Character strength · Transcendence
Gratitude as a character strength: meaning and examples
The short answer: gratitude is noticing what is going well, and who helped make it so, and saying thank you for it: to the people involved, and more generally for what you have. It is one of the 24 character strengths of the VIA classification, in the Transcendence family: the strengths that connect you to something larger than yourself.
What gratitude looks like
People with a lot of gratitude tend to:
- say thank you often, and mean it
- write notes or messages to thank people
- notice small good things: a kind word, good coffee, a sunny morning
- remember who helped them along the way
- focus more on what they have than on what they lack
In everyday life
At work, gratitude is the colleague who thanks people by name in the team meeting and remembers who helped on a project. At home, it is the thank-you to the partner who cooked, or the text to an old teacher.
Gratitude is one of the strengths most strongly linked to life satisfaction in research. Simple practices, like writing down a few things that went well before bed, are among the most studied ways to strengthen it.
Gratitude and the strengths close to it
- Hope looks forward to good things. Gratitude looks back at them.
- Love is strengthened when gratitude is expressed.
- Appreciation of beauty notices what is excellent; gratitude feels thankful for it.
When gratitude is overdone, or underused
Like every strength, gratitude works best in the right amount. Overdone, gratitude can become feeling indebted to everyone, or glossing over real problems with forced thankfulness. Underused, good things go unnoticed, people feel taken for granted, and attention drifts to what is missing.
The aim is noticing and naming the good, without ignoring what needs to change.
Is gratitude one of your top strengths?
Ask yourself:
- Do you thank people more often than most?
- At the end of a day, do you tend to remember the good parts?
- Do you feel lucky for the people and things in your life?
If you answered yes to most of these, gratitude may be one of your signature strengths. The only way to know how it compares with your other 23 is to rank them.
Find your top strengths with the free test
Where this comes from
The 24 character strengths were described by psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman in Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (2004). Happy Me's assessment uses public-domain questions from the International Personality Item Pool and is not affiliated with the VIA Institute.