The 5 Self-Assessments I Do Before Goal-Setting
Before you can write your life story, you have to get to know your main character really, really well. Personality assessments provide a consistent, reliable way to get to know yourself before you make a major life change or take a big leap.
Every wise explorer carries something to navigate by.
Especially if what you’re exploring is yourself.
Whenever I’m planning to make a major shift or a significant life change, I carve out time for a little self-exploration beforehand.
Why?
When I’m do something that doesn’t look like it makes sense to others, I have to be pretty sure of myself and the ‘big whys’ behind my big leap or big shift.
A few of the ‘senseless’ things I’ve done in the past:
Quit my ‘good corporate job’ as a management consultant to invest in real estate
Quit my ‘good corporate job’ as an IT project manager to become a freelance writer
Quit my ‘good corporate job’ as a content strategist to move to Spain and teach English
And I recently quit my ‘good corporate job’ to start following my purpose.
After 4 years of working in an environment that tested my self-confidence and my commitment to my personal values, I knew I needed to spend some time getting reacquainted with myself without the constant stress and anxiety that comes with being in a situation or environment that is just not the right fit.
I turned to several personality assessments - some I’d taken before, some I hadn’t - to help me dig deep and really put some effort into my answers to the questions:
‘Who Am I?’
and,
‘Why Am I Here?’
Answering these questions allow me to enter my life planning or goal-setting process with clarity. Not just clarity about what I want - i.e., what I want to accomplish, what I want to have more of, what I want to have less of - but clarity about who I am now, who I am becoming, and what will help me bridge the gap between the two.
Having the answers to these questions gives me the essential ingredients I need to begin writing my life story. To assume the role of the hero in my own story. To stop waiting for external achievement, relationship or reward to make me feel complete or valued.
I believe that each of us was sent to the world at the exact time we were born because we have a mission to complete. Some call that mission destiny, others call it purpose. But whatever you call it, it’s this driving force that will really help us feel fulfilled in life versus only feeling accomplished.
To make sure I get the maximum value out of these personality assessments, I developed a process of extracting the most meaningful bits of each assessment and using them as inputs to:
Defining my life story’s main character
Creating the outline for my life story
As with life, it’s not just about the results of the test, but what you do with those results that matters most.
Below are the 5 personality assessments I use before I begin life planning or goal-setting. For more details on how I use each assessment, and how I create my Declaration of Self and my Life Value Map from the results, click each link to explore further.
My 5 Go-To Self-Assessments:
Natal chart
Typefinder (aka, Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator)
Enneagram
Life Values Inventory
StrengthsFinder
The Life Planning Outputs I Create from My Self-Assessments:
Declaration of Self
Life Value Map
Does your job define you? 4 Questions to ask yourself.
One of my colleagues pulled me aside a few days before my first corporate exit and gave me a good word: ‘This place didn’t make you who you are.’
I seem to have made a habit of leaving good jobs.
The first good job I left was 15+ years ago. It was my first job out of college, and it had taught me everything I knew about business in the real world. One of my then-colleagues, a member of the group I’d secretly dubbed my SOWs (Successful Older Women), pulled me aside a few days before my exit and gave me a good word: ‘This place didn’t make you who you are.’
It was perhaps the best parting gift I could have received.
Jobs take up a huge part of our lives. When people ask who we are, we often respond with an answer that describes what we do to make money. It is very easy, then, to begin to associate your worth, value, degree of success, your you-ness with the job you have. Especially when others around you continually re-affirm that by saying things like,
About your decision to leave: “Why would you ever leave that good job?”
About your working a non-traditional job or freelancing: “You’re not working a real job now, so you must have tons of free time.”
About your side project or self-imposed time off: “That sounds great, but when are you going to get back to work?”
For some, having a job that defines them is a perfectly acceptable state of affairs. But, if you have a worry or growing fear that you’ve lost yourself in your job and want to change that, ask yourself these questions to start:
What are you doing for yourself outside of what’s required for your job to help you learn, grow, and be of service to those around you?
How are you investing in yourself in ways that are not solely tied to how you can be a better worker or employee?
What personal goals and desires are you postponing because they interfere or conflict with your job?
What other social circles or communities do you belong to that represent who you are and offer a place for you to contribute?
The work of understanding yourself, defining yourself for yourself and finding ways to express yourself and improve upon how you engage with the world is continual. It’s this work that has helped me realize both my innate value and my very specific uniqueness. Armed with this self-awareness, I’m less hesitant to leave a so-called good job, and less receptive to questions from those who question why I would.
