Category Archives: Personality

In Procrastination lay possibilities

Posted on by

One of the things that undermines us being at our best is procrastination.

  • In 1978, 5% of the population admitted to being chronic procrastinators compared to roughly 26% of the population today (Steele, 2007).

Indeed, it is no coincidence that Self-Control is the least occurring VIA Strengths (only 4% of the population) and Discipline is near the bottom of Gallup’s 34 Strengthsfinder themes (31st of 34). So, if you are like me, you cannot call on these strengths to help you.

Warning: While reading.viewing this post will help you effectively move beyond procrastinating if put into practice, you will probably go down a rabbit hole exploring procrastinating. 

Tim Urban of Wait, but why offers one of best explanations for why we procrastinate:

He offers a follow up in another post on How to Beat Procrastination.

Dr. Linda Sapadin has created a personality quiz to help you identify the type of procrastinator you are:

According to Dr. Sapadin, the 6 styles represent the outer polarities of 3 traits:

Attention to Details: The perfectionist pays too much attention to details; the dreamer doesn’t pay enough attention.

Focus on the Future: The worrier is overly concerned about what might happen if…; the crisis-maker is not sufficiently concerned (until crunch time).

Relationship to Others: The defier goes against what others want; the pleaser is overly oriented to what others want.

In her book, she offers prescriptions to each of the styles. Short of buying the book, what can you do?

Planning

First steps always involve having a plan. Part of the plan comes down to understanding your priorities. For big picture, short of having your own mission statement (which is a good idea), I like Warren Buffet’s 25/5 priority solution:

  • Write down your top 25 goals for the next year.
  • Circle your top 5.
  • Throw out the other 20. As Buffet said “Everything you didn’t circle just became your Avoid-At-All-Cost list. No matter what, these things get no attention from you until you’ve succeeded with your top 5.”

You can do this on a life time, or five years or one week. It really does not matter. The idea is to zero in on the essential. Charles Schwab employed a similar idea brought to him by a consultant Ivy Lee

  1. At the end of each work day, write down the six most important things you need to accomplish tomorrow. Do not write down more than six tasks.
  2. Prioritize those six items in order of their true importance.
  3. When you arrive tomorrow, concentrate only on the first task. Work until the first task is finished before moving on to the second task.
  4. Approach the rest of your list in the same fashion. At the end of the day, move any unfinished items to a new list of six tasks for the following day.
  5. Repeat this process every working day.

A more macro approach has to do with understanding the nature of your to do list at any given time as General Eisenhower did: “”I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” This is best illustrated by this matrix:

If you actually organized all the tasks into one of the four quadrants, you will be a far more productive place. Here is a video of it in practice:

But how to stop procrastinating?

Anisa  Horton at FastCompany offers an idea of scheduling procrastination which he borrowed from Charles Duhigg:

“this is something I actually found when writing the book.  The more you focus, the more that focus becomes a habit.  So, willpower is like a muscle, right?  It’s this muscle that you can build up, and it gets tired, but the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets.  The same is true of our ability to focus.  The more you practice focusing, the easier focusing becomes.  And so the other answer for procrastination is, don’t beat up on yourself.  Let yourself practice going longer and longer and longer without taking a five-minute break to check Facebook because after three or four weeks, after three or four months you’ll be able to sustain focus much longer, but the key is, you can’t change everything overnight. You can’t suddenly say, I want a brand new habit tomorrow and expect it to be east and effortless.  It’s something you have to give yourself permission to take a little bit of time to practices because you’re building up neuro pathways associated with certain behavior and those neuro pathways just build up over time.  You can’t speed up that process any more than is natural.”

Another personal favorite is the Pomodoro Technique.

  1. Choose a task to be accomplished.
  2. Set the Pomodoro to 25 minutes (the Pomodoro is the timer)
  3. Work on the task until the Pomodoro rings, then put a check on your sheet of paper
  4. Take a short break (5 minutes is OK)
  5. Every 4 Pomodoros take a longer break

Other techniques

Visual Cues: Let’s say you need to learn a list of vocabulary words. You commit to reviewing 25 words every day. You can get a bowl of 25 paperclips–25 to be exact. Each word you review, you flip the clip to an empty bowl. And you keep going until the first bowl is empty. Repeat tomorrow. 

Surrender your cell phone. Seriously, you know you cannot live without it, so let’s meet half way. When you get home, give your phone to your parent. You can give yourself an allowance of say 30 minute phone break to do all the things you normally do. A growing body of research is showing that Cell phone usage is driving anxiety levels up. 

