Know Thyself? How Analyzing Your Personality Type Can Help You Achieve Your Goals

Okay, I know I know. We're really getting into internet self help guru range with this blog post. Apologies, my hopes are to elaborate on a passion of mine - without sounding preachy. You are perfectly fine as you are! But just in case you wanted to dive deeper...

"The Ancient Greek aphorism "know thyself", is one of the Delphic maxims and was inscribed in the pronaos of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi according to the Greek writer Pausanias. The phrase was later expounded upon by the philosopher Socrates who taught that: The unexamined life is not worth living."

While Socrates confirms my bias, I think one of the best ways to achieve what you want in life is by knowing who you are.

If we were to relate this to let's say cars, would you take a honda civic to a formula one race track to compete amongst the high powered behemoths? Probably not. Not that there is anything wrong with a Honda civic, it's a great car! It may just be the wrong application for the given task at hand.

If you have special strengths within your personality that better suits one particular task as compared to another, wouldn't you rather take the position where you'll have the best chance for success?

If you're more-so on the introverted spectrum, say a person who may enjoy days alone quietly reflecting on her thoughts- you could go days without talking to someone, would a high paced 15 cold calls a day sales job be a good fit for you? Would you leave the day full of vigor and energy revving up for that next sale? Would your sales calls be filled with flow and meaning? I'll leave the answer up to you to deduce your own opinion.

I feel knowing yourself is one of the most important steps to achieving what Maslow would call self actualization. "...represents growth of an individual toward fulfillment of the highest needs; those for meaning in life, in particular. Carl Rogers also created a theory implicating a “growth potential” whose aim was to integrate congruently the “real self” and the “ideal self” thereby cultivating the emergence of the “fully functioning person.”

Would it not make sense that if you fully understood and were accepting of your unique strengths, and weaknesses, that you could fine tune your life achievement radar with wicked accuracy?

This is not discounting the benefits of understanding your flaws and actively going out and conquering them head on. I'm all for that! This is not a scapegoat for someone to discount every opportunity for growth as asinine.

What I am advocating for is the ability to have a more intuitive thought process and a more discerning eye to recognizing a particular task, like a career, that you may be excellent at. Because let's face it, life is too short not to do awesome engaging and meaningful work that you love.

So where is the meat and potatoes? Here they are. I've gone through the.... mental gymnastics?... of figuring out what is relatively evidence based (personality science is tough to validate), so you can use for yourself. Here they are:

Get your Baseline - Who are you and what are you good at??

1) Hexaco Personality Inventory : http://hexaco.org/hexaco-online. <--- Good Evidence Supporting

2) Martin Seligman at UPEN Signature Strengths : https://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/testcenter

3) Meyers Brigg Testing: https://www.16personalities.com/free-personality-test <--- Not as great of evidence, but can still be insightful

4) The SAME Profiler from a great book: Springboard : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17707493-springboard.

With these four resources you will have MORE than enough to start to piece together the artifacts that make you uniquely awesome.

What to do now?

You should now have an amalgam of traits that are unique to you. Maybe there's a pattern there? Maybe you trend towards being highly analytical and more on the introverted side. What career would serve those skills well? Maybe accounting or financial analysis? Probably something that could really benefit from a thorough critical thinker. What if you're an extrovert, who has the social prowess of a politician? Maybe a career in sales or account management might be something to look into?

Once you take the steps towards knowing yourself you may develop a more accurate picture of your skill set so you can achieve your goals with laser precision. While the failures in life are great educators and can drive learning, I think there's merit in setting yourself up for success.