One of the 24 character strengths
Being careful about what you do, by thinking ahead and steering clear of risks you do not need to take.
Prudence is the strength of thinking about the consequences first, and not taking risks that were not needed.
The operative word is needed. This strength is not about avoiding risk; it is about noticing which risks are buying something, and it will take a large one cheerfully when there is a reason for it.
It works mostly by prevention, which is why it goes unnoticed. Somebody who leads here spends their life quietly not having problems, and there is no way to point at the thing that did not happen.
That makes it the hardest of the 24 to be thanked for. The reward is an absence, and absences are invisible to everybody except the person who arranged them.
Curious which of these lead in you? Take the free assessment and find out.
96 questions · about 9 min · free
Start your free assessmentThe group books the cheap flight with the fifty-minute connection. One person books the later one, says nothing about it, and is in the hotel when the others are not.
Opportunities have expiry dates. A decision can get thought through so carefully that the thing being decided about is gone. It can also be the reason a group hesitates at the exact moment speed was worth more than care.
It gets read as timidity or as anxiety. The difference is that this strength is doing a calculation and being frightened is not. Somebody who leads here is often noticeably calm in a crisis, because they have already thought about this one.
Both hold something back. Prudence is about weighing what comes next; Self-Regulation is about the impulse itself. One is planning, the other is brakes.
Both slow a decision down. Judgment is careful about whether the reasoning holds; Prudence is careful about what the decision will cost.
Everybody has all 24 of these. A result puts them in order within one person, so a strength near the bottom of somebody's list is one they reach for less often rather than one they are missing.
That also means nothing here compares one person with another. There is no reference sample behind these scales, and an order made of somebody's own answers cannot say where they stand next to anybody.
Or start with what the 24 character strengths are.
Two hundred and thirteen questions, about twenty minutes. You get all 24 put in your own order, free, with the ones that lead in you named at the top.
96 questions · about 9 min · free
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