When you hear the words, tell me about yourself, how do you answer? My guess would be if you are a woman you would start by saying if you’re a wife and mom possibly going into all the activities your family is involved in, then mention your job, hobbies and groups you belong to. If you are a man you would lead with your position in your company or career and your accomplishments, then go into your family life, hobbies and social connections. Yes, this is stereotyping but it doesn’t matter too much because neither is “right”.
When you give lists of titles in efforts to describe yourself you tell people what you do, not who you are. We have become so obsessed with showing people how busy we are and measuring ourselves by the boxes we can check off on the daily to do lists that we negate to even consider who we really are and what makes us tick as individuals. I don’t think it is a matter of neglect or priorities, it is simply not something we are taught to factor into the life equation. It is constantly drilled into young adults heads upon high school graduation that you need to figure out what you are going to study to pursue what career, what activities you are doing toward getting into what school to make it happen so you can make what amount of money and on top of it all it better line up with what I think on the matter.
After all that is accomplished, many times we are now dealing with adults who view life as a grind, work at the wrong job for the wrong reason and spend all kinds of time trying to find ways to make themselves happy. If they are lucky they choose a route that leads them to self discovery vs self destruction and are able to find themselves and get on the right path before they are too old to enjoy it. Now, life is a process, so of course it is natural for the what’s in your world to change as time goes on but that is because the who in you is evolving and growing leading you to different whats.
I am on a mission to change this course of action by teaching students how to understand and embrace who they are before faced with deciding what they are going to be. Once you can interpret your own unique talents and learn to turn them into strengths, you will know how to go about making better decisions for yourself. Again, this doesn’t mean things won’t change in your life, it just means that you will actually be living your life authentic to yourself and not anyone else so it is what is meant to be for who you are.
The graphic above illustrates how once you can actually answer the question “Who are you?” the rest will be determined by if you have predominantly relationship building (RB) traits, influencing (Inf) traits, strategic thinking (ST) traits or executing (Ex) traits. These all influence how we go about pursuing the various whats in our lives. RB’s like to center their decisions around who else is involved with them, where they need to go so they can be around those people, care about why this is so important to them, then figure out how they will make it happen which leads them to what they will do. Inf’s like to center their decisions around who they can affect, what those people need to improve, why they need their assistance, how they will go about creating change and it doesn’t matter where as long as it is happening. ST’s like to center their decisions around how is the best way to approach something, what is the best way to go about it, why it makes sense to do it that way, where would be the best place to be for it and who will be the best people to involve with it. Ex’s like to center their decisions around what makes the most sense, how is the most efficient way to do it, where should I be to get the most accomplished in the shortest amount of time, who can help me get it done and why this is the most effective way to proceed.
If this makes sense to you and you would like to learn more about the individual talents within theses domains and how they ebb and flow depending on your particular order and ultimately how to answer who you are without listing what you are, contact me for a consultation.
Leave a Reply