Once you make the commitment to work on yourself as your primary work… you come to realize 2 very important facts:
No job or title can give or take away the value you bring to the table.
You. Are the secret formula.
Practical Lessons for Thriving in Corporate America
Using the geisha as metaphor, I share lessons from my 20+ year career as a management consultant in a series of poignant and insightful essays.
The experienced corporate worker will relate to these narrative slices of consulting and corporate life. Those new to corporate life will find indispensable jewels of wisdom to help propel their careers to the next level.
When No One Knows The Way: 5 Steps To Make Your Mission Statement A Way Of Working
My client’s disappointed that the team hasn’t adopted or isn’t fully aware of the organization’s mission. How, she wonders, can she get her team to not only know what the mission is, but live it everyday?
Management Issue:
My client has been in her role as lead of her team for the past year or so. She’s put a good deal of her efforts into strengthening the team culture and creating a more collaborative and client-focused mindset within her department.
At the beginning of the year, she worked with other members of the organization’s executive team to develop a mission statement for her department. Shortly after it was finished, she proudly shared the new mission with the team in a town hall style meeting. Months later, she’s dismayed at how few people on the team have grasped the mission – she randomly polled a few of her staff about the mission statement a few days ago, and some didn’t even know that a mission statement existed!
Naturally, she’s disappointed that the team hasn’t adopted or isn’t fully aware of the mission. How, she wonders, can she get her team to not only know what the mission is, but live it everyday?
***
Training your team on your organization’s mission statement is not a once-and-done activity. Many organizational leaders put a great deal of effort and thought into the creation of their company or department mission statement, carefully crafting each word until it conveys a message that both inspires and succinctly describes what the organization does.
But once the hard work of creating the mission statement is done, the task of getting employees to learn and embody the words of the mission statement is the next big hurdle – one might rightfully conclude that this is the hardest work of all.
As a result, mission statements often end up being treated as canned corporate speak or a motivational poster without real-life impact. Organizations who move beyond this mindset and successfully instill the mission into their employees are poised to experience profound shifts in organizational culture.
So how do they do it? Here’s one approach for taking your company’s mission statement from words to action.
From Mission To Action
5 Steps to Turn Your Organization’s Mission Statement into a Way of Working
Step 1: De-construct the mission statement
Take action phrases from the mission statement and develop both marketing and training materials around them. Do the same for adjectives and descriptor words.
Step 2: Create marketing and training materials
Suggested marketing materials:
Wall posters of the mission statement with action phrases or descriptors highlighted and explained
3D toys, puzzles, games, figurines, etc. that demonstrate the action phrases or descriptors in some way or have action phrases or descriptors printed on them
Suggested training materials:
Self-directed eLearning modules – a la the security essentials training
Recorded video presentation of a member of leadership explaining the mission and its importance
Animated explainer videos
Step 3: Include mission statement in required annual training
Require that each employee attend an annual introduction or refresher training that includes or exclusively focuses on the mission statement. Require the training to be completed within the first 30 days of employment for new hires and once a year for existing employees.
Step 4: Provide and promote ongoing experiences
When launching a new or modified mission statement, provide 2-3 experiential learning activities or sessions within 6 weeks of revealing the new mission statement. Experiential training should be designed to create ‘a-ha’ moments that allow participants to act and reflect on the concepts of the mission statement.
After each training session or after all sessions are completed, recommend and regularly encourage activities for your team to continue ‘living the mission’, including:
Book clubs – read and discuss business-related books that focus on the action phrases and descriptors in the mission statement
Internal improvement projects - suggest and work on internal-facing improvement initiatives that embody the concepts of the action phrases and descriptors in the mission statement
Community service projects - plan and participate in external activities and hands-on projects that embody the concepts of the action phrases and descriptors in the mission statement
Informal social groups - encourage small group participation in fun, social activities that are aligned with or themed with the action phrases and descriptors of the mission statement
Step 5: Encourage and reward demonstration of the mission in action
Create a rewards and recognition program to identify, recognize and reward projects or teams that have demonstrated the action phrases and descriptors highlighted in Step 1. Be sure to focus rewards and recognition primarily or exclusively on team and group efforts, not individuals. This will serve to encourage teamwork, asking for help, collaborating and having shared experiences; and will discourage isolation, ‘hero’ behavior or the tendency to ‘pick favorites’.
