December 24, 2019 | by David March.
When it comes to job hunting and finding your true work, you have to understand yourself first and foremost. In the words of Carl Jung – “The self is infinite and full of untapped potential; it contains all the unconscious aspects of the psyche and the conscious aspects of it too.
The First Step of Job Hunting
It is important to understand yourself as an individual, separate from the collective society. Once you get an understanding of yourself and your personality, you can more easily find your place in society and have that dream career.
Knowing your personality type can help you to:
- Be more responsible to yourself, to others, and to prospective employers,
- Be more independent and free,
- Feel more conscious and in control of your life, and
- Become more connected, real, and authentic.
Your individual self is special because it is where you get your originality and creativity from. It is the storehouse of your strengths, your personality, as well as character traits. Thus, knowing yourself becomes an integrating starting point for knowing all others. It can also hint to how you can provide value and benefit to others during your career search.
Your Mask or Your Authentic Self?
In many cases, I believe our individual self is hidden behind a mask we wear for society. Carl Jung, a Swiss Psychologist which was a prolific writer in and around 1923 in psychology, would call this mask a “Persona”. At times, this mask is thick and gets stuck in our lives. As a result, it becomes difficult to take it off and reveal your authentic self.
An interesting yet counter-intuitive and entertaining way to understand this Jungian concept is by referencing the movie, The Mask which stars Jim Carrey. It’s interesting and counter-intuitive because it’s the exact opposite of the concept I am explaining.
Jim Carey’s character did not hide behind the mask in the sense that he buried himself in it and did not show his emotions. Just the opposite, in fact it released him. He showed his wild side. It made him seem risky, fearless, and able to talk with anyone. Effectively, he was releasing his inhibitions when he wore the mask.
Why Do We Wear Masks?
Masks serve many purposes. I believe the persona or mask we wear for collective society CONCEALS a part of our true self. When this happens we lose our self in the mask we show to others. Therefore, what we need to do is recapture our own individual self and become whole. Like a rare and precious mineral beneath bedrock, it takes some time and trouble to separate the individual spirit from the persona; it takes careful mining and digging within you to find each jewel in its own right.
This process of looking within could look like dropping friends that don’t serve you, fighting the inner dragons within you, or going through the pain necessary to ask oneself critical questions pertaining to what makes you happy. By going through this reflection process you will then rediscover the work that is meaningful to you.
Personality Assessments Before You Start Job Hunting
To assist in this reflection and individuation process of finding your true work, there are many personality assessments that could be used as tools for your reflection.
To list a few, there are:
- Strength Finders 2.0, a Talent assessment from the minds of Donald Clifton, Tom Rath and the team at Gallup,
- David Keirsey’s Temperment Sorter,
- Kathy Kolbe’s Instincts assessment, the Kolbe, and
- the MBTI better known as the Myers-Briggs assessment which was created from Carl Jung’s work on Psychological types.
It is important to note that all these assessments are both statically valid and reliable with more than 20+ years of research behind them in some cases 40+ years. The authors of these assessments all wanted to initiate a conversation more on what’s right with people. Moving the conversation away from the field of psychology that focuses on disorders like the ones seen in the DSM-IV, a manual of disorders.
These assessments and their associated descriptions talk about healthy, adapted people which are all of equal inherent value. I have given these assessments to many of my clients and they have seen the benefit in their own lives, in job hunting and beyond.
To briefly elaborate on the assessments, consider the following:
1. The Strengthfinder 2.0
The Strengthfinder 2.0 seeks to identify your top 5 talents in 34 different themes. In this assessment what Gallup and a team of scientists set out to do with the strength finders book and assessment is set forth the ambitious goal of developing a common language for talent. They mined their database which at the time contained more than 100,000 talent-based interviews. In the meantime, they looked for patterns in the data. Through this process, they were able to identify 34 themes of talent that were the most common in their database. Over time their research grew and the themes became more solidified.
2. Temperament Sorter
David Keirsey focuses on intelligence and temperament. According to him, there are four temperaments and associated intelligence of the temperments:
- Diplomatic (Intelligence), Idealist (Temperament)
- Strategic (Intelligence), Rational (Temperament)
- Logistical (Intelligence), Guardian (Temperament)
- Tactical (Intelligence), Artisan (Temperament)
David Keirsey was also heavily into the Myers-Briggs assessment. What’s the Myers-Briggs?
3. Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
A very commonly used assessment for self-reflection and self-understanding is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Using the MBTI, people find out what personality type they are. The instrument determines your type code, and your answers reveal your personality tendencies. Examples of type codes are ISTJ and ENFP.
In summary, the idea behind the Myers Briggs is much seemingly random variation in the behavior of people is actually quite orderly and consistent, being due to basic differences in the ways individuals prefer to use their perception and judgment.
Perception involves all the ways of becoming aware of things, people, happenings, or ideas. Judgment involves all the ways of coming to conclusions about what has been perceived. If people differ systematically in what they perceive and in how they reach conclusions, then it is only reasonable for them to differ correspondingly in their interests, reactions, values, motivations, and skills” (MBTI manual, third edition)
4. The Kolbe
As time passed, Kathy Kolbe got her hands on these personality theories, she read it all from Jung to Myers to Keirsey. She noticed that all the current theories have something to do with your emotional or cognitive attitude. No one was talking about the “conative connection.”
What Kathy Kolbe saw differently is best described by explaining the three parts of the mind. Most personality assessments focus on the cognitive and affective parts of the mind. Kolbe focuses on the Conative, seen in the three parts of mind explained below:
- Cognitive (Thinking) – Thoughts, intelligence, learned behaviors, knowledge, recall, skills.
- Conative (Doing) – Purposeful action, drives, urges, natural abilities, innate talents, MO, instincts.
- Affective (Feeling) – Feelings, emotions, personality, preferences, desires, attitudes, values. (Powered by Instinct, Kathy Kolbe, p. 17).
Conative is part of the “doing” section of the mind, and it drives your MO. Kathy Kolbe’s assessments evaluate your MO and your unique way of striving and taking action.
Then the Kolbe gives you your arrangement of these four action modes on a scale from 1 to 10. So your arrangement could be 8-4-3-2, which means the following : 8 for fact finder, 4 for follow through, 3 for quick start, 2 for implementer.
Kathy Kolbe explains her four action modes:
- Fact Finder – The instinctive need to gather information.
- Follow Thru – The instinctive need to organize, store and retrieve information.
- Quick Start – The instinctive need to deal with (risk) and unknowns.
- Implementer – The instinctive need to deal with space and physical elements (tangibles).
What you think about and the way you feel about something drives the actions that you take. The mid- point here is where your thinking and feeling come together at one point to make the conative.
Learn More and Find your True Calling
To see a full description on each one of these personality assessments, their main ideas, differences and similarities, and how I apply them, please see my book, Vision in Action. This will help you decide if you want to take one or all of them in your career journey.
My goal in understanding all these personality theories as well as general theories on individuality is to help all people with their career path and job hunting, coaching them to continue on their hero’s journey towards success, happiness and fulfillment. I endeavor to help all seekers find out who they are and find their true work, so that, together we can build a better future.
To take the next step, schedule a call with me at https://calendly.com/coachdavemarch
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