Exercise Self Control. Don’t have any? There is an app for that. You can block websites and apps that distract you. The nice thing is you can give yourself an allowance. So you can block Youtube for say 1 hour and then give yourself a break to do so. There is an app called Focus for your iphone that does the thing. More iphone apps for productivity here.

Focus Writer helps you concentrate on your writing on a mac. StayFocusd increases your productivity by limiting the amount of time that you can spend on time-wasting websites through this Chrome extension. 

Practice mindfulness daily. Why? “Emotional regulation, to me, is the real story around procrastination, because to the extent that I can deal with my emotions, I can stay on task,” says Pychyl, a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada).

Podcasts worth listening to

 

Where to start?

Simply pick one of these strategies and test it for one week. Run it like an experiment. Next week try a different strategies. 

Well worth reading is this article on the Science Behind Procrastination.

A dozen ways to build Identity Capital:

Posted on by

Dr. Meg Jay, author of “The Defining Decade,” borrowed the term Identity Capital from socioligist ames Côté to describe the task of becoming yourself:

“Identity capital is our collection of personal assets. It is the repertoire of individual resources that we assemble over time. These are the investments we make in ourselves, the things we do well enough, or long enough, that they become a part of who we are. Some identity capital goes on a résumé, such as degrees, jobs, test scores, and clubs. Other identity capital is more personal, such as how we speak, where we are from, how we solve problems, how we look. Identity capital is how we build ourselves—bit by bit, over time.”

 

Her Ted Talk is well worth the view:

I am struck by the idea of building one’s identity and how it can relate to leveraging one’s strengths. Inspired by Nicole Booz’s excellent list in Gen Twenty, I have crafted one aimed more specifically for high school students. I borrow heavily from her list, so credit is really due to her. I reorgnaized them so my list only has a dozen items. 

Here are more than a dozen ways to build Identity Capital:

  1. Identify goals you want to achieve in the next month.
  2. Give back to a cause that matters to you by volunteering your time.
  3. Keep your resume up to date.
  4. Spend quality time with people you consider family.
  5. Ask for more responsibility in one of your clubs.
  6. Learn something new such as:
    1. Read books from multiple genres.
    2. Learn a new skill; practice it for six months.
    3. Listen to TED talks and podcasts for inspiration.
    4. Learn a new technique for something you already know how to do.
    5. Attend a workshop for something you’d like to know more about.
    6. Learn a new language.
  7. Practice strong resiliency skills
    1. Avoid comparing yourself to others.
    2. Identify your natural talents.
    3. Stop doing things you don’t truly enjoy.
    4. Eliminate time-sucks in your life that aren’t productive.
    5. Stop procrastinating.
    6. Make a commitment and see it through.
  8. Keep a gratitude journal.
  9. What the heck:
    1. At least once a month, try something you’ve never done before.
    2. Cook your way through a professional cookbook.
    3. Take a break from social media.
    4. Spend a weekend cleaning out your closet and de-cluttering your home.
    5. Wake up and start your day earlier.
    6. Go for a hike and spend time outdoors.
    7. Go to the ballet, opera, or a show.
    8. Do something you’ve always been afraid to.
    9. Plan a vacation to a destination filled with history.
    10. Dedicate a few hours each week to a hobby that you enjoy.
    11. Set a fitness goal and work to achieve it.
  10. Schedule a meeting with one of your teachers and ask for feedback.
  11. Engage deeply in some sort of personal expression or creative project such as:
    1. Try your hand at a Pinterest DIY project.
    2. Start a scrapbook.
    3. Learn calligraphy.
    4. Start a collection of something you enjoy.
    5. Try your hand at writing a novel.
    6. Start a blog and connect with like-minded individuals.
  12. Dream big:
    1. Make a https://www.bucketlist.org/ for the year; actively work to check off the boxes.
    2. Map out what your dream career path looks like from beginning to retirement.
    3. Write a letter to 80-year old you. What do you hope to have achieved by then?
    4. Allow yourself to daydream about who you want to be… then go be it.

 Shoutout to Eric for pointing me to the book the Defining Decade. 

 

“Go Beyond school,” urges Woz

Posted on by

Steve Wozniak has sage advice for all people, but especially for teens. 

“But even in school, if you love something like mathematics, instead of working the assigned problems, do all the other ones too. Just decide, this is something I really love in life. I’m going to go a little further than school wants me to.”

And Mentors:

“They looked at things I could do and saw the things that I liked and wanted to do but were outside of the normal school,” he said. “Look for mentors that want to help you in other places in life and take advantage of it when you can. Don’t turn down something that’s given to you.”

