Personal Evaluation

This week in several of my classes, we have been working with self-evaluation and self awareness through different "strengths" and personality tests.  I have always found these incredibly interesting, even though I've felt it to be a bit overkill this week, but I'm ok with that.  So I thought I'd share a little bit about some of these tests.

1) Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

   -Ok, so this is not one that we have done in class, but it is one of my favorite.  This test asks you a series of about 60 questions- some of which seem repetitive, but they are all yes or no, so it makes it go by very quickly.  Your results of this test come out as 4 letters which each stand for something.  The "choices" of letters include:  a) Extraversion vs Introversion (E/I)  b) Sensing vs Intuition (S/N)   c) Thinking vs Feeling (T/F) and  d) Judging vs Perception (J/P)   My result for this test is ENTJ (Although when I took it in High School I got INTJ)  Because many people have had access to this test and have evaluated it, there are a lot of sites which evaluate how your personality result will relate to other personality results, which to me, is the most interesting part of it. 

2) Social Styles (Merrill & Reed)

   -If I remember right, this test asks you to assign a rating/preference to particular tasks and skills under certain situations and will then assign which "Social Style" you are most similar to.  The choices are Driver, Expressive, Analytical, and Amiable. My result was as a Driver- which means I'm more likely to take action on a given task than be concerned about the human element.  

3) Strength Deployment Inventory (Porter)

   -The Strength Deployment Inventory begins by having you consider 2 situations- one time when a situation is going well, and another time when a situation is going badly.  It asks you specific questions about how likely you are to react in each of these situations which you respond to with a points value- 10 points that you divide between the different situations and you add up the point value at the bottom of a column.  The numbers on each column allow you to graph your "motivational" score on a triangle graph divided between 3 colors (which you can be a combination of).  For instance, mine came out as Red-Green meaning Judicious- Competing.  A second score shows how you are more likely to react under stress.





Overall, these tests serve different purposes, and help make you more self-aware as you are working with others, which is useful in many different situations.  If you get a chance to take one of these assessments in your organization or classes, don't ignore the results!  They're useful across many parts of your life!