Strong Inventory analisys and MBTI - Personal Statement Example

?What is my MBTI type? My MBTI test reveals that my MBTI type is INFJ. This personality type is the short form for Introverted iNtuitive Feeling Judging People who belong to this type are generated Introverted Intuition with Extraverted Feeling. According to Personality Page (2010), “As an INFJ, your primary mode of living is focused internally, where you take things in primarily via intuition”. This is to say that we look more to ourselves though we are not selfish. The reason we would look more to ourselves is because we are introverts and do not easily associate with people. Introverts are person who tends to focus on their own thoughts and feelings (EnglishTest.Net, 2011). Instead of making friend with almost everyone who comes their way, we would rather “direct their energy towards the inner world of thoughts and emotions” (Team Technology, 1995). For this reason, the INFJ personality type thinks and invents a lot. The possibility of dealing with external influence is judged by how we feel about them and how they suit our way of doing things. This is to say that we are not easily influenced. We will do things only because we feel it is right for us to do it. Personality Pages describes INFJs as people who “are gentle, caring, complex, highly intuitive, artistic and creative who live in a world of hidden meanings and possibilities.” It is believed that only 1% of the world’s population has this personality meaning it is the most uncommon. Functional Preference Ordering According to personality page (2010), there are four functional preference ordering for the INFJ which are Dominant (Introverted Intuition), Auxiliary (Extraverted Feeling), Tertiary (Introverted Thinking) and Inferior (Extraverted Sensing). According to Butt (2010), “Introverted intuitive, INFJs enjoy a greater clarity of perception of inner, unconscious processes”. The strength or advantage of this preference ordering lies in the fact that because the introverted intuitive requires greater clarity of perception, they are deep thinkers and do not take decisions briskly. With the extraverted feeling, Butt holds the view that they “express a range of emotion and opinions of, for and about people and find themselves caught between the desire to express their wealth of feelings and moral conclusions about the actions and attitudes of others, and the awareness of the consequences of unbridled candor.” The strength in this ordering or preference is that such people are very selfless and put others first. This is seen in their habit of being caring, loving, empathetic and generous. The introverted thinking ordering also has to do with people “make decisions based on logic, so the introverted thinking function allows a person to categorize and analyze data” (My Personality Info, 2011). The final type which is extraverted sensing also carries a lot of strengths and advantages. Such a person believes in personal experience and cannot be persuaded easily to do something out of his wish. According to My Personality Info, extraverted sensing “is the ability to be keen to what is seen, smelled, touched, heard and tasted.” Relation of my MBTI to my Career Interests My career interest is in becoming an individual therapist and also to take up careers in teaching and taking to counseling and clergy work. I find this ambition so linked with my MBTI personality type. This is because as per my type, I am visionary, understand people and situation, highly principled, sensitive and compassionate, service-oriented, value authentic relationship and I dislike dealing with details unless they enhance or promote my vision” (Personality Page, 2010). These are traits that are shared in an individual therapist. This is because according to Therapists.Net, an individual therapists help others “to learn to be more confident in yourself, to make your voice heard through communication, to validate your own emotions, to learn to love yourself, and to learn better ways of coping with anger, sadness and stress (and not rely on your Eating Disorder).” All these relate with the MBTI personality type since they involve working one-on-one to help people overcome certain difficulties. Analysis of STRONG Results Basic Interests According to the Strong Interest Inventory, my basic interest scale refers to “areas that often points to work, activities, projects, course work and leisure”. This means that my basic interest scale represents a larger part of my entire life. The scale measured six (6) interest areas which are social, investigative, realistic, artistic, enterprising and conventional. I scored very high under ‘social’ with my two (2) top most interests being in counseling and teaching and then teaching and education. My two least interests under social were religion and spirituality and then healthcare services. I scored high for artistic and my topmost interest under artistic was performing arts whiles my least interest was culinary arts. I scored moderate for investigative, enterprising and realistic. My topmost interests for these areas are medical science, marketing and advertising and then military respectively. My least interests for these three areas are mathematics, law and mechanic and construction