Spring: Developing Virtues
A couple weeks ago, I left the house at 5:15 a.m. in the middle of a downpour to drive to SFO. I had hoped to make a couple of calls to the east coast as I drove, but instead, I white-knuckled it for an hour and a half in the dark with my windshield wipers on high speed, navigating massive pools of water and large gushes of spray from trucks that I passed. I was grateful for the four new tires I recently put on my car (see my last post).
I parked the car in an off-airport lot, took the shuttle to the airport, waited in line at security, and breathlessly arrived at my gate just in time to board the United flight to Boston in Group 5! Whew… The 5 ½ hour flight to Boston gave me time to recuperate and get a little work done. I found my hotel, grabbed a bite to eat at a nearby Irish pub with live music, and got to bed at a decent hour.
I was in Boston to attend the Human Flourishing@Work Summit at Harvard, where this year’s topic was Character and Virtue. Forty leaders from various sectors, including finance, education, medicine, nonprofit, and business, received a personal invitation to participate in the summit. We were there to listen, learn, dialogue, and build community around the topic of human flourishing, especially as it relates to character and virtue.
A friend who was familiar with my work at Conversations in the Vineyard and our use of the metaphor of the vineyard to promote a framework for sustainable flourishing in life and leadership invited me, and I was honored to participate in the Summit.
For ten years, the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard has been studying and promoting human flourishing. Their Global Flourishing study has collected data from 200,000 people from 22 geographically and culturally diverse countries. They created a simple 12-question survey around the following six domains of flourishing.
Happiness and Life Satisfaction
Physical and Mental Health
Meaning and Purpose
Close Social Relationships
Financial and Material Stability
Character and Virtue
Of the six domains studied, it seems Character and Virtue is at the heart of it all. Their longitudinal study across multiple continents shows that people who have high scores in the Character and Virtue domain of flourishing tend to score higher in the other domains as well.
If human flourishing is enhanced by character and virtue, then we must ask,
“What is character, and which virtues matter?”
As with any big question, there are multiple answers with lots of nuance. Our breakout session drafted a possible definition of character.
Character is the outcome of repeatedly choosing actions that align with truth.
In his presentation on The Formation of Character: Driving business results through employee growth in virtue Dr. Andrew Abela defined character as “no more and no less than the collection of our most important habits.” He distinguished between primal habits connected to such things as diet, exercise, and sleep and uniquely human habits formed in our thoughts, actions, and feelings. He calls the uniquely human ones “super habits”. These are the habits, or virtues, which lead to more flourishing. He has developed a system and written a book on Superhabits based on the four cardinal virtues brought to us by the ancient priest and philosopher, Thomas Aquinas.
Self-discipline (Temperance)
Practical Wisdom (Prudence)
Courage
Justice
More than 50 virtues grow out of the soil of these four virtues, including such virtues as perseverance, resilience, contentment, gratitude, generosity, respect, and humility.
The research shows that developing character and virtue leads to greater flourishing.
If we truly want to flourish long, we must cultivate the habits of virtue that lead to character, and the vineyard can teach us how.
Every season in the vineyard teaches us something about character. What is developed inside the vine will eventually show up in the fruit, and every season through every year contributes to that.
Here are a few examples of spring metaphors that offer a framework for understanding character development.
Bud Break
When the seemingly insignificant brown nodes burst open in spring, the miniscule cosmos which has been developing inside the bud, breaks through and starts pushing out shoots, leaves, tendrils, together with the whole potential for harvest this year. The harvest this year is dependent on the health of the vine and everything that happened to the vine in the previous year. If the vine is compromised by disease or pests or weather in one year, it affects the bud development and therefore the harvest in the following year. Likewise, whatever small habits we are developing in one season will be on display in the next season. Are we persevering in hard times? During our next season, that virtue will become more developed.
Suckering
During spring, a vineyard worker will walk along the rows of vines and cut off any suckers growing out of the trunk. Suckers are shoots that drain energy from the main shoots that are intended to produce good fruit. Many virtues have corresponding vices that need to be eliminated in order for the virtues to flourish. Imagine the desire to cultivate gratitude as a virtue, but envy keeps popping up. Think of envy as a sucker that needs to be cut off so it doesn’t detract from the flourishing of gratitude.
Tucking
Every spring when tender shoots are wildly growing in all directions, the vineyard workers will come along and tuck them up into the trellis. The trellis will provide support as the fruit develops and gets heavy for harvest. Even though the vine might want to grow whichever way it wants, a trellis will train and support it to maximize fruitfulness. Visualize the wild grasping of greed, like a crazy vine in spring. What if a structure could be put in place that settles the greed and produces the fruit of ordered contentment.
Just as the vine works day in and day out, season after season, to produce beautiful fruit for wine, cultivating virtues takes time and habitual engagement with some activity that may feel like a constraint but, if we want to flourish long, this is what it takes.
In your organization
Does your organization have a culture that values character development? Are people encouraged to practice habits that lead towards virtue? Maybe you’d like to explore the T.H.R.I.V.E. Solutions at Relational Values. They are committed to helping companies flourish!
On your team
Do you have enough trust on the team to name the virtue you are working to develop? Does the team have the grace to encourage the habits that will lead to that virtue? Would it help to get out of the office and spend some time together in a vineyard to go a little deeper with each other? We can help curate the right kind of vineyard experience for your team.
In your life
Developing character by habitually choosing virtue is a lifelong process, and it cannot be done all at once. Be gentle with yourself as you embark on this journey. Consider choosing one virtue you’d like to develop, like contentment. Identify a practice that could lead you to a habit of choosing contentment when you feel you don’t have enough. Perhaps, choosing to be content with a plain coffee instead of grabbing for the complicated, high-calorie frozen coffee could help exercise the muscle of contentment. It could also be as simple as something you say every morning like, “I am enough. I have enough.”
My personal favorite for developing contentment is the first line of Psalm 23 (NIV): The Lord is my shepherd. I lack nothing.
Together on the journey!