Further reading:
https://blog.clickboarding.com/how-to-improve-employee-engagement-make-the-mission-clear
Kisha Solomon is an Atlanta-based writer, knowledge worker and serial expat. She writes witty, poignant stories about the lessons she’s learned from her life, work and travels. She deals with the sometimes frustrating and often humorous side effects of being black, female and nerdy. When she’s not writing working or travelling, you can find her in deep conversation with herself or her four-legged familiar, Taurus the Cat.
the superglue - my first taste of project management
One of the most interesting jobs I had was when I worked at a busy coffee shop in Midtown Atlanta. My coworkers were a diverse cast of characters from all kinds of backgrounds, and our customers were an often amusing mix of discerning coffee snobs and folks who just needed their morning cup of joe.
Each morning when I came into work, I was given a different position to play. Some days I’d be the cashier – keying in transactions and filling pastry and drip brew orders, other times I’d be the barista – creating all of the fancy espresso-based beverages. But my favorite team role was a position called the Superglue.
The Superglue was so named because it was the position that, quite literally, held it all together. If the cashier was out of change, the Superglue would go get it. If the barista was low on 2% milk, the Superglue would refresh the supply, so the barista could keep serving up the espresso. If the line got especially long, the Superglue would first get the queue formed in an orderly fashion, then start pre-filling orders so customers wouldn’t be too delayed. If there was a lull in the action, the Superglue would do a quick interim cleaning of the work area to make sure the back of the house remained presentable.
Unlike the cashier or the barista, the Superglue wasn’t assigned any one specific task, but assisted with all of them. I guess you could say that the Superglue’s one task was to make sure that all the other tasks were performed as efficiently as possible with maximum support to the team and minimal displeasure to the customer. I didn’t know it then, but by ‘playing Superglue’, I was getting my first taste of project management.
As a project manager you don’t really do any one thing, but you must be reasonably skilled at or have a deep understanding of everything that all the other players on the team do. You also have to possess a certain empathy for the customer, being able to see through their eyes and respond to their needs no matter how sophisticated or simple those needs may be. Like the Superglue, a good project manager is an enabler that has the ability to support a diverse set of personalities, and respond to ever-changing needs while making sure that the quality of the process isn’t compromised.
And like the Superglue, you usually end up consuming a lot of coffee when no one’s looking.
a conversation before takeoff
Flying a Kuwaiti airline from Spain to Greece. I find it somewhat comforting that the airline plays an Arabic prayer over the PA system before takeoff. I always say a small prayer before any major travel... for protection, for smooth arrival, for the flight crew, for new insights... and Arabic prayers are like musical meditations to me. My seatmate, a young Gaditano, reveals to me later that he (and i think everyone else on board) was freaked out when it started playing.
”Is this some kinda joke? Are we about to end up in Egypt or the Middle East?” he says.
We laugh about it. I assure him that the prayer is common for airlines based in Muslim countries. “Ahhhh!” he says. Its his first time traveling out of the country. I smile broadly and congratulate him.
“It’s good to travel. You have to travel a lot, especially while you’re young. Its like an education.”
He looks genuinely confused by that statement. '“Como?” he inquires.
“Well...” I say, (while thinking to myself, ‘Bruh. Didn’t you just learn something? And we ain’t even off the ground yet!’) “How do i know what I’ve been told about the world is true unless i go out and see for myself? Go to new places and learn about the people there, their language, their food, their music. Their... prayers?”
A light is slowly dawning in him. He tells me that he’s studying psychology. That he also plays flamenco guitar. He shows me a video of him playing. He’s good. And he has a smoldering intensity for someone so young. “But flamenco isn’t valued much in Spain,” he tells me.
”Ah, cuz there’s lots of people who can play?”
Yep.
”Well, that’s even more reason to travel. People love flamenco outside of Spain, but they usually can’t hear or see it live where they are. In my country, se flippan!”
He stops and repeats what I said, then cracks up laughing at my use of the colloquialism. We continue talking, I tell him he should try to find other musicians on social media who play similar music or who would like to learn more about flamenco. Invite them to come crash at your place if you have extra room, offer to teach the something about flamenco and ask if they’d be willing to do the same for you when you visit their countries. Ask if they would mind introducing you to their network of other musicians and music learners. Post videos of you playing on your Instagram, Facebook, etc. Use what you know to take you where you want to go.
He ponders this for a few moments.
“That idea would never have occurred to me,” he muses aloud. “It’s like you said, you learn things when you travel and talk to other people who have experienced a lot.”
I nod. This sobrino is starting to get it. I pray that he does.
