Personality. It’s an all-encompassing term that plays a huge role in defining you as an individual. Whether you have much interest in the subject or not, it is undeniable that personality not only shapes how you live, interact with others, think and feel, it also has a huge impact on your work style and the relationships you have with your colleagues.
You’ve probably come across (or completed) a personality profiling assessment at some point in your life – DISC profiling, the dove/owl/peacock/eagle (DOPE) assessment, Myers Briggs…the list of options goes on, but essentially what each of these tests does is sort you into a particular category based on answers you give related to your personality. While there has been criticism of one’s personality being too complex to fit into a ‘category’, almost everyone can say (even if they don’t admit it aloud); ‘I can definitely see more of myself in this description than in that one.’ Being a former psychology student, I have done several of these assessments myself and have always found the descriptions to be very accurate – and, equally importantly, consistent from one test to the next.
As your personality is essentially stable throughout your life, taking one of these assessments is a great exercise in self-awareness and can help you understand both yourself and the way you interact with others on a deeper level. For example, if you have never been able to make decisions as fast as your colleague in accounts, it can confirm that the reason you prefer to make decisions at a slow pace and with a lot of information is down to your personality. This is not a negative thing by any means – it is simply the way you’re wired! Having this self-awareness means you can more effectively make decisions because you know how you prefer to make them, and it also means you can communicate this to your manager and colleagues, to help them understand too.
On a number of our training courses we provide each person with a DOPE assessment to give a basic understanding of their personality type and how they best work. Consistently, feedback has shown that this is a very popular section in the courses we conduct it in, and as a result we have decided to design a new course solely surrounding the link between personality and communication.
Finding out your personality category is not only a great exercise for you to be aware of your own style, it is also very useful in knowing how to work with other personality styles. It is inevitable that everyone will come across people they find it more difficult to work with than others, but as they say - knowledge is power! Arming yourself with the knowledge of how to best work with other personality types will help you greatly in your working environment.
Our first ‘Art of Effective Communication: Understanding People’ course is set to be run on Wednesday 15th February 2017 at the Waipuna Hotel & Conference Centre in Auckland. Don’t miss out on this great course – register your interest by e-mailing me on anna@rapidresults.co.nz
If you register before 16th December 2016, you will receive a 15% discount off the price, too.
Merry Christmas!!
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