Portfolio Career - Values and Psychometric Test

The next part of the selection process in identifying the best careers to put in to my Portfolio Career, is an exercise that will pull out the values that I have concerning work.

As we grow up we are exposed to many external influences and messages, all of which have an effect on our beliefs, preferences and priorities. These are then formed in to our value systems which uniquely shape our decisions and our perceived happiness. These values are better defined than attitudes and opinions, and more firmly set in who we are.

There are techniques that can work at changing these conditioned values that we all have, and if we need to change a value then Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) is a fascinating series of techniques to do so. However, even in order to initiate that journey you must first define what your values actually are.

In understanding which values are important to us and which are least important, we can help ourselves to understand what decisions will make us happier.

If I had understood my values ten years ago, then I would certainly not have chosen to go in to an Accountancy career, which goes very little towards my key values.

The exercise that I followed is quite simple. In the book "And What do You Do?" by Barrie Hopson and Katie Ledger, it lists 32 values and asks you to rank them in to five categories; Very important, Important, Quite Important, Of Some Importance, and Not Important At All. The aim is to have no more than eight in any one category, and no less than five.

My most important values are below, ranked again in order of priority:

Communication
Independence
Helping Others
Creative
Status
Money

My least important values that do not matter at all to me are below:

Promotion
Place of Work
Well Known Organisation
Routine
Competition
Precise Work
Physical Challenge

So, in itself, this is a vaguely interesting exercise to help me understand what I knew already inside, but this has articulated it for me. The real purpose of this though is to again act as a directional guide in making the decisions about which roles to chase after eventually. This, in the same hand with the achievements exercise, will provide a steer.

Psychometric Tests

The best personality test that I have ever completed is the Myers-Briggs personality type exercise. There is plenty of information regarding this on the internet, if the reader is interested.

There is repetition here in terms of the purpose of such a test. Many people under value these tests and consider them a waste of time, but this is more an indicator of the type of personality of those people. I personally think that, again, they can give you a great insight in to exactly what type of a person you are and act as a wakeup call. It is uncanny how accurate the description is for my personality type, and this helps to reaffirm the direction that I want to go in.

My personality type is ENFP. Each letter means something, and as mentioned before if you want to you can Google it, but the description and guidance is the important bit.

First thing to note is that this is one of the rarest types, only 2-3% of the population. There is a whole load of information, but a summary is below:

Warm and Enthusiastic
Live in a world of possibilities
Ability to inspire and motivate others
Talk their way in or out of anything
Love life
Broad range of skills and talents, and can turn their hand to most things
Strong sense of values
Importance on being genuine
Great people skills
Need to be liked
Intuitively understand people after a short time
No importance on detailed, maintenance tasks
Can make rash decisions on people that are unfounded, due to the strong sense of intuition
Need to master the skill of completing a task.

Incidentally, I agree with all of this, and some of the explanation behind these headlines really made me think that it had me to a tee. It also goes on to suggest preferred occupations of other people with this type. See below:

Consultant
Psychologist
Entrepreneur
Actor
Teacher
Counselor
Politician/Diplomat
Writer/Journalist
Television Reporter

As you can see this is an interesting mix of roles, but one that really excites me, and there are some in there that I wish I had moved more into years ago.

Anyway, that is for another post. The next time I will be getting into the actual list of potentials that I have come up with, and then I can start chipping away at them.

Portfolio Career - Achievements

In order to achieve a Career Portfolio and leave behind the corporate world, an important step in the process is selecting the individual roles to fill the portfolio. I am working through the exercises in a book called, “And What Do You Do?” by Barrie Hopson and Katie Ledger, and this suggests a couple of approaches that will help to clarify the areas that you actually enjoy, are important to you, and that you are actually good at.

The first exercise focuses on the achievements that you have had in your life, and the Motivated Skills that were used in achieving it. The point being that if you have used these skills to motivate you to success in the past, the chance is that you are naturally stronger in these skills. Although the corporate world would have you believe that you must work on developing your weaker attributes to become stronger, the truth is that if you concentrate on doing the things that you do well even better, then you will excel in that field. Also, if you are employing those skills that you are good at then you will be more motivated because you will constantly feel that sense of reward and achievement.

If you do the things that you are good at, then you enjoy what you are doing, this means that you are motivated, and this means that you will succeed; and the cycle then becomes self-fulfilling as you expect to succeed, you do.

So, I listed out the personal achievements that I could think of, which is actually quite hard. I found that the memories I tend to remember are the ones where I failed, and the achievements were buried much deeper under a cover of self-deprecation and a blanket of modesty. We tend to concentrate more on the failures in an effort for it not to happen again, and gloss over the achievements and just move on.

The achievements can be in any walk of life, not just your occupation, and the list I had in the end totalled around twenty. Some went right the way back to school and others related to more recent successes. The three prompts that the book mentioned in order to think in that frame of mind were; 1) You believe it you did it well, 2) You enjoyed it, 3) You were proud of it.

My achievements varied from School Plays and Swims, to Finance Projects, to Exams, to being a Dad, with a broad range in between. You could say I’ve been good at many things, or you could say that I’ve been scraping the barrel here, but the interesting point for me was what my perception was with these things in particular. Most of my achievements have not come easily, they have all taken a bit of pain, but ultimately the reward when it all pays off is fantastic and everlasting. This is something that I can take away for free from this exercise, the fact that perseverance is needed in anything in order to really succeed.

Anyway, the book then asks you to rank your achievements and select the top seven to score in a matrix versus the Motivated Skills that were used in completing this achievement. There are about thirty motivated skills listed and I averaged about eight skills used per achievement. Without going through the whole thing, the common skills that were used in my achievements, and therefore those skills that should be my natural strengths are as follows:

Came up five times
o Communication

Came up three times
o Solving Problems
o Motivating and Leading
o Working Creatively
o Managing Time
o Strategic Thinking
o Performing
o Helping Others
o Assertiveness

I think that these are a true reflection of the areas that I would consider motivate me to do a good job, and also the areas that I tend to concentrate on in any job that I have had. It also articulates some of the frustration that I have in my current role because I do not get a chance to use some of these skills. You can probably tell which ones.

This will now become valuable information about myself that I can bear in mind as I move along this journey towards selecting occupations that really fit with what motivates me, and that simply - I will enjoy.

Later this week I will post the results of an exercise that I have completed on my fundamental values, and I will also show the results of a psychometric personality test. All of these exercises will be directional, and some interesting conclusions are generated.