As mentors, mentees and teachers, we work with many different people (students, teachers, administrators and parents). While maintaining and fostering our identities is crucial, we must also interact with an array of personalities; some of which might compliment our own, and with some of which we might clash. Embarking on a journey of self-discovery and change can be made easier by getting to know ourselves in our current entwinement of state and action. In order for this to begin, I would like to propose a few tools for self-discovery:
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The Myers-Briggs personality inventory - This tool breaks down personality into four easily relatable features that we would all like to know about ourselves: introversion and extroversion (our tendency to engage socially with inner or outer worlds); intuition and sensing (our tendency to take new information at face value or to relate it to look for other understandings of that information); thinking and feeling (our preference to make decisions and tackle problems using our heads or our hearts); and perception and judgement (our tendency to remain open or to be decided, once we have intuited or sensed new information, having made decisions through thoughts or feelings). To take a free version of the Myers-Briggs personality inventory test, please visit:
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And here is another one that I find fun. It provides self-reflective questions along with a nice visual:
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Our personalities also create our tendency to decide what we want to be when we grow up or to remain open. For a reflection on the topic of multipotentialites, see the video on the right:
Photo credit: Jeremy Lane