If Only People Came With Labels...

Idly surfing Amazon, looking at hardcover books way too expensive for me to splurge on all at once. Mostly on leadership, management and knowing one's own strengths to focus on for self-improvement, instead of just trying to repair weaknesses.

Remembered an ancient book called, "Now, Discover Your Strengths" that I bought in college. Spent a dusty hour trying to locate it in my cupboards. Finally found it. Figured out email used to take the personality test *hem* StrengthsFinder Profile (TM) and recalled password to log in.

Being a snotty once-only kind of thing, I couldn't retake the test again for fun, but I did pull up the report on my Signature Themes:

Many years of research conducted by The Gallup Organization suggest that the most effective people are those who understand their strengths and behaviors. These people are best able to develop strategies to meet and exceed the demands of their daily lives, their careers, and their families.

A review of the knowledge and skills you have acquired can provide a basic sense of your abilities, but an awareness and understanding of your natural talents will provide true insight into the core reasons behind your consistent successes.

Your Signature Themes report presents your five most dominant themes of talent, in the rank order revealed by your responses to StrengthsFinder. Of the 34 themes measured, these are your "top five."

Your Signature Themes are very important in maximizing the talents that lead to your successes. By focusing on your Signature Themes, separately and in combination, you can identify your talents, build them into strengths, and enjoy personal and career success through consistent, near-perfect performance.


Ideation
You are fascinated by ideas. What is an idea? An idea is a concept, the best explanation of the most events. You are delighted when you discover beneath the complex surface an elegantly simple concept to explain why things are the way they are. An idea is a connection. Yours is the kind of mind that is always looking for connections, and so you are intrigued when seemingly disparate phenomena can be linked by an obscure connection. An idea is a new perspective on familiar challenges. You revel in taking the world we all know and turning it around so we can view it from a strange but strangely enlightening angle. You love all these ideas because they are profound, because they are novel, because they are clarifying, because they are contrary, because they are bizarre. For all these reasons you derive a jolt of energy whenever a new idea occurs to you. Others may label you creative or original or conceptual or even smart. Perhaps you are all of these. Who can be sure? What you are sure of is that ideas are thrilling. And on most days this is enough.

Input
You are inquisitive. You collect things. You might collect information—words, facts, books, and quotations—or you might collect tangible objects such as butterflies, baseball cards, porcelain dolls, or sepia photographs. Whatever you collect, you collect it because it interests you. And yours is the kind of mind that finds so many things interesting. The world is exciting precisely because of its infinite variety and complexity. If you read a great deal, it is not necessarily to refine your theories but, rather, to add more information to your archives. If you like to travel, it is because each new location offers novel artifacts and facts. These can be acquired and then stored away. Why are they worth storing? At the time of storing it is often hard to say exactly when or why you might need them, but who knows when they might become useful? With all those possible uses in mind, you really don’t feel comfortable throwing anything away. So you keep acquiring and compiling and filing stuff away. It’s interesting. It keeps your mind fresh. And perhaps one day some of it will prove valuable.

Deliberative
You are careful. You are vigilant. You are a private person. You know that the world is an unpredictable place. Everything may seem in order, but beneath the surface you sense the many risks. Rather than denying these risks, you draw each one out into the open. Then each risk can be identified, assessed, and ultimately reduced. Thus, you are a fairly serious person who approaches life with a certain reserve. For example, you like to plan ahead so as to anticipate what might go wrong. You select your friends cautiously and keep your own counsel when the conversation turns to personal matters. You are careful not to give too much praise and recognition, lest it be misconstrued. If some people don’t like you because you are not as effusive as others, then so be it. For you, life is not a popularity contest. Life is something of a minefield. Others can run through it recklessly if they so choose, but you take a different approach. You identify the dangers, weigh their relative impact, and then place your feet deliberately. You walk with care.

Command
Command leads you to take charge. Unlike some people, you feel no discomfort with imposing your views on others. On the contrary, once your opinion is formed, you need to share it with others. Once your goal is set, you feel restless until you have aligned others with you. You are not frightened by confrontation; rather, you know that confrontation is the first step toward resolution. Whereas others may avoid facing up to life’s unpleasantness, you feel compelled to present the facts or the truth, no matter how unpleasant it may be. You need things to be clear between people and challenge them to be clear-eyed and honest. You push them to take risks. You may even intimidate them. And while some may resent this, labeling you opinionated, they often willingly hand you the reins. People are drawn toward those who take a stance and ask them to move in a certain direction. Therefore, people will be drawn to you. You have presence. You have Command.

Intellection
You like to think. You like mental activity. You like exercising the “muscles” of your brain, stretching them in multiple directions. This need for mental activity may be focused; for example, you may be trying to solve a problem or develop an idea or understand another person’s feelings. The exact focus will depend on your other strengths. On the other hand, this mental activity may very well lack focus. The theme of Intellection does not dictate what you are thinking about; it simply describes that you like to think. You are the kind of person who enjoys your time alone because it is your time for musing and reflection. You are introspective. In a sense you are your own best companion, as you pose yourself questions and try out answers on yourself to see how they sound. This introspection may lead you to a slight sense of discontent as you compare what you are actually doing with all the thoughts and ideas that your mind conceives. Or this introspection may tend toward more pragmatic matters such as the events of the day or a conversation that you plan to have later. Wherever it leads you, this mental hum is one of the constants of your life.

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I find it surprisingly accurate for these sorts of profiles. With 34 themes, the top 5 would tend to be more individualized than trying to stuff all types of people into 16 boxes like the MBTI does.

And because I have a certain fondness for these sorts of conceptual ways of looking at and understanding people, I often wish that the people around me came nicely labelled with all these different profiles.

People kinda perplex me just looking at them and trying to read their body language. I'm so self-focused anyway and introspective that I have very little clue (or interest, to be brutally honest) what they're thinking. Though I do think it would help me understand them better if I did know them as combinations of these profiles.

Too bad the people I'm really interested in figuring out won't share or have any interest filling these sorts of things out.

My entire workplace did the MBTI as part of one workshop. Unfortunately, the only people whose MBTIs I managed to find out were my closest colleagues and friends - unsurprisingly, most of them were INTPs or INTJs. Duh. No doubt that's why we liked to hang together in the first place, cos we saw the world in the same way.

The other less close colleagues who cared to share what kind of other strange combination ESwhatever, I have to admit that I callously just shrugged mentally and quickly forgot whatever the heck they were cos they weren't close anyway.

I am still deathly curious as to what the heck personalities my supervisor and my boss are, mostly because it may make trying to figure out the appropriate approach less alien guesswork, but it's not exactly the kind of thing you can come out and ask, eh?

And I would seriously kill to find out what everybody's Top 5 Strengths are, because that would make figuring out what they're good at and value doing and should be asked to work on SO MUCH EASIER.

But no...our dysfunctional little family is broke (in the poor sense, not the broken sense, though that is true too), so we will never get to do one of these Gallup tests on a corporate level. Thus we will continue to waffle around in our little oblivious bubbles, cheerfully noncommunicating with each other.

Grrr.

We need some sort of expert consultant. Except they don't come cheap. And Singaporean consultants tend to be eyebrow-raising, in a bad way. Perhaps it's just what happens when you always take the lowest bidder. Good enough for gahmen work.

Blah.