Mindfulness strategies by personality type

Posted on by
According to personality theory, when an individual becomes stressed, they will find themselves in the grip of their shadow side of their persoanlity type, sort of a distorted view of the polar opposite of one’s normal personality. While much research ahs shown the benefits of mindfulness in handling stress. Now a couple of writers are advocating specific mindful practices to specific personality types to combat stress. 

The ideas below come directly from Gabriel Taylor and ring true to my thinking on both meditation and personality types. Read the whole Article. Basically, for each type she suggests one or more of the following practices:

  • Mindfulness meditation
  • Spiritual meditation
  • Zazen meditation
  • Mantra meditation
  • Movement meditation

Mindfulness meditation: This is the most commonly known meditation. By being present, allow whatever thoughts occur to rise then detach. Be aware of your breath patterns, deep breaths mean you’re slowing down and relaxing, shallow breaths means you’re tensing up. This quieting of the mind by letting thoughts come and go and being more of an observer will naturally allow the meditator to let go of any invading thoughts, the goals is not to empty the mind but to notice and let go. This is ideal for ISTJ, ISFJ, ISFP and INFJ.

Where to start?

Spiritual meditation: This is a good solution for those that are facing a problem and need a higher power for guidance to work through it. You can practice this anywhere quiet, just sit still, form your problem into a query and listen for your higher powers guidance. This meditation would be good for the types ESTP, ENTJ, ESFP and ESFJ.

Where to start?

Zazen meditation: This meditation is more traditional and takes disciple to practice due to long periods of stillness in one position. Its focus is on holding position, focusing on breath and being discipled to stay present with a clear mind for long periods of time. It is perfect for those that are unafraid of self-study and reflection. Types such as INTP, INFP, ISTPand ENFJ may find the challenge appealing.

Mantra meditation: Is simply repeating a word or words while meditating. You can look to tradition and use Om or bring your own like love or joy. Chanting helps keep the meditator focused and cuts down on distraction for deeper meditation practice. Types INTJ, ISTPand ISFP would benefit most from this style.

Where to start?

Movement meditation: For those that find it difficult to sit still and do nothing or be silent. To gain the multiple benefits of meditation, one doesn’t have to sit and be still. You can still clear your mind, slow your thoughts and let go of stress by slowing down your movements, and listening to relaxing music. Yoga, Qi gong, walking, are movement meditations. For example, in yoga, you can chose to meditate on one thing while you are going through the poses, like peace of mind. You can also take a nature walk, and mindfully let go of any stress-full thoughts. Some will even practice this while doing chores, it’s just a matter of being present. ENTJ, ESTJ, ENTP and ENFP personalities will find this exercise may suit them best.

Where to start?

Yoga

Qi Gong —video instructions

Walking Meditation guide here and another more philosophical one here. 

Here is some more detailed options

For the Data Lovers

To see the full set of data, please click here 

The Introversion to extroversion continuum

Posted on by

People often equate shy with introversion. Jung defined introversion as an “attitude-type characterised by orientation in life through subjective psychic contents” (focus on one’s inner psychic activity); and extraversion as “an attitude type characterised by concentration of interest on the external object”, (the outside world). Wikipedia distinguishes shyness from introversion: “professor of psychology Bernardo J. Carducci, introverts choose to avoid social situations because they derive no reward from them or may find surplus sensory input overwhelming, whereas shy people may fear such situations.” A more complete discussion can be found on Susan Cain’s Quiet Website: 

Shyness and introversion are not the same thing. Shyness is the fear of negative judgment, and introversion is a preference for quiet, minimally stimulating environments. Some psychologists map the two tendencies on vertical and horizontal axes, with the introvert-extrovert spectrum on the horizontal axis, and the anxious-stable spectrum on the vertical. With this model, you end up with four quadrants of personality types: calm extroverts, anxious (or impulsive) extroverts, calm introverts, and anxious introverts.

This chart below, from The Thought Catalogue, provides a handy cheat card not just between shyness and introversion, but also extroversion and obnoxiousness (Yes that is the word they use). 

What is the strengths explorer? Initial Review.

