MAKE YOUR UNIQUENESS WORK FOR YOU

Since the right job flows directly out of all the elements of your personality type, you need to spend some time figuring out what makes you tick. By making a conscious effort to discover the “real you,” you learn how to focus your natural strengths and inclinations into a career you can love for a long as you choose to work.

This is where “type” is so helpful. It provides a systematic, effective way to evaluate both your strong points and your probable weaknesses or blind spots. Once you have these figured out, you’ll know how to make sure you are always operating from a position of strength.

Each one of us has a distinct personality, like an innate blueprint that stays with us for life. We are born with a personality type, we go through life with that type, and when we are laid to rest (hopefully at the end of a long and fruitful life), it is with the same type.

Now you are probably wondering, “Wait a minute. I might be one way sometimes, but at other times I’m a very different person. Doesn’t the situation influence my personality type?”

The answer is no, it doesn’t. Do we change our behavior in certain situations? Certainly! Most human beings have a tremendous repertoire of behaviors available to them. We couldn’t function very successfully if we didn’t. Sure, we act differently at work than we do at home, and it makes a difference whether we’re with strangers, close friends, at a ball park, or at a funeral. But people don’t change their basic personalities with every new door they walk through.

All this is not to say that environmental factors are not extremely important; they are. Parents, siblings, teachers, and economic, social, and political circumstance all can play a role in determining what direction our lives take. Some people are forced by circumstances to act in a certain way until they are literally “not themselves”.

If you are skeptical about the idea that personality type is inborn, take a look at different children from the same family. These could be your own children, your siblings, or even children from a family you know. Do they have different personalities? Absolutely! And the differences are often apparent from birth.

The concept of “personality type” is not new. People have always been aware of the similarities and differences between individuals, and over the centuries many systems and models for understanding or categorizing these differences have been developed. Today, our understanding of human behavior has been expanded to such a degree that we are now able to accurately identify sixteen distinctly different personality types.

Finding the right job for each of these distinct personalities may seem like an awesome task. However, all sixteen personality types do function in the world. As we will see, it is possible to identify your own personality type and the types of others, to understand why certain types flourish in certain kinds of jobs, and to clarify why people find career satisfaction in different ways.

Rod Colon