all my library blogging

Greetings! To continue my informal series of posts on “finding your thing”, I’d like to talk about…

Not fixating on a single self-knowledge tool

Lots of people are familiar with the Meyers-Briggs inventory and/or the Keirsey Temperament Sorter.  I like these tools, but I worry that it’s easy to fixate on the results to the point where other aspects of your personality fall from your view, resulting in a limited view of yourself.  (This is probably true of most self-discovery tools, which is why I think it’s good to play with more than one.)  For example, I saw this in a former roommate who described himself as a “Textbook ENTP”.  I often wondered if he might be more than that.  I also saw it in myself – despite the fact that my type has changed over the years, when I started regularly testing as INTP, I began to let my type define me the way some people let their horoscopes define them.

I particularly focused on the “T” in my type, which is supposed to mean I am more of a thought-oriented person than a feelings-oriented person.  I came to think of myself as  a very rational person.  I identified with Spock and Data. When I took the Autism, Systematizing, and Empathy Quotient tests (yet even still more self-discovery tools!), my high scores on the AQ and SQ tests and rather low EQ score reinforced this belief. I suppose the “Intellection” result on my StrengthsFinder didn’t help, either.  The jury was in.  I was not ruled by my emotions. I was definitely Not An “F”.

Which is why the next self-discovery tool I’m going to talk about floored me about as much as the StrengthsFinder did.

NeuroLinguistic Programming and finding out how you process information

One of my the people from the #notstrategy call I started following on Twitter, Jason (@metanoid), tweeted a great link about processing information last week. (He also tweeted about the AQ I mentioned above.  He knows good links.)  I learned about how I process information a few years ago when I was seeing a NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP) counselor, Raven Erling in Seattle, and it was another very important discovery about myself.  NLP is a complex topic, but one of the core concepts is that everyone has a primary Representational System – everyone tends to favor one of their senses over the others when interpreting their environment. This is what the processing information link that Jason shared is aimed at helping you discover.

I can still remember what Raven said when I told him I was a very thought-oriented person, and that I did not consider myself very emotional at all:

Raven had a shaved head when I was his client, so he actually did look sort of like that.  =)

Today, I can only assume he was trying really hard not to laugh, because he had already figured out what I hadn’t, which is that my primary modality is Kinesthetic. I understand the world through my body and my feelings before I let any of my other senses have a crack at it.  (Contrast this with being primarily Visual, or primarily Auditory.)

I was pretty shocked when Raven told me this. I didn’t want to believe it, frankly, because I believed so strongly that I was a “T”. It didn’t take me too long to come around, though. I talk with my hands. If I participate in any activity with any risk of physical discomfort, I am guaranteed to notice the physical discomfort. When shopping for clothing, I prioritize comfort over everything else. I love to do work with my hands, like knitting, or assembling IKEA furniture. I can’t not move to music, even when I’m sitting down.  You get the idea.

Raven and I spent a few sessions reconnecting myself to my body and my feelings. My focus on the “T” part of myself meant that I often didn’t even realize when I was feeling something. I was going through a rough transition period at the time, so whenever I was worked up emotionally, Raven would make me stop and check in with myself. Where is the feeling in your body? Is it hot or cold? Is it moving or stationary? is it pulsing?

What I discovered is that, despite my belief that I was thought-driven, I actually had very strong, raw emotions, I just wasn’t able to recognize when I was feeling them.  This meant they could blindside and incapacitate me, I could quickly become overwhelmed with depression or anger without understanding why.  Learning that I am a kinesthete and the NLP work that followed helped me gain more understanding about what’s happening with myself at any given moment and has helped me grow tremendously as an individual.  Not only do I recognize and have better control over my own emotions, I recognize them better in others now as well. It’s also much easier to get information the way you need it when you know how you process it best. It is not something I consciously apply to my professional life (not yet, anyway), like I do with my Input, but I do use it to describe myself.

Ironically, I later learned that my relationship with my own emotions was actually very INTP.  For INTPs, feelings are a “shadow” function that expresses itself in an extraverted and immature way.  Paul James explains some of these characteristics in his extensive INTP Profile.  So, even though I process information kinesthetically, it doesn’t mean I’m not INTP, in fact, it might even reinforce it.  I find it immensely interesting that these two tools ended up complementing each other, when initially it seemed like they were in conflict.

