The VIA Character Strengths Survey: Finding What Energizes You
The Work That Lights You Up Is Trying to Tell You Something
I had a physician tell me recently that she hadn't felt genuinely energized by her work in over three years. Not burned out. Not miserable. Just flat. She was doing good work, hitting her metrics, getting renewed without drama. But she described her career the way someone might describe a long commute -- something to get through, not something to look forward to.
When I asked what had changed, she couldn't point to a single event. "I think I just drifted," she said. That word comes up a lot in coaching conversations. Drift. The slow, almost imperceptible shift away from the work that used to fire you up toward work that merely fills your calendar.
The VIA Character Strengths survey is one of the best tools I know for figuring out where you drifted from and how to get back.
What the VIA Survey Measures
The Values in Action survey, developed by Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson, grew out of a three-year research project involving 55 scientists across multiple disciplines. Their goal was ambitious: build a comprehensive classification of human strengths the way the DSM classifies disorders. The result was 24 character strengths organized under six broad virtues -- wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence.
Your top five to seven strengths are your "signature strengths." These aren't skills you have learned or talents you were born with. They are qualities that feel authentically, deeply yours. When you use them, time passes differently. The work feels less like obligation and more like expression.
Peterson and Seligman detailed the full framework in Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification. It is a dense read, but if you want to understand the science underneath the survey, there is no better source.
VIA Character Strengths Physicians Actually Use
In my coaching work with physicians in academic medicine, certain signature strengths show up in interesting patterns. Not because physicians are all alike, but because the profession selects for and rewards particular qualities.
Love of learning appears near the top for almost every academic physician I have worked with. No surprise there. But here is the insight that matters: many of these physicians have been channeling that strength exclusively into clinical knowledge and missing opportunities to learn in domains that would actually re-energize them. Leadership. Communication. Even creative pursuits outside of medicine.
Judgment (also called critical thinking) runs deep in physicians trained to weigh evidence and make high-stakes decisions. When this strength is engaged, it feels like flow. When a role requires you to suppress your judgment and simply execute someone else's plan, it feels suffocating.
Fairness shows up frequently among physicians drawn to equity work, curriculum reform, or advocacy. The ones who recognize fairness as a core strength tend to be more strategic about where they invest that energy. The ones who do not recognize it often burn out fighting every battle.
Kindness and social intelligence appear more than the stereotype of the detached scientist would suggest. Physicians with these as signature strengths often thrive in mentoring, patient relationships, and team leadership -- but only if their roles actually give them room for those activities.
The Energy Connection
Here is the part that matters most for your career. Research by Ryan Niemiec, published in his practical guide Character Strengths Interventions, found that using your signature strengths in new ways for just one week produced measurable increases in happiness and decreases in depressive symptoms for up to six months. Seligman's team reported similar findings in a 2005 study published in American Psychologist.
The implication for physicians in academic medicine is straightforward. When your daily work engages your signature strengths, you have more energy at the end of the day. When it does not, you feel depleted -- even if the work itself is not objectively difficult.
This is why two physicians in identical roles can have completely different experiences. One feels energized. The other feels drained. The difference is not resilience or grit. It is alignment between the role and the person's core character strengths.
Think of it like a basketball coach running a system. Phil Jackson did not succeed with the triangle offense because it was universally the best system. He succeeded because it matched the strengths of the players he had. A values in action survey for academic medicine works the same way. The goal is not to find the objectively best role. It is to find the role that fits what you naturally bring.
How to Take the Survey and What to Do Next
The VIA Survey is free at viacharacter.org. It takes about 15 minutes. You will get a full ranking of all 24 strengths at no cost. Paid reports offer more detail, but the free version gives you everything you need to start.
Once you have your results, do not just read them and move on. Try this instead:
- Identify your top five. Read each description and ask yourself: does this ring true? The survey is remarkably accurate, but you are the final judge.
- Audit your week. Look at your calendar from the past two weeks. Where did you use your signature strengths? Where were you working in areas that required strengths ranked near the bottom of your list?
- Find the gaps. The places where your role demands strengths you do not naturally have are the places most likely to drain you. That does not mean you cannot do the work. It means the work costs you more than it costs someone whose signature strengths align with it.
- Make one shift. You do not need to overhaul your career. Start by finding one way to use a top strength more deliberately this week. Volunteer for the project that lets you use your curiosity. Restructure a meeting to engage your leadership. Mentor a trainee in a way that taps your social intelligence.
The Takeaway
Your signature strengths are not a nice-to-know. They are a map to the parts of your career that will sustain you over the long haul. When academic physicians feel flat, disconnected, or quietly exhausted, the problem is rarely that they chose the wrong profession. It is usually that they have drifted away from the qualities that made them choose it in the first place.
The VIA survey takes 15 minutes. The conversation it starts can redirect years.
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