respectively. Under conventional, my interest scale was little. My topmost interest in that area was finance and investing while my least interest was programming and information systems. These basic interests relate a lot to my educational and leisure activities as well as my occupational aspirations. They expose the fact that I would generally feel comfortable in the midst of other people in order to learn from them and also to identify their problems and help them. However, certain areas that do not currently show in my lifestyle and occupational aspiration are my love and/or involvement in performing arts, writing and military, all of which I scored ‘high’. I shall therefore begin to read and learn more about those areas so that I can incorporate them into my plans for life. Skills Confidence Inventory My skills confidence scale reveals very interesting aspects of my life. Basically, this scale reveals areas of my life I feel more confident or comfortable venturing into. My skills confidence code is SA depicting Social and Artistic. Arranging in order of preference from top to bottom, my skills confidence scale rank from social to artistic to enterprising to investigative to realistic and finally conventional. My topmost scores are 4.8 and 4.1 out of 5 for social and artistic respectively; while scoring 1.6 out of 5 for conventional. This is to show that I am more confident taking up responsibilities in social sciences and artistic areas. To confirm this, my confidence level and interest level in social and artistic were at par when compared. My confidence in realistic and conventional however diminished with my interest in those areas. This implies that as much as I am not interested in realistic and conventional activities, my confidence levels in those areas are equally bad – even worse. I therefore need to concentrate more on social and artistic activities though it is equally important to improve my confidence levels in realistic and conventional activities. General Occupational Themes and Scales My highest theme code is SAE. This depicts that I am Social, Artistic and Enterprising. With reference to my top five (5) interest areas which are counseling and helping, teaching and education, human resource and training, performing arts and finally writing and mass communication, and my three (3) least interest, which are mathematics, programming and information system and then taxes and accounting, my five interest areas also open me to ten (10) strong occupations which are speech pathologist, social worker, elementary school teacher, special education teacher, community service director, foreign language teacher, photographer, rehabilitation counselor, translator and collect instructor. My five dissimilar occupations are physicist, athletic trainer, mathematician, actuary and geologist. These occupational themes and scales mean so much to me as I advance on my educational calendar. It is a benchmark for me, directing me to areas I am most likely to succeed and areas I am less likely to succeed. Judging from educational progress and personality type, I may rank five (5) out of the ten (10) strong occupations in order of preference as – rehabilitation counselor, community service director, elementary school teacher, special education teacher and foreign language teacher. This is because most of these occupations have to do with helping people and I that is a strong area for my personality type. My interest in becoming a foreign language teacher is inspired from decision to travel all the way to the US to learn a new language. Personality Style Scale Learning environment. The score for the STRONG results on learning environment is 66. This implies that I prefer academic environments, learn through lecture and books, willing to spend many years in school, seek information for its own sake. There are a lot of implications to discover in other to make my learning periods useful to me. With reference to my personality type, I would want to be alone most of the time and do critical thinking. It is not surprising then that lecture method and book learning is my most preferred learning type. This implies that I have to take lecture sessions serious and not depend much on group studies and other forms of learning that do not permit privacy. Again, I have to make time almost constantly to do personal learning from books. This is a strong advantage for me because it means I can understand concepts from books even without a teacher. Another important advantage of my learning environment is my preference to spend many years in school. This is implies that I can pursue education to the highest level without worries of rushing to settle with work or family life. Finally, I have an advantage to seek more information about issues even if they do not have direct bearing on my course of study. Work style. My score for the STRONG results on working style is 66. This indicates that I prefer working with people, enjoy helping others and being outgoing. These are in conformity of my MBTI personality type and my personal believes for life. With reference to my personality type, I am an introvert and not very sociable however I prefer working. The implication of this result for me is to seek for careers that would give me an