Posted on by

Most people familiar with the Strengths Movement are aware of the big two: Gallup Strengthsfinder and the VIA Character Strengths assessment. There are others, but today we will focus on one designed specifically for younger students, The Gallup StrengthsExplorer, which they claim “gives teachers a tool to help identify the talents of their students, as well as actionable suggestions for utilizing those talents. Such information can help teachers to individualize the ways in which they respond to youths, and the manner in which they can teach most effectively. In addition, it provides teachers and parents a common language, goals, and sets of action, all based on the unique talents of youth.” The stated aimes of the Strengthsexplorer instrument is:

  • Help youths identify their positive characteristics

  • Help youths improve their understanding of self

  • Help youths develop from their areas of greatest talent

  • Improve parents’/instructors’ understanding of their children/students

  • Provide an opportunity for an important kind of communication between parents and their children (i.e., discussion of one’s unique nature, the positive characteristics/gifts that one has, and how those can be developed)

  • Provide the theme-based language that youths and parents/ instruc- tors could use to discover and describe positive characteristics 

This 78 item assessment focuses only on 10 strengths, reporting out a person’s top 3. Aimed at students in grade 6 to 10, is a welcome addition to the Naviance platform. Gallup has partnered with Naviance to provide this assessment to students at its 6000 school around the world. Certainly this has far reaching implications. See it in action here:

Gallup StrengthsExplorer in Action from Naviance on Vimeo.

What intrigues me most is how they linked it careers. I expect many counselors will like that. 

StrengthsExplorer Themes:

 

  • Achieving
  • Caring
  • Competing
  • Confidence
  • Dependability
  • Discoverer
  • Future Thinker
  • Organizer
  • Presence
  • Relating

So how does it work?

Spend about 12 minutes answering the 78 questions. The interface is clean, large letters. Each question comes up once, with no timelimit, but you cannot go backwards. Once completed, you will learn your top 3 (of the ten). 

The breif descriptions are straightforward and empowering. The detailed report begins with an eye-catching graphic.

Take a look at the detailed for Discoverer (“A thinker and learner, you are excited about exploring ideas and making connections. You like to ask the questions “How?” and “Why?”)

Discoverer

A thinker and learner, you are excited about exploring ideas and making connections. You like to ask the questions “How?” and “Why?” Questions are in your mind a lot. How does that work? Why did that happen? How did someone figure that out? You are excited to explore new ideas and ask questions so you understand the “how” and “why” of the things you choose to learn. You collect and connect information and ideas. It is fun to be an expert, and when you find a subject or idea you like, you can spend a lot of time exploring it. You might be bored doing things the same way everyone else does because you like to find new ways. Talking with creative thinkers is fun because it sparks even more ideas. People can benefit from your information and ideas when you share them.

Obviously this sounds a lot like VIA’s Curiosity and a bit like love of learning and perhaps creativity. But given that it comes from Gallup, perhaps it is best to look at which of the 34 strengths themes it combines. Gallup has their own Learner description that is quite similiar, but it has strong tones of Context and analytical. The descriptors are very useful and insightful for helping students understand themselves and counselors and teachers to gain insight. 

The action items are aimed at students. They are somewhat general and basic. 

1. Discoverer – Action Items

  •  What would you like to research? Maybe you would like to choose one or two subjects that interest you a lot, and try to become an expert on them. Could you know more than anyone else in your grade about something? Since you like to explore ideas on your own outside of school, try to earn credit for your research and have it help your grades.
  •  You are good at figuring out how things work. Try to create a space of your own where you can take things apart and see how they’re made, even if it’s just a special “project box” you keep under your bed.
  •  Find people who are interested in the same things as you. Start a conversation. You can teach each other what you know and learn to look at ideas in new and different ways. Together, you may discover more and more because your ideas connect and lead to new ones. Who else might like to join in?
  •  The Internet is one place to explore ideas. Find someone who knows great Internet sites where kids can do research, and make a list. Share the list with teachers and friends, and add their favorites to it. They will appreciate it, and you will have a growing list of places you can learn about new ideas.
  •  You like to know the reason why. You like to get as much information and knowledge as you can before you kick off an activity. Sometimes, others may have an idea and want to jump in and get started. You can be the “voice of reason” in the group who helps them get the facts and learn more first.
  • ——
  • Counselors and teachers would appreciate more direct suggestions on how to work with students. Perhaps a secton called “Working with Discoverers”
  •  Discovers often like school, especially when they get to explore actively. They will respond well to constructivist approaches, problem based learning and original research projects. 
  •  Discovers love to solve problems, be it math, or design, emotional or intellectual. find ways to engage them actively in the problems of the world. 
  •  Discoverers may love clubs that allow them to explore–Science Fair, Socractic Club, Quiz team–anywhere knowledge can be discovered. 
  •  Discovers may like to deeply inquire into a topic or broadly explore a varity of topics. Either way, they rejoice in new and interesting topics. 
  •  Discovers like to know why. Give them a context for why you are doing these things. 
    •  Partner Discovers with organizers to help them stay grounded in their exploration and Pressence to help them bring their research alive to others. 
    I think counselors and teachers would find this sort of information very useful. 
    ————————-
    The workbook that accompanies the profile ould rpovide some useful guiance lessons, but I wonder if the student would actually use it otherwise. Colorful, it contains a lot of fill-in the blanks self-reflection components. The suggetions again could be very useful if students did them. For example: “Ask your mom, dad, teacher, friend, brother, or sister to tell you about a time when he or she saw you using these talents.” and ”Consider selecting an action item that you would do with your mom, dad, brother, or sister. Then talk to that person about getting started.” The workbook is available here, along with the parent guide and the Educator/Leader Activity Book. You can read a review of a parent’s reastion to seeing his daughter’s report here:
    I had an “aha” moment when I saw his three themes: Competing, Relating, and Discoverer. They explained so much about who my son is. For example, we knew that he loved to win at basketball. But we couldn’t figure out why, if he wanted to win so badly, he kept passing the ball to whoever called out for it, whether they were likely to make the shot or not. Now we realize that in his activities, the relationships are just as important to him as the game itself. 

