No Test Required
Personality profiles have always been fascinating to me. Sometimes they seem miraculously spot on. Other times they surprise me. Even some social media applets jump on this magnet train to help us discover anything and everything we thought we ever wanted to know about ourselves.
Some of them have a significant amount of research and testing behind them. But most don’t. Many are just some best guesses based on answers and assumptions. They can be interesting, even fun. But they can be dangerous as well.
A friend recently asked if I would work with them to help them understand the results of one of those exercises to figure out how they could achieve more meaning from their relationships and work.
Their concerns reminded me that we need to reconsider how much faith we put into the results of many, if not most, of the tools out there.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t want to learn about ourselves or even try to understand how we might be perceived. I’m just not sure that emotional intelligence and a healthy self-awareness level will come from taking a test, especially when it is a standardized survey intended to tell us far more than it can reasonably know. It is, after all, still dependent on a critical element: How we answer the questions.
Even those that are meticulously researched have that fatal flaw. Any outcome is only as accurate as our answers. Unfortunately, I’m not sure we’re always the best witness for ourselves.
How then can we achieve that awareness? Perhaps it’s less about an external measurement and more about an internal one. In the recesses of our minds and hearts, we already know what we love about ourselves and what we’d like to change.
The key is recognizing that both sides of that coin will always be there. We are continually growing into and out of ourselves into what is next for us.
The other part of the equation is recognizing that how we feel about our lives is tied directly to how we feel about ourselves. We will never love our life until we fully learn to love and accept ourselves.
Let’s start there. I have learned that the best way to begin exploring who we are and who we want to become is first to recognize and record what we love about ourselves and our story. What and who are we grateful for? What are we proud of when we look back over our life? What excites us and moves us into action?
By starting there, we are beginning the next part of our life journey with a sense of ourselves based on what is good about us, and that’s what we will want to build on.
Whatever we find along the way we would like to change can be seen thru that lens.
We can change it if that’s what we choose to do or simply embrace it as part of the whole.
Perhaps instead of answering someone else’s questions to find out who we are, we should be asking our own questions to determine who we want to be and then live into them.
That will enable us to live with a purpose and connection to ourselves that will also allow us to connect with others in a meaningful way. And live the life we want to live.
Problem solved.
No test required.
“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.” ~ Viktor E. Frankl
