What's your personality profile?
Most people know how important self-knowledge is, but there’s a strange ambiguity around it.
It’s hard to teach, so we grow up without understanding how to discover it. It’s steeped in individual exploration, which is difficult to encourage in a society of standardized tests and uniformity. And it’s deemed a bit self-serving, so it’s something people can be reluctant to discuss, let alone do.
You know that saying ‘You have to love yourself before you can love anyone else’, right? It’s a bit like that. You have to know yourself before anything else.
So, how do we do that?
Knowing yourself comes from a mix of different avenues:
Spending time alone and with other people
Being aware of how you think, react, and speak
Finding out what you’re drawn to and what you avoid
Exploring your limits of what you are capable of
Pushing past your comfort zone to reassess what you previously thought your limits were
All this takes time, of course. You never stop learning who you are, as life constantly changes and you constantly grow. But you can get up to speed with the person you are now.
Here’s a shortcut to get you started: a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator based test by 16Personalities. The MBTI test is a personality profiler created in 1962 by Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Myers. Katharine and Isabel used Carl Jung’s work on psychological types to help women entering the workforce during the postwar era.
The test was designed to help women discover their strengths, weaknesses, and general personality traits. The 16Personalities version provides a simple way to get an overview of what your strengths and weaknesses may be. Most people find the test eerily accurate!
Remember that this is just a starting point for you to take further.
The idea is that when you ‘know thyself’ and embrace who you are with all your quirks, you can figure out how best to work with your personality.
You can adjust, enhance, or compensate for certain traits you have and take advantage of the strengths you naturally embody.
Once you know whom you’re working with, you’ll become unstoppable.
The 16Personalities test gives you a percentage of each trait. You’ll be able to see if you’re almost equally balanced between two traits (like feeling and thinking) or if you’re most definitely one and not much of the other (like intuitive and observant). It’s something to keep in mind as you read the analysis!