opportunity to work with others. Though I personally prefer a one-to-one type of career, I infer from this result that opening myself up for group work is not something my personality type cannot handle. After all, there are advantages of working in a group even when I do not want to socialise. Some of these include the fact that working in a group would permit me to undertake observational learning by watching what others do and copy those that conform to my intuition and conscience. By working with other people, I will be given the opportunity to discover different kinds of problems that people face so that I can offer help to them when help is needed most. Naturally, I am more comfortable helping others. Seeing other people get satisfied especially when their satisfaction comes from me makes me also satisfied. The same reason of helping people and doing silent learning is the reason why I would want to be easygoing and outgoing. Leadership style. The score on leadership style is 58. This is a mark that shows clear preference. The preferences include; comfortable taking charge of and motivating others, prefers directing others to doing the job alone, enjoys initiating action and expresses opinions easily. Linking these preferences to my MBTI personality type gives very interesting implications. The relation I draw is that, though I may be self-centered it is possible for me to influence people especially not by forcing them but by motivating them and indulging on their conscience to follow my ideas. This is therefore I challenge for me not to put myself off with leadership. From all indications, I can become a good leader because my personality type and leadership style is not oppressive but liberal and open. Risk-taking. The score for risk taking was 48. This means that I do not really have a clear preference for any of the options. This means that I can make implications from preferences on that side. On the ‘negative’ side, there are preferences such as; dislike risk taking, likes quiet activities, prefers to play it safe, makes careful decisions. On the ‘positive’ side however, there preferences like; likes risk taking, appreciates original ideas, enjoys thrilling activities and taking chances and makes quick decisions. Since I do not have a clear preference, it best way to make good use of this result is to link it to my personality type. The J in my personality type INFJ means ‘judging’. This means that I would generally judge the consequences of an action before taking it. Based on this, I can say that I dislike taking risk, prefer to play it safe, make careful decisions and at the same time appreciate original ideas. I would do this to ensure that I do not tarnish my image and self-believe by going into a venture or risk doing something that I am not sure of and so would fail. What I learnt about myself My most outstanding learning areas have to do with my work style and leadership styles. Before this lesson, I thought I would do well only with one-to-one career types and would not make a good leader at all. This test has however taught me that though I may be INFJ, there are a lot of potentials in me. I have learnt that being introvert does not mean being an outcast and so I should open myself up to work with people because in so doing, I can learn from them and have the opportunity to help them as my personality trait is. As far as leadership style is concerned, I have learnt that I would make a liberal and unautocratic leader, whom a lot of people would want to associate with and so I can really have a lot of positive influence on people. Other attempts I have made to assess my interests, abilities or self concepts. As suggested in my learning environment, I will take to personal reading on books and other resources that will help me discover more and more about myself. I will also attend a lot if seminars and workshops that will train me not just on my strengths but also on my weaknesses so that I can learn how to overcome my weaknesses and turn them to strengths. Assessment of my personal career development process My personal career development process is very positive. The two activities have really confirmed to me that I am on track and that my study areas and planned careers conform to my personality and abilities. REFERENCE LIST Butt J, 2010, Introverted iNtuitive Feeling Judging. Accessed on 12th February, 2011 from http://typelogic.com/infj.html EnglishTest.Net, 2011 Introverts, accessed on 14th February, 2011 from http://www.english-test.net/gre/vocabulary/meanings/107/gre-words.php#introvert My Personality Info, 2011, Introverted Thinking Function, accessed on 11th February, 2011 from http://www.mypersonality.info/personality-types/ti-function/ Personality Page, 2010, Career for INFL Personality Types, accessed on 14th February, 2011 from http://www.personalitypage.com/html/INFJ_car.html Personality Page, 2010, Portrait of an INFJ Accessed on 14th February, 2011 from http://www.personalitypage.com/INFJ.html Team Technology, 1995, INFJ Personality Type, Accessed on 12th February, 2011 from http://www.teamtechnology.co.uk/myers-briggs/infj.htm Therapists.Net, 2008, What is an Individual Therapist? Accessed on 13th February, 2011 from http://www.therapists.net/individualtherapist.php Read More