There are lots of books out there about NLP but I’m not going to recommend any of them because I haven’t finished any of the ones I’ve tried to read. The books by the people who created NLP, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, are mostly transcripts of live sessions and can be difficult to follow, and the rest are like Tony Robbins’ stuff (which, hey, if you like him, cool, but I am definitely not his “right people”.). Instead, if you are interested in exploring NLP, I recommend finding a certified counselor in your area and scheduling a couple sessions. If you don’t have any particular issues to discuss and just want to learn more about yourself, you may only need one. NLP has a reputation for not taking a lot of repeated effort, and even people who see NLP counselors with problems to work out tend to get them figured out in only a few weeks. NLP counseling is not something you need to keep doing, unlike a lot of other talk therapy approaches.

That’s all for today!  I’m going to try to post a brief wrap-up tomorrow, perhaps with a few more pointers to tools I know about but haven’t used much personally.  Please share your thoughts and experience in the comments.

Hello again! In this post I’m going to talk about one specific tool that helped me find my thing. Apologies in advance for the length, I did cut a few hundred words but it’s still pretty long.

The StrengthsFinder Inventory and how it changed my life

I hated my first job out of college. It was so bad, I often entertained thoughts of running my car into the median on the highway during my drive home, just to get away from it all. (Thinking about my cats kept me from doing it.)  My self esteem had been so destroyed in this job that I didn’t even feel capable of obtaining a new one.  I was truly, truly stuck.

After I had been there a few years, one of my favorite managers ever, Noel Nyman (who was actually my manager’s manager), gifted a book to his entire team called Now, Discover Your Strengths. Dumb title, but was the first tool that really helped me out of my career rut.

The basic idea is that you have the most room to grow as a person in the areas where you are strongest. Developing natural talents into personal strengths is what makes people happy and productive, and everyone would be better off if we all spent more time working on enhancing our strengths rather than shoring up our weaknesses. Accompanying the book is an online inventory that helps assess what your strengths are, choosing your top five out of a list of 34. The book’s publisher, Gallup, developed the inventory after interviewing tens of thousands of managers in hundreds of companies over a period of several decades, so it’s backed up by considerable research.

Downside note: you have to use a code printed on the inside of the book jacket to access the inventory, which means you need to buy your own copy. But, if you feel like you are at a dead end in your life and are looking to get out of it, I think it is totally worth the price. I received my copy as a gift, but I have gifted copies to several of my friends because of how useful it has been to me.

If you are already well aware of your strengths, this tool will be a waste of time, and I do know people who felt that way about it when they were required to participate in a StrengthsFinder activity at their workplaces. (I disagree with requiring people to take the inventory.) But if you are someone who has placed high priority on being a “well-rounded” individual, the results may be a revelation — they were for me. I tried to guess what the inventory would tell me before I took it and I guessed completely wrong. My top two strengths are something called “Input” and “Intellection”. My reaction was something along the lines of, “What the heck is Input?”

It turns out that people who are strong in Input have a natural talent and tendency for collecting things, especially information, because you never know when you might need it again. The truth of this was immediately apparent to me. I’ve long been someone who processes huge quantities of information on a daily basis, from my childhood as a voracious reader to the internet-addicted adult I am today. But it was never anything I had ever considered among my personal talents! No, these were qualities that made me a lazy daydreamer who surfed the internet all day, keeping me from doing my job. Despite being able to immediately reframe my newly-identified strengths as weaknesses, I was energized. Something told me that the folks at Gallup were right, and I started looking for ways to play to my strengths in my work.

For a while, I tried to use my newfound self-knowledge to make my existing job more tolerable, but I soon concluded that I really was in the wrong role, and that it was time to find a new career, one that suited me better. Prior to finding the StrengthsFinder, coming to this conclusion would have made me feel like a failure, but instead, it gave me the courage and freedom to look for something different.

I didn’t find a new career immediately — I spent a couple years pursuing Technical Writing and Editing before I found my “calling” in Library and Information Science, and it took me a couple years after that to apply to library schools. But today I am a library school graduate with a fledgling information consulting business, a dream whose seed was planted six years ago. I know I would not be here if I hadn’t encountered the StrengthsFinder.

