Honesty As A Top Strength:

If Honesty is your top strength, you are a straightforward person, not only by speaking the truth but by living your life in a genuine and authentic way. You are down to earth and without pretense; you are a “real” person.

If you dont know your Character Strengths why not take the VIA Strength Test – click here

Virtue Category:

Honesty falls under the virtue category of Courage. Courage describes strengths that deal with overcoming fear. These strengths can manifest themselves inwardly or outwardly as they are composed of cognitions, emotions, motivations and decisions.

Key Concepts:

This strength involves accurately representing your internal states, intentions, and commitments, both publicly and privately. The strength of honesty is often linked to self-concordance – the extent to which your goals accurately represent your implicit interests and values. Honesty allows people to take responsibility for their feelings and behaviours, owning them, and reaping benefits by doing so.

Exercises For Boosting Honesty:

The next time you are asked for advice, give constructive, direct and authentic feedback.

Honour your commitments in all of your relationships. If you agree to do something or schedule a time to meet with someone, be reliable and follow through.

Write about what living an authentic life means to you and reflect on it often.

Pamela Meyer TED Talk

Pamela Meyer thinks we’re facing a pandemic of deception, but she’s arming people with tools that can help take back the truth.

Why you should listen

Social media expert Pamela Meyer can tell when you’re lying. If it’s not your words that give you away, it’s your posture, eyes, breathing rate, fidgets, and a host of other indicators. Worse, we are all lied to up to 200 times a day, she says, from the white lies that allow society to function smoothly to the devastating duplicities that bring down corporations and break up families.

Working with a team of researchers over several years, Meyer, who is CEO of social networking company Simpatico Networks, collected and reviewed most of the research on deception that has been published, from such fields as law-enforcement, military, psychology and espionage. She then became an expert herself, receiving advanced training in deception detection, including multiple courses of advanced training in interrogation, microexpression analysis, statement analysis, behavior and body language interpretation, and emotion recognition. Her research is synthetized in her bestselling book Liespotting.