that's the biggest benefit of taking a strength based approach.

People often and this I think parents are a bit nervous about taking a strength based approach because they feel that it will create a sort of egotistical child who thinks they're better than everyone else because they have these strengths. And that's a natural concern. I think it's fair enough

to sense for parents. But what I've actually found is quite the opposite, is that once you connect a child with the idea that they have strengths and that everyone has strengths, our strengths are not something that make us special because everyone has them. There's certainly something that make us you need, but the real benefit of taking it, of knowing your strengths is that you start to realize, how can I use these strengths to contribute to others.

The second layer of strengths is that real contribution piece about what do I know about myself? What do I know about my strengths, and how can I use these in service of others? How can I use my strength to enable others to make others lives better? And I think that's where the broader piece of compassion comes in. I know, you know in my own journey speaking for myself that I only got really connected into my strengths in my early thirties and that's really changed my life trajectory.

And I mean, I wouldn't be sitting here having this really interesting conversation with you, Scott now if I hadn't learned A what my strengths were, and B how can I use my strength to help others. That's what the book's all about, be using my research strengths and my communications, my storytelling ability to share that to contribute those strengths to as many parents as families as I can to make them happy, you know, loving warm families who are

building resilient, optimistic children. Oh, what a beautiful at all that is. Can you talk about the strength of communication that's often not mentioned. I thought that was really unique in your book because you have a whole chapter on that and you rarely see that these list of strengths. So that was good. Yeah, we done. Thank you. You're making me feel very good about myself. Well, I mean there's different kind of models are strengths. There's and there's

two broad buckets of strengths, if you like. There's strengths of talent, and then there's strengths of character. I think in the world of positive psychology, we have tended to gravitate more towards the strength of character. And so you mentioned before that many people take the VA and ask you have you taken the VA? And I mean, don't get me wrong, because I love the VA and I use it myself. I've used it with my children, I

use it with lots of families. But we need to understand these two broad categories of strengths and the strength of character. There are positive personality they're kind of morality based, but then we have strengths of talent and strength of talent are performance based. They're more skill oriented, and they're things like athletic ability, intellectual ability, artistic ability, communication, communication skills, it ability. And this is part of fraadening our idea

of what strengths are and not. You know, this is one of the as you said before, one of the potential downsides of just sticking to the typologies that are out there. The taxonomy is like the via classification, the gallop. They realize too. I mean, they're all fantastic, they're great tools, but in the end, they are a list. It's a typology or a taxonomy, and they're just the lists of a particular you know, psychologist who've been able to identify

and measure. But we know there are many, many, many more strengths out there than fit on that list. And by the way, I just want to say that for the people who are listening, I put together the list

of all of those frameworks. If they go to my website, the Strength which and go to the free resources, I've got a Strength library and it's got over one hundred different strengths, the definitions and the descriptions of those strengths, so that you can go and you can download that library and start to just read through all the different strengths that psychologists have measured, lifted, have been able to

describe and define. Thanks. Yeah, my pointview was there are many more strengths than what I've just listed on those frameworks. That's great. Yeah, So do you want me to go back to communication or yeah, just can you just briefly touch on what is that? Let me ask you, what do you know people who you think have the strength of communication, who are good communicators? If you break it down, what makes you think that person's a good communicator and

this person not so much? You're Australian. Have you heard of the TV show Mash? Yeah, I love Mash. I had Alan Alda on the podcast a couple episodes ago, and the whole thing was about communication because he wrote a book about this topic and he is an interesting take on this and is really central to that as attention in his model central as that is really paying attention to a person and kind of taking your preconceived

ideas out of it. And you know, if we can go back to the humanistic psychologist because we both share this love and Karl Rogers talked a lot about unconditional positive regard and I think that's a concept that we need to bring that back. Absolutely, yeah, I absolutely agree with that. And actually, in the online parenting course that I've got, the very first lesson is sort of like the key foundation to being a good parent before we

even add unconditional positive regard. It is one of those I've got Rogers with unconditional positive regard, Winnicott with holding

the idea of holding. Well, I was saying, you know, for me, those three really true foundations that are key for good parenting, you know, unconditional positive regard, Winnicott stuff on holding, and then all the work on attachment and the importance of a secure and safe attachment coming through, and that when you have those three things in place, that's when you really start to get the best outcomes from taking a strength based approach. Absolutely, I completely agree

with you. So I'm going to tell people in the show notes, I'll put the information how they can access the five week online course for parents. Tell me you know more about the course than your vision for a strengths based society. Thanks good, that's yea lovely question, thank you.

