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When developing goals, focus on character strengths—who to become, not just what to achieve.

Character strengths differ from personality traits in that they require discernment and calibration.

Optimizing character strengths requires tailoring them to fit specific situations and people.

This post is part 6 of a mini-series on virtues and vices associated with gratitude.

If you’re in the midst of formulating life goals, consider a simple shift: Focus less on what goals and more on who goals.

Instead of listing accomplishments to check off by the end of the year, ask: Who do you want to be when the year is over? That’s often a more motivating question than what you want to accomplish.

Who goals are more inspiring and energizing than what goals. Try this journaling exercise: Imagine it’s the last week of the year. You’ve become a better version of yourself. What would you be doing differently? What would others notice about you? Write in detail about this future you.

Identifying Your Desired Character Strengths

Who goals are deeply connected to the character strengths we want to cultivate. (I use the term character strength, though philosophers and some psychologists use virtue. You can think of them as interchangeable.)

A character strength is a habitual quality of character that helps you live well and be a good human being. Character strengths benefit you, others, and society.

Not sure where to start? Here’s a non-exhaustive list of character strengths/virtues. Pick one that inspires you.

Suppose you’ve identified a character strength to develop. What does it look like at its best?

This is where character strengths differ from personality traits. Personality traits are about consistency. Doing more is what matters. A person who is regularly warm, gregarious, and energetic across situations can be described as highly extraverted.

But character strengths are different. Yes, they require habitual practice. But they also require deliberation, discernment, and calibration. Doing more isn’t enough.

Aristotle called this capacity phronesis, or practical wisdom.

Consider the character strength of perseverance. Perseverance is widely regarded as a good thing, and people who persevere often do better in life.

But our time and resources are finite. Persevering in everything is neither possible nor wise. Investing a great deal of time and energy in one domain, such as work, inevitably means having less to invest elsewhere, such as family or health.

Sometimes, wisdom requires knowing which goals to let go of. Persevering in outdated goals that no longer serve us can be counterproductive.

This is why discernment matters so much when it comes to optimizing your character strengths.

So what does practical wisdom look like in action?

3 Strategies for Calibrating Your Character Strengths

Below are three strategies for calibrating your character strengths using the example of gratitude, but these strategies apply to many other strengths as well.

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Strategy 1: The Flourishing Test

If you want to learn how to calibrate a character strength, ask yourself in each situation: Is what I’m about to do likely to contribute to my living the good life, or (what I call) human flourishing?

You can think of flourishing as living the good life across four dimensions:

Consider all four dimensions of the good life when determining how to exercise your character strength.

Let’s apply this to gratitude. Imagine you feel deeply grateful to someone who mentored you for 10 years, and you’re always looking for ways to repay their kindness. Now, suppose this person asks you to do something illegal or unethical to help them.

Would you do it? If you say yes, you’ve expressed gratitude by violating the principle of justice. In doing so, gratitude becomes corrupted. The solution here isn’t to be less grateful, but to practice gratitude with integrity.

Strategy 2: Proportionality

This strategy, inspired by both Aristotle and Confucian scholars, emphasizes that a character strength should be exercised in ways that are neither deficient nor excessive, but that fit the situation.

Applied to gratitude, philosopher Tony Manela has argued that it’s possible to be both deficiently grateful and excessively grateful, and that both are problematic. Excessive gratitude, for example, can arise when someone responds to a very small favor with outsized, self-effacing gratitude that undermines their autonomy and sense of self.

Exercising a character strength well requires accurately reading a situation and responding proportionately. This, again, is a core function of practical wisdom.

Strategy 3: Social Calibration

The third strategy applies primarily to relational character strengths, such as gratitude, compassion, generosity, encouragement, and loyalty.

If expressing gratitude isn’t about doing more, but about doing it well, how does that work in practice?

To explore this, my colleagues and I recently conducted a study that asked U.S. women to describe a memorable incident in which someone expressed gratitude to them. We then asked how gratitude was expressed: through words, writing, quality time, gifts, physical affection, or acts of service. Finally, we asked which form of gratitude they generally prefer to receive.

What did we find? There was no single “best” way to express gratitude. Instead, participants felt most grateful when there was a match between the way gratitude was expressed to them and their preferred way of receiving it.

For example, if you prefer gratitude to be expressed through quality time but someone buys you a gift instead, there’s a mismatch. But when someone knows you well enough to express gratitude in the manner you most appreciate, you feel seen, valued, and genuinely grateful.

This is the essence of social calibration: Exercising relational strengths in ways that consider the preferences and needs of the specific person you’re interacting with.

Everyone is different. Expressing gratitude in the same way to everyone, such as repeatedly saying “thank you,” may be consistent, but it’s not always effective.

Here’s the moral of the story: To become good at social calibration, you must get to know the people in your life. Observe them. Talk to them. Learn about what they like and need.

Reframing Your 'Defects'

This brings me to an important closing thought. What you might call “character flaws” are better understood as miscalibrated character strengths. You aren’t broken; you just need to learn how to regulate your strengths. Shifting your perspective this way turns your self-criticism into a roadmap for growth.

Maybe you beat yourself up too much, and you focus excessively on your weaknesses. But rather than think of yourself as a defective person with low self-worth, perhaps you have a form of humility gone awry. Awareness of your limitations is a strength, as long as it is harnessed for growth rather than self-condemnation and balanced with an appreciation of your strengths.

Life is complicated, which is why success rarely flows from consistency and effort alone. What you and I need is discernment: the ability to pause, deliberate, and calibrate how we act across situations. When we develop this kind of practical wisdom, we begin to live lives that are happier, more meaningful, more successful, and more morally grounded.

This post also appears in my Substack newsletter on the science and practice of gratitude.

Maneia, T. (2016). Gratitude and appreciation. American Philosophical Quarterly, 53(3), 261–273. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44982104

Xia, F. (2020). A comparative study of Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean and Confucius’ doctrine of Zhong Yong. International Communication of Chinese Culture, 7, 349–377. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40636-020-00194-x

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