Step Three: Discover Your Personality

Discover Your Personality

For the past few weeks, I have been giving my readers the opportunity to actively engage in completing my “Personal Leadership Development Plan“. The plan is based on my coaching model, which I have developed over the last 20 years. It’s also the basis for my course at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. It utilizes my books: Self Aware: A Guide to Success in Work and Life, and the Journal for Self Aware.

Step Three: Discover Your Personality

Personality is a characteristic that has been studied extensively by psychologists over the last several decades. Research has defined five aspects of personality. Click here to learn more about the “Big Five” personality traits. They are:

Openness to Experience – do you prefer change to the status quo?
Conscientiousness (work ethic) – are you organized and disciplined?
Extraversion – do you enjoy meeting and interacting with new people? Do you recharge yourself socially or alone?
Agreeableness – are you accommodating or firm?
Natural Reactions – are you relaxed and calm or excitable/anxious?

These big five personality spectra are often described by their acronym, OCEAN.

Your Reflection

For each of these, where do you feel you are on a range of high/middle/low?
Through relatively quick assessments, it is now possible to understand your personality. However, is it important to recognize that these assessments depend on information which comes directly from the individual taking the assessment. Since human beings are notoriously poor at understanding themselves, these personalities have a severe limitation. They are describing the individual solely based on input from the individual.

Follow this link to a take a free questionnaire to better understand your personality . It is also important to include feedback from others. Fill in the OCEAN test results on your personal development plan.

I also will be offering a 4 session, two hour monthly workshop from September through December for the people who wish to dive deeper into their professional development. It will be offered in two versions: