KHRISTINA ANNE A.

DIMARUCUT
9933156
Psych 150: Friday 5:30-8:30
Dr. Jimenez

Reflection on Character Strengths

Essentially, our desire to discover and unleash our identity seem basic to every
individual at a certain significant milestone of our lives. Throughout our growing years, we
continuously define our self in terms of our capacities across different dimensions of life.
Psychology as a discipline indeed enables individuals to enlighten individuals through self-
discovery and self-realization. Doing such validates that we are mixture of our strong suit and
flaws. The activity is a very enlightening experience that challenges how I would be able to
celebrate our character strength and compensate for our challenges. Such mixture should be
recognized and cultivated to empower ourselves.
The result of the Survey of Character Strength elicit a combined reactions ranging from a
confirmative to a challenging reaction. Being a last born, it was a surprised me for me to
discover that I have Leadership Skills as my top character strength. During my growing years, I
remember my parents taking charge of decision making in important family matters. As I
reminisce, some significant social experiences and I was able to appreciate how I harness and
nurture my potential for influencing and leading people. Truly, I can testify that my experiential
skills has improved during my career years. Leadership skills as a character strength flourish as
I engaged in leading student organization as Campus Student Adviser and bravely applied for
Chairperson Student Affairs Services. Over time, I should say that the result was very validating
and encouraging to me. At the same time, I believe that my character strengths blend with each
other, such as my sense of justice and kindness fits so well with my leadership skills with spiced
ingredient of humor. Today, as I reflect on my character strength I was challenge on how would I
be able to improve my character strengths. Realizing that these strength can be knitted and
blended with each other. I find it very effective that humor is useful when communicating with
colleagues because to some extent this breaks the autocratic approach of leadership.

Being able to identify my top character strength authenticates my desire to improve my

life, both personal and professional dimension. Over the course of our discussion, I was able to
reflect that some experiences confirms the thought that Excellence is never an accident.
Knowing my top four strength- Leadership, Kindness, Humor and Sense of Justice challenge
me to further explore my uniqueness. Looking back on the items of the survey, I was able to
recall some everyday life behaviors indeed reflects my high intention and sincere effort to
flourish my interpersonal strength hence setting intelligent direction in my personal and
professional dimensions.

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Psychology 150: Positive Psychology
Character Strengths
 As chairperson designated to the Office of the Student Affairs, I ventured on exploring
and improving my leadership skills. With this I have drafted a work plan that would help me
exercise and nourish my salient character of leadership. For this week, I have committed
myself to apply creative ways of cultivating my interpersonal and civic strength. I have
identified specific strategies to articulate my desired signature strengths.

Leadership
Skills/ Objective Specific Behavior
Competencies
Consultative To ensure that there is Instead of monopolizing the content of
a formal/ informal agenda for the incoming quarterly meeting,
means or process of I have asked inputs from campus
consulting colleagues chairperson regarding the possible FAQ
in daily operation and from student Organization.
action planning.
Campus heads were also consulted
regarding the queuing system of faculty in
charge who would assist students who will
attend seminar
Suggestions received from colleagues were
integrated in the presentation of output and
recognized their inputs
Communication To improve the To meet set deliverables and targets, I have
process of exchanging provided formal communication with
information and complete details regarding seminar
sharing ideas to information guide and template for
colleagues both communication letter and prescribed forms.
formal and informally
Mentoring To be able to train Since our section/department is on the
colleagues in transition phase of implementing and
facilitating their task adopting a new guidelines in the Office of
through guided the student Affairs, I have offered my help in
facilitation. assisting chairperson in the standard
protocols and suggest strategies in the
implementation of programs.

I have also provided assistance to the

chairperson of Board of discipline regarding
the Process flow in implementing due
process in student discipline. (Suspending
students who forged grades for their
Scholarship requirement)

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Psychology 150: Positive Psychology
Character Strengths
 To further help me become aware of my working environment, I have asked my
colleagues to do random assessment regarding their perception of Organizational Politics Scale
through a survey questionnaire. This somehow gave me a feedback on how my colleagues
perceive dynamics of power and politics in our university. This allowed me to have a snap view
about how colleagues feel the power from their immediate supervisors and respective leaders.
Being one of their immediate supervisor, I find it deemed necessary to be enlighten with such
perception. After knowing their perception, I take the initiative of doing self-assessment in terms
of the Four Paradigms of Power to match the desire and expectations of my colleagues. I
eventually realized that I used the Expertise and referent style as my leadership skills paradigm
in leading people. As of today, I am assessing the compatibility of my leadership style to my
colleagues.
Along with the known character strength, I also continue to apply positive emotions and
lessen negativity in the workplace which helped me stay focus and become productive in
exercising my character strength with the fervent hope that this will eventually flourish as my
signature strength.

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Psychology 150: Positive Psychology
Character Strengths