Personality
 One of your most fundamental personal attributes is your personality, i.e. the type of person you are. And it can be extremely rewarding in so many ways to discover the characteristics of your personality. In the very first Brainware students workshop that I gave I included a very simple personality test. This consisted of ten yes/no questions, and its purpose was to establish the students' degree of introversion or extraversion. For a student to have even an approximate measure of their position on the introversion-extraversion scale can be extremely illuminating, especially during their first week at university. Thus, for example, introverts can be daunted by Freshers' Week, finding the socialising and meeting lots of new people extremely exhausting, while extraverts tend to be in their element, feeling energised.
Some of the benefits of knowing more about your own personality and the personality of other people you meet are as follows:
- It helps you to appreciate and value the kind of person you are, and it can enable you to identify and develop your particular strengths.
- It can also indicate those 'weaker' areas, for example, extraversion for an introvert, which can become your areas of long-term growth. Carl Jung referred to this process as 'working on your shadow'.
- It enables you to make a more informed choice about your career and so avoid the 'square peg in a round hole' situation, where there is a conflict between your personality and the characteristics of a job.
- It helps you to establish good relationships with other people, even those who may be very unlike you. And note that teams are usually more productive when they contain an assortment of different types of people.
- In general, it alerts you to the fact that there is a wide diversity of personality types, and it encourages you to cherish that diversity and value human difference, rather than find it a stimulus to conflict.
Recommendations
It can be very illuminating and worthwhile to take a reputable personality test, such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. It is usually preferable to attend a suitable workshop, although some tests are available in paper form and on the web.
Further Information
For further information on personality and personality testing see Personality on the Theories track.
|
