What is your personality type? What skills do you have?
There are certain preliminary activities you must take to lay the groundwork to achieve your dreams, set goals, and live your best life. Let’s look at what I believe are the top six:
Have a desire to change or to achieve more.
Believe you, personally, can change or achieve what you want.
Decide what you want.
Develop a plan that includes realistic, tangible goals (not objectives) with timelines to achieve what you want. Your goals must be tempered with your current reality.
Take action. Accept that there is a risk when you change.
Stick with your plan when things are going well and when they are not. Most achievement comes in times of difficulty. Success often comes to those who stay the course and don’t give up too early.
Notice that steps 1, 2, 3, and 6 are not tangible things to do but rather mindset issues. Before you do anything at all, you must decide that you want to change or achieve, you must have the desire, and you must believe you can. Point one is simple. I suspect you desire to change or improve as you are taking this course, or continuing to read these posts, to do so. My question is, how strong is your desire?
Point 2 is a little more difficult and entails choosing to overcome any past obstacles or biases, think positively, and move ahead. There are some links and references in the notes section, and I encourage you to view those. You CAN overcome anything from your past with enough willpower and perhaps some outside help. Remember when I mentioned sometimes you need outside help? This may be one of those cases.
I am going to help you with Points 3 and 4. Points 5 and 6 are on you but I would like to say that success comes to those who are willing to take a calculated risk and those who don’t give up but stick with it when things are hard after everyone else has quit.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch
That is why there is a small cost for this course. People perceive that something free does not have value. Value is perceived to be related to the cost of something and in many cases this is true. Athletics is one example of a high-cost item. So is education and professional success. You have a stake in a successful outcome by paying with your time and money. Everything worthwhile in life has a cost. Everything. This is what entrepreneurship is. This is why the most successful people are entrepreneurs who have worked hard and overcome the odds to be successful.
Now, I would be remiss if I did not mention what we all know to be true and that is the best things in life are free. Typically, this refers to intangible items such as love, time spent with those we care about, and living life on our own terms. I certainly believe this to be true, but these are intangible things we are not talking about here.
What’s your personality type?
OK, let’s move on. I don’t need to tell you that each person has their own unique personality type. Or more accurately we each have a combination of four basic personality types. If you are a parent with children, you know this to be true. I’ve often stated myself, and heard others say something to the effect of “It’s hard to believe that child came from me, he/she is so different!” It’s generally accepted that there are four basic personality types and each type has its own traits. As I mentioned typically each of us is some unique combination of these four basic types and are generally annotated by a letter (Note 1). Let’s look at them:
Type A is called the Director. They are goal-oriented, operate well under stress, and are risk-takers.
Type B is known as the Socializer. They are outgoing, enthusiastic and relationship orientated.
Type C is The Thinker. They are logical and detail-oriented.
Type D is the Supporter. They are cautious but task-oriented and tend to have a stabilizing effect.
Which one of these is your dominant type? Absolutely zero question I am a strong Type A. There are a number of different tests that can help you determine or otherwise help you determine your personality type and what your traits are. As part of my professional development at work, I was able to take several different tests. Here are a few, see the link in the notes section to learn more:
DISC (Note 2)
Myers-Briggs (Note 3)
Enneagram (Note 4)
Hogan (Note 5)
Coreiq (Note 6)
ASVAB (Note 7)
I have taken all of these assessments and what I will tell you is that all of them are shockingly accurate. Most of these assessments have a cost associated with them and there is specialized training required for the people who interpret the results. This is how it should be, you don’t just want to go off on a tangent and not know for certain what the results are. The same as you want a skilled plumber, electrician, or HVAC person working on your home. The enneagram is something you can take on your own and if you want to, click on the link below to learn more about it.
All these tests are designed to help you understand what kind of person you are and where you may need additional training. For example, if you are a leader, it’s good to know you are decisive. If you are a mathematician, it would pay to be logical. In all cases, the goal is to either place you where you have the best likelihood of success or identify deficiencies you may need to work on. If you ever decide you want to enlist in the military, you will take the ASVAB and your results will likely determine what kind of military specialty you can be assigned to.
I may have mentioned that my wife and I are small group leaders at our church. One day, the church provided a leadership seminar for all the small group leaders where they brought in a gentleman named Dr. Robert Rohm of Personality Insights (Note 8). As part of the seminar, we went through a very basic DISC assessment with a large group of about 200 people. In the beginning, Dr. Rohm asked a series of four questions. After each question, if you answered in the positive, you were asked to stand in one corner of the room. After the fourth question, there were four groups of people, one in each corner. One thing immediately stood out. That was that very typically the husband was standing in one corner, the wife in another. It was mostly men in one or two groups, and mostly women in the others. It was very rare that both spouses were in the same corner. Remember I said the training was for small group leaders that were, mostly, husband and wife teams. Dr. Rohm then went on to teach about the general personality of each type and to no one’s surprise, the outcome was that opposites, as in husbands and wives, attract.
I happen to believe there is no greater power on the earth than the power of a man and a woman in a committed marital relationship. While they typically are different, as Dr. Rohm’s test proved, because they both have different strengths and weaknesses, they are complementary as well. One picks up for the other and combined, the power is not just added, but it is exponential! Children who are part of families like this are big beneficiaries as I mentioned in a previous post. Indeed, complete societies benefit from strong family units. Some of you may disagree with me on this point and that’s OK, we each are entitled to our opinions.
