Try Quiet Flourishing Instead of Quiet Quitting: Working with your strengths
Try Quiet Flourishing Instead:
Working with your strengths
By now, you've probably heard about the "quiet quitting" trend making waves. Employees checking out from work responsibilities without formally resigning - just gradually disengaging behind the scenes. Sound familiar?
While understandable as a reaction to feeling overworked or undervalued, quiet quitting often leads to missed deadlines, resentment among colleagues, and a general lack of accountability. Plus, not to mention a feeling of sadness that you are just not valued and now you are feeling slightly stuck in what to do; balancing frustration, loss, and a want to be noticed so you can shift out of this and move forward in a positive and proactive.
But what if we flipped the script? Instead of dialing back with a “quiet quitting”, let's talk about "quiet flourishing" - optimizing your effort by intentionally leaning into your unique strengths and values.
Identifying Your Signature Strengths
The first step is getting clear on what energizes you and allows you to operate at your best. Reflect on times when you felt fully engaged and purposeful at work or in other areas of life. What innate talents and qualities were you drawing upon?
Maybe it was your curiosity that fuelled deep research. Your appreciation of beauty that sparked creative ideas. Or your perseverance that pushed a project through to completion against the odds.
Once you pinpoint these signature strengths, get specific on how you want to develop them further for peak performance. Is there an underutilized strength, like creativity or gratitude, that you want to dial up? Or perhaps you sometimes overplay certain strengths to a fault, like perfectionism leading to burnout.
The goal is to find your personal "golden mean" - optimizing each strength in a balanced, healthy way for maximum benefit.
Strategies for Quiet Flourishing
With your strengths vision defined, you can start embedding supportive habits into your daily routines and environments. For example:
· Piggyback a new habit onto an existing one, like journaling about how you expressed a core strength after your morning coffee.
· Set external reminders, like a Post-It that says "When I get to work, I will look for opportunities to collaborate."
· Identify low-lift ways to flex your strengths muscles, like taking a daily walk to soak in nature's beauty if that's a key strength.
· Job Crafting invites you to look for ways to redesign or "job craft" your current role to better utilize your strengths. Could you take on new responsibilities that allow you to lean into curiosity? Shift focus to projects requiring creativity? Volunteer for stretch assignments that tap into strengths like leadership or persistence? Get creative about shaping your work to highlight your sweet spots.
· Strengths Partnerships is one way you to identify colleagues who possess complementary strengths that balance yours out. You might have powerhouse creativity but struggle with follow-through, while your counterpart is a master of discipline and execution. Collaborate in ways that allow you both to do what you do best while learning from each other's strengths.
· Build a Strengths Community where you surround yourself with others interested in cultivating their strengths. This could be an accountability group, book club or weekly check-ins. Having a supportive peer community keeps strengths top-of-mind and provides encouragement.
The key is priming your mindset for a strengths-focused mindset and creating a sustainable routine, not an unsustainable grind. Be sure to celebrate small wins along the way with healthy rewards that reinforce the positive feelings.
At its core, quiet flourishing is about realigning your activities with your values and natural gifts. It's a path to achieving personal and professional growth through your authentic strengths - not bluster, busyness or forced hustle.
So instead of quiet quitting, how might you quiet flourish by doing more of what you do best? Get curious about your strengths, get clear on your vision for developing them, and start incorporating strengths-boosting habits today.