Knowing Who You Are Is The Key to Making Positive Change

Always Be Yourself

As the old saying goes, if you want to make a change, you should start with the person in the mirror.  Right? Or “be the change you wish to see in the world”, or “you must make a change to see a change”.  All great mantras for good living.  But how do you go about making a change, if you don’t know who you are in the first place?  I know, that’s pretty deep.

Finding Out Who You Are

It is one of the interview questions I have always hated, “what would your friends say is your best asset? Greatest weakness?” etc.  “What would your former supervisors say about your organizational skills?”  Of course in an interview you are supposed to sell yourself, so your response is always somewhere along the lines of, “the would say I am fantastic,” even though what you really want to say is, “I don’t know, ask them!”  Short of asking all of the people in your life to profile you, you really don’t always know what others think of you in any real sense.  If you have low self-esteem you may think that they don’t like you anyway, and if you are narcissistic, you will believe that everyone on the planet adores you, even though we know that isn’t possible. (Because, let’s face it, most of the people on the planet have no idea who you are.)

What is Your Personality?

Luckily there are better ways to find out exactly who we are and what makes us tick.  One tool that many corporations use is the Myers Briggs Personality Type Indicator.  This assessment was designed to indicate a person’s psychological preferences in reference to how they make decisions and how they see the world around them.  The tool asks a variety of questions and asks the respondent to answer on a 1 to 5 scale from definitely that’s me to definitely not me…and then gives you an intuitive summary of what your preferences are based on your answers.  I took one of these personality profiles when I was a student studying medical assisting.  The Insights Discovery program breaks your personality into colors.  You can lead with one or a combination of colors.  For instance, I lead with yellow, then green and blue are tied and red is my weakest color.   To find out more about what the colors mean, you can check them out here.  Basically mine break down this way:  Yellow is the color of energy and signifies someone who is social, enthusiastic and expressive.  So the social person who wants to do things together.  Green signifies the caring, nurturing, bleeding heart type who responds to caring.  Blue signifies the cautious, precise, questioner who wants to do things right the first time.  And finally, red signifies the demanding, purposeful and competitive personality who wants things to be brief and efficient (see, told you that wasn’t me).  The profile that came along with the color analysis was staggering…I was going through my divorce at the time and things were revealed to me in that report that I had never known about myself before.  Important things that I could learn from.

How Do I Know Who I Am?

While both the Myers-Briggs Indicator and Insights are available for a fee, I found a very useful free version at My-Personality-Test.com.  It is set up much like the Myers-Briggs indicator in that you are given a letter indicator of your personality type at the end.  You can take the assessment in about 10-15 minutes and if you answer the questions honestly, and not how you think you should answer them.  You will get a handy little guide to understanding who you are.  The good, the bad, and the ugly.  My own My-Personality-Test revealed that I am Extraverted (which I don’t agree with), Intuitive, Feeling and Judging.  The report told me that I have an entrepreneurial nature (really?!? lol) and that I have strong work habits, form close relationships easily, and I am highly empathetic.  All true!  I also learned that the ENFJ personality type is extremely rare and make up only 2% of the population, and that other’s who share my type are/were Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela!  That is pretty good company!  I invite you to take the My Personality Test and come back and let us know in the comments who you are, and if the results confirmed what you previously believed, or if they surprised you.  Once you know who you are, you can move towards identifying things about you that you would like to change.

But that’s a subject for next time!  See you soon!