The cool thing about StrengthsFinder is that there are so many strengths, there are millions of combinations of them and you’re unlikely to come up with the same profile as someone else. I also like that it doesn’t try to prescribe you a job. It tells you who you are, but it doesn’t tell you what you should be doing — that part is up to you.

Downsides

I don’t want this to sound like a commercial for the StrengthsFinder so here are some of the things that are not so great about it:

• As mentioned above, you have to buy the book to take the inventory
• They only tell you your top five strengths — it would be nice to see all 34 ranked
• They claim your top five will never change, so they don’t let you take it again

I have actually obtained a second code to take it again and only my top two strengths were unchanged, so I don’t believe the last item.

The StrengthsFinder is based in Strengths Psychology, which is loosely related to the field of Positive Psychology, the brainchild of Martin Seligman. Dr. Seligman discusses similar ideas in his book, Authentic Happiness, but his list of traits are less business-oriented — kindness, humor, gratitude, etc. — and he claims that you can actually develop the traits you’re weaker in, and he has examples from his own life of how he developed his own sense of gratitude. My own experience inclines me to agree and I think the StrengthsFinder would be an even better tool if Gallup acknowledged this.

I should point out that the inventory has been upgraded and the book has been revised since I took it. It’s now called StrengthsFinder 2.0, and it’s possible they’ve addressed some of the issues I raise here.

Other Resources

If you check out the StrengthsFinder and you find it useful, you may also like the book that preceded it, First, Break All the Rules. In it, they discuss how to make workplaces better by helping people play to their strengths. Noel went through this book with his three direct reports before he shared Now, Discover Your Strengths with the rest of his team. I have used the “12 questions” outlined in the first chapter to evaluate every workplace I’ve been in since I read the book.

You can also read the short review I wrote about Now, Discover Your Strengths at LibraryThing.

Have you used the StrengthsFinder?  Did you find it useful, or did it tell you what you already knew?  What strengths did it identify for you? Do they seem accurate or inaccurate? Share your experience in the comments.

Friday, I’ll talk about some more things that helped me figure out who I am.

I was in this awesome call last Wednesday with Havi and Pistachio called The Strategy of Not Being Strategic. I learned a lot about connecting with people on Twitter by being myself, and I met a lot of cool people too.

One thing that came up with several people on the call is the question of knowing what “your thing” is. There was quite a bit of chatter on Twitter about this after the call.

Havi touched on this in her post on Thursday and she’s totally right. We care about you, and your “thing” will naturally arise out of who you are.

But here’s the catch.

Some of us don’t know who we are. Actually, a lot of us don’t.

I certainly didn’t. I thought I did, until I received some gifts that opened my eyes to parts of myself I was overlooking, that I was taking for granted, and that I even considered personal weaknesses.

And — this is HUGE — it turned out that these things were the things that most make me who I am. As such, they were the key to my “thing”.

When you think about it, it shouldn’t be surprising that this happens to people. Consider– how many messages do we get in our lives that we should be striving for goals that other people have set for us? In my case, when I had lost sight of my unique personal talents, it was because I was trying to be the person I thought my parents wanted me to be. (Barbara Sher has some good exercises for untangling and analyzing the web of external demands we all experience in her book, I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was.)

Over the last six years, I think I’ve done a good job of finding my thing and pursuing it.  Since self-discovery is one of my favorite subjects ever, I thought I’d write up a post about the tools that helped me figure out who I am and what my thing is, and hopefully help others figure out how to figure it out in the process, particularly my new friends from the #notstrategy call.  

Except it turns out I had a ton to say and the first draft was way too long for a single post, so it’s going to be a few posts. This one is just a teaser, sorry. =)

In the meantime, I’d like to give others a crack at offering advice.  Has anyone reading this ever discovered part of themselves that was hiding from view? What self-discovery tools have helped you? I invite you to share your thoughts in the comments.

I updated the WordPress theme today to something even more minimal than the Hemmed theme I was using.  (This theme is “Blass2″.)  I may customize the colors a bit, but for now, this feels much better.

Blogging is going to be light until I can build up an inventory of content to sustain me for a while.  I have a list of posts I want to write, once I have a few written I am going to start posting them on a schedule.  At the moment, I am thinking I will post something original on Tuesdays and share an interesting link from my library blogroll on Thursdays.  We’ll see how that works out.  My goal is to start posting on schedule in June.