What skills do you have?
Along with knowing and understanding our personality type, it’s good to know what skills we possess. Now I’m not talking about people who are butchers, doctors, or construction workers but skills you inherently possess due to your upbringing, experiences, or just your personality type. These are generally broken down into four types:
Hard skills are related competencies necessary to perform a job. Hard skills typically are considered technical skills and are defined as specific abilities or capabilities that an individual possesses and can be demonstrated or measured. Examples include, but are not limited to, engineering, finance, sales, and any of the trades such as plumbing, electrician, etc.
Soft skills are non-technical skills typically thought of as the ability to interact effectively. Soft skills are personal qualities and traits such as social, emotional, and behavioral skills that affect how you perform a job. Examples include, but are not limited to, communication, emotional intelligence, leadership, time management, and teamwork.
Cognitive skills are functions your brain uses to think, pay attention, process information, and remember things. Typically, these skills are associated with mental functions. Cognitive skills decline is part of the normal aging process. Examples include, but are not limited to, attention, memory, and logical reasoning.
Character skills are individual qualities that makeup one’s overall character. Character skills are the skills that allow us to advance and achieve more than just a set of hard skills. It is thought that character skills can continue to be built as we age. Examples include, but are not limited to, hard-working, positive, focused, accountable, energetic, motivated, and disciplined.
Herb Kelleher was the co-founder of Southwest Airlines and he was famous for saying “Hire for attitude, train for skill.” Southwest was famous for their early year group interviews where they asked the group to solve a problem and looked for the team players in the group.
As a leader, I always want to hire a 10. This would be a person who has all the skills listed above. However, I typically end up hiring a six or seven. Many people do not have the education or hard skills they desire. In my experience, what can overcome this deficit is an abundant quantity of character skills. As we just noted, character skills can be learned and improved over time. While you may not be able to go back to school and get a degree, or learn computer programming, you can compensate by improving your character skills to the point you become more valuable than if you had only hard skills. That’s an extremely important concept so let it sink in.
This tells me and should tell you, that if you want to overcome any past obstacles or deficits, work on your character skills.
The perfect six. Or maybe seven
If you are observant, you will have noticed I just gave you some valuable information that will be helpful in your career. What was that? I mentioned that as a leader, I always desired to hire a ten. This would be someone who exactly possessed all of the requirements listed as part of the job description. If you’ve ever read a job description or a job posting, you quickly come to the conclusion that very few people are able to meet all of the requirements. The second important piece of information you just learned is that leaders often settle for someone with about 60 to 70% of the desired skills listed in the job description or job posting. “Well Dave, what does that mean for me, anyway?” What it means to you is that absent a few job descriptions that may be written around the skills of a particular applicant (yes, that happens sometimes), your takeaway is that most applicants are not perfectly qualified for any job and there is plenty of room for the well-prepared candidate to be successful. This includes a lot of hard work and plenty of pre-interview activities, a well-conducted interview, and post-interview tasks. I’ve mentioned before that I have hired a lot of people over the years, participated in many panel interviews, and now volunteer with a fine group of folks who help those currently in job transition, so I feel reasonably qualified that what I am telling you is true. As you seek increased responsibility throughout your career, these are the kinds of lessons that will help you be successful.
So what does all of this mean, anyway? To me, it’s another one of those “It’s simple, just not easy” things. Our individual success is up to us and us alone. We can’t blame others or stick our heads in the sand and not learn what skills we have and don’t have. We must look in the mirror and provide a proper assessment of ourselves. You may even need to pay someone to provide that assessment, but most likely if you have a good mentor, they can give you excellent feedback. Even if life treated us poorly or we have been wronged in the past unless we do something ourselves, we will not get the things in life we want.
Aristotle once said, “Our problem is not that we aim too high and miss, but that we aim too low and hit.”
Today, let’s pull up our pants, tighten our belts, and learn all we can about ourselves. Taking a good self-assessment of ourselves is the basis of growing, learning, and achieving. Do it today!
What’s in it for Me
One of our mottos at Afterburner Success Partners is we get you from here to there. How far that journey is, is different for each person. In all cases, it requires us to accurately assess where we are today and use that as a starting position to get there. If you are honest with yourself, you will take the time to understand your personality and skills gap and use that as a platform to achieve your dreams. And live your best life!
Call to Action
As a result of understanding your personality type and what your current skills are, consider if you are in the right career. If you are an elementary school teacher but you are impatient with children, you probably need to consider if you are in the correct job. Not being happy at work will definitely hinder you from living up to your full career, and thus, financial, potential.
Recommended Resources
Purchase and read the book (Note 9)
Up Next
The developing and achieving goals process.
Notes
Please note that as an Amazon Affiliate, I may earn a small commission on the sale of any of these recommended resources.
https://www.hiresuccess.com/help/understanding-the-4-personality-types
https://www.themyersbriggs.com/en-US/Campaigns/All-About-the-MBTI-Assessment
https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/how-the-enneagram-system-works/
What Got You Here Won’t Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith: https://amzn.to/3Uc9xpE