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WHAT MAKES YOU WHO

YOU ARE?

Today, knowing yourself can take many paths. What are your aptitudes? In
other words, those talents that come to you naturally? What are your skills
and your learned competencies? What are the specifics of your personality
that you were born with versus. those that may have become ingrained
after years of managing various job and life circumstances? What work
processes, environments, activities, and structures let you bring your best
stuff into play?

What values have you developed, what commitments have you made as
you moved through your adult life? Do you still like/dislike the things that
drove you early in your career, or have you grown in different directions?
Have changing life circumstances affected what you most need from your
job right now?
And, as important as all of the rest of these self-assessments, what would
you simply enjoy doing?

There are a number of ways you can increase your self-understanding.
The following tools and resources will get you started.

Myers-Briggs. Probably the best known is the Myers-Briggs personality-
types indicator (MBTI). According to authors Tieger and Barron-Tieger
in their book, Do What You Are (Little, Brown, 2014), the Myers-Briggs
assessment considers four personality characteristics or dimensions:

• How you interact with the world and where you direct your energy –
do you direct your energy toward people and the “external world” of
relationships, communities, and events (extroversion), or toward the
“internal world” of information and ideas (introversion)?
• The kind of information you naturally notice – do you focus on facts and
clear evidence (sensing), or prefer to explore the world of ideas and
intellectual discussion (intuition)?
• How you make decisions – are you the analytical type, relying on logic
and objectivity (thinking), or are your decisions driven by personal
beliefs, values, and feelings (feeling)?
• How you prefer to live your life – do you thrive on structure, stability,
and plans (judging), or are you instead more of a free spirit who
flourishes in a spontaneous flow of day-to-day events (perception)?
For a fascinating study of MBTI profiles among nursing students, see “The
Characteristics of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator in Nursing Students” by
Mi-Ran Kim and Su-Jeong Han.

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4 | Transforming Healthcare Through Education