And I mean, well, let's start with I. You know, as I said earlier, I've been a psychologist and I've been a researcher for over two decades, and I think what I've done a lot in these last two decades is build up a science space for taking a strength based approach. But what I've really learned in the last decade is that there's one thing about giving people the knowledge, and that's different to giving people skills for action. I mean, we all know that there's a gap between knowledge and action.

I know I should eat more natural sugars, but you know, I go to the cafe at the bottom of my university building and it just looks so good. So what I've really realized is that if I'm going to have of like a wide impact on families and introducing them to the science of positive psychology, that it can't just be about building up a science. I also need to

give families. What I've realized is that if I'm going to help families, really is as many families as possible use the science of positive psychology to build optimism and resilience in their children. Is that I can't just be

a scientist who's providing the knowledge. I also need to help families put this into action, and so that was a big motivation for me in writing the book was to not only introduce the science to parents, but also give them a whole host of chips, techniques, exercises, activities how to translate that knowledge into action. And so for me, now I'm really at that point in my career, twenty odd years into my career saying how can I translate this science into action for people. The book is a

big part of that. But what I've also done with a collaborator of mine, Leila McGregor, is built an online parenting course, five week course for parents and families to undertake who translate that science to just bring strengths fully into the family in an everyday, easy to do, easy to live kind of way. And so the program itself is five steps. The first week is understanding strengths, then

we move on to seeing strengths. Then we move on to using our strengths, and then growing our strengths, and then celebrating our strengths. And so it's this really lovely

five week journey that families take in Strengths. There's an online little tutorial that parents do with me first, where there's some video files, there's some self reflection stuff, there's some surveys, and then every week they do a Family Night, and so there's a whole lot of downloadable activities that families can do to help understand the US, grow and

celebrate their strengths. And for me, this is professionally and personally it has been really rewarding to do because it takes me out of the Ivory tower of the universe and it really allows me to have wide impact with families all across the world. And we're getting amazing feedback about that course and how it's changing families and bringing

them together and bonding them. And so it kind of tips into the second part of your question, Good, and that is how do we take this science, the science you're doing, the science I'm doing, the science that we know is having an impact on people, and how do we spread it widely? Because I think if we're able to bring this into families, we start to see this ripple effects. The more families are using a strength based approach inside their home, it spills over to outside of

their home. They start becoming not only strength based parents, but they become strength based bosses, and they become strength based friends, and they become those strength helpers that you and I were talking about earlier in the interviews where you were saying, I wish I had a strength based parent. Doesn't have to be my parent, but I wish I

had someone who's seeing my strength. So the parents who are learning these skills through the online program and through the book are translating them, transferring them not only to their children, but to everyone who they're interacting with. And you know, for me, the longer term picture is this is about intergenerational change, and this is about raising the abilities and the wellbeing of our society more generally, and

so taking that longer term approach, that intergenerational approach. You my hope, my aim, My goal is that this approach goes to as many families as possible now and then these children are raised in a strength based way, so they grow up to be strength based parents themselves, and they grow up to be strength based teachers and strength based doctors, and strength based nurses and strength based scientists

and who knows, strength based politicians. You know, you never know. Yeah, if we bring this through families, now these other children who grew up to be the adults who lead our society, and they're leading it from a strength based perspective. I love it. Wow. Thank you so much for chating today, for being a true trail blazer in the field of positive psychology and education and kind of helping to bridge these really important areas. Thank you so much for all that, Scott.

It's been such a pleasure to talk to you. I always enjoy catching up with you anytime I get the chance to you, And as I said earlier, it's an honor to be on your show. And thank you for being one of my strengths helpers and spotting my strengths and helping me to use those in service and contributions. Well, yours are very easy to spot, but you're very welcome. Thank you so much for listening to The Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this

episode just as thought provoking as I did. It's something you heard today stimulated you in some way. I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology Podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast dot com.