If you’ve been following along with this month’s blog series, you know we’ve been doing a deep dive into personality assessments. In this series, we’ve covered CliftonStrengths, The Four Temperaments, and the Enneagram.
Hopefully, you’ve found these articles informative. Perhaps they’ve even encouraged you to try out these assessments for yourself. (If you haven’t yet, I’d encourage you to give them each a try!)
Alright, now that you’ve taken the time to truly get to know yourself a little better, it’s time for the million-dollar question:
Now what?! What do you DO with the information you’ve gathered?
I’m sure you’ve heard the saying, “Knowledge is power.” Well, it’s true! The more you know about and understand yourself, the greater power you will have to make impactful decisions in your life and relationships. After all, what’s the point of taking self-assessments if you aren’t going to use the information to somehow better yourself or your life?
Here are a few ways to practically put your self-assessment results to good use:
- Plan for your strengths:
Each individual has their own unique set of strengths and abilities. In each of the three personality assessments we unpacked, you should have become a little more familiar with the unique strengths attributed to your personality or temperament.
Don’t let good talent go to waste!
Seriously! Far too often I see people underutilizing their talents and natural abilities. How does this happen? People keep waiting for opportunities to drop in their laps or for everything to “fall into place.”
Life simply doesn’t work that way (most of the time.) You have to PLAN to use your strengths. Create your OWN opportunities.
REFLECTION:
What are your top strengths?
How can you use these strengths to improve your own life?
How can you use these strengths to make a difference for someone else?
- Stop making excuses for your weaknesses:
Have you ever heard someone explain away their less becoming character traits with phrases like: “That’s just who I am.” Or “That’s just how my “type” is.” Or “I can’t help it, it’s just my personality.”
Perhaps you’ve even used those phrases yourself. The truth is, we all have weaknesses. We all have aspects to our personality that simply aren’t the greatest.
Personality assessments are designed to give us insight into our habits and tendencies, the good and the bad. It’s healthy and important to be able to identify both these areas in ourselves.
HOWEVER, we must not allow the knowledge of our weaknesses to become an excuse for acting like a jerk. In other words, none of us deserve a “get out of jail free card” because our temperament or enneagram type predispositions us toward being brutally honest, impatient, overly critical, (or any other less than ideal quality.)
Instead of making excuses, use this knowledge of your weaknesses to guide your goal setting and personal development. Consider this knowledge your roadmap for personal growth! After all, you now know exactly what areas could use some improvement.
Important Reminder:
Self-assessments are a helpful tool for understanding ourselves at a deeper level. They are an excellent starting place and personally, I’m a huge fan of using them.
However, they are simply that, just a tool. They are not the “end all, be all” defining who or what you are. It can be tempting to use this assessment data as a personality Bible of sorts, creating a strict and thorough outline of your personality. While this information is helpful, there isn’t a single personality assessment available that can totally capture the essence of your unique disposition with 100% accuracy.
My advice: Use the information, but don’t overanalyze it.
If you’re interested in digging a little deeper into self-assessment and your own personality tendencies, CLICK HERE to learn about a special offer. (Limited to the first 10 people who want to know more about my new Enneagram Offering that helps you be strategic and authentic in business and life.)
Article was contributed by: Maria Lees, Team Writer with Sarah Boxx