    ———————-

     One of the most intriguing aspects of the Strengths explorer is the link to career pathways:

     

    The links take you to Naviance’s already established career pathways. Unfortunately, Naviance and Gallup have given no indication on how the career pathways came to be associated with the indivudal strength themese. Strengths explorer was not designed as a career discovery tool (read the technical report here). So how did Naviance come up with this list? Does accounting really respresent a Discoverer? Do accountants really emobdy “A thinker and learner, you are excited about exploring ideas and making connections.” Do they “like to ask the questions “How?” and “Why?”” Apparently accountants do have particular types of personalities: 

    Although there are 16 different MBTI types, 42 percent of all accounting students fit into just two types according to the “Accounting Editors’ Journal.” Twenty-five percent tested as type ESTJ or extroverted, sensing, thinking and judging. They tend to trust what they perceive with their senses rather than intuition or gut feelings. They rely on logical thought more than emotion, and they prefer to make judgments about what they experience rather than simply experiencing life without judging. Seventeen percent tested as ISTJ or introverted, sensing, thinking and judging.

    Do the STJ personality types correspond to the Discoverer strength theme? Certainly a discoverer is a thinker and most likely a sesnor. As an ENFP…and a discover…it apparently does not fit for me. 

    While Naviance should make their details more clear, in adding the StrengthsExplorer Naviace provides a robust counseling tool. Naviance also needs to develop a report so counselors can quickly see who has completed the assessment (much like they do for both the Do What You Are and the Career Interest Profiler). Counselors will want lesson plan outlines and activities. Stay tuned and the StrengthsMining website will aim to help you.  



    are you an ambivert?

    Posted on by

    Most people are familiar with personality types of extrover and introvert. While many people mistakenly think that you are one of the other, but Jung proposed that both exist in each of us, but that one is expressed more than another.

    “there is no such thing as a pure extrovert or a pure introvert. Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum. They are only terms to designate…, a certain tendency….the tendency to be more influenced by environmental factors, or more influenced by the subjective factor, that’s all. There are people who are fairly well balanced and are just as much influenced from within as from without, or just as little”.

    Back in the 20s, some psychologists argued for a middle of the road position they called ambivert:

    Ambiverts, a term coined by social scientists in the 1920s, are people who are neither extremely introverted nor extremely extroverted. Think back to that 1-to-7 scale that Grant used. Ambiverts aren’t 1s or 2s, but they’re not 6s or 7s either. They’re 3s, 4s and 5s. They’re not quiet, but they’re not loud. They know how to assert themselves, but they’re not pushy.

     

    Dan Pink offers a short assessment on whether you are  an extrovert, introvert or ambivert. 

    Dan asserts that ambiverts make the best sails people:

    Pink synthesizes the findings into an everyday insight for the rest of us:

    The best approach is for the people on the ends to emulate those in the center. As some have noted, introverts are ‘geared to inspect,’ while extraverts are ‘geared to respond.’ Selling of any sort — whether traditional sales or non-sales selling — requires a delicate balance of inspecting and responding. Ambiverts can find that balance. They know when to speak and when to shut up. Their wider repertoires allow them to achieve harmony with a broader range of people and a more varied set of circumstances. Ambiverts are the best movers because they’re the most skilled attuners. (Cited from  Brainpickings)

    You can learn more about Dan’s book here: