Introduction
Self-awareness is the key to success in life. This awareness is achieved by conducting numerous self-awareness tests, such as the Indigo Assessment, that will be used for this analysis. The indigo assessment is a science-based, comprehensive, and multi-dimensional tool that allows students and tutors to gain insights by being more self-aware of their behaviors, career preparation skills, and social-emotional interpersonal skills. The key measures of this assessment are behaviors through the DISC system, motivators following the works of Spranger and Allport on human value, drive, and motivation, skills according to the Likert-Scale questionnaire, social-emotional perceptions following the Hartman Value profile and other personal assessments on careers, time wasters, and communication tips. This report will present my self-assessment results in detail, starting from the DISC tests to the communication tips and time wasters. The report is divided into three major parts; part one covers the personality traits identified from the tests, inclusive of my strengths and weaknesses; Part two discusses how these traits will impact my future career and daily interactions and part three is an action plan on how I plan to improve on the weak areas.
Part One
DISC style
The DISC assessment contains four major aspects outlined by Marston’s theory; Dominance, influencing, steadiness, and compliance. Dominance shows that someone shapes their personality and environment by challenging opposition to obtain the desired results. Influence describes someone who shapes their personality and surrounding by persuading others through friendships and openness. Steadiness describes those who obtain their results through cooperation, dependability, and sincerity, while compliance describes those who value competency, objective reasoning, and expertise in achieving their results (Gianakos, 2023). The scores obtained show the natural response to daily circumstances. Understanding DISC traits is important in raising self-awareness, service skills, and interpersonal engagement. From the assessment, I scored highest on steadiness, followed by influencing, compliance, and dominance. This means I value cooperating with others and depending on them to achieve my desired results.
Top 3 Skills
From this test, my top three skills are decision-making, continuous learning, and creativity and innovation. Decision-making entails weighing different options and making a desirable choice after thinking objectively. This trait comes first since I like to think through my decisions before I make a choice. The decision-making process encompasses various skills, such as problem-solving, reasoning, intuition, and emotional intelligence. All these factors and skills allow me to weigh all possible options and come to a desirable conclusion. This trait has driven me to become a good leader in my life and in other clubs I participate in.
The second skill is continuous learning. This skill allows me to keep researching and reading new content to ensure I am updated with information related to my course and future career. I also read about technology and tried to learn every software related to my course. Keeping up with technology is crucial in this era because everything revolves around it. Also, companies and major organizations tap into technology skills to aid in their business operations. Therefore, continuous learning allows me to understand and keep up with my environment in the desired ways. The third major skill is creativity and innovation. Creativity is the ability to develop new ideas, and innovation is the ability to implement these ideas into something useful or impactful. I always have ideas to solve problems or designs that most peers adore and adopt into daily activities. This creativity and innovation capacity allows me to solve problems easily and amicably while ensuring everyone is satisfied with the decisions made. Creativity has also improved my learning process by creating new projects and participating in science and technology projects that have improved my skills and knowledge on different subjects.
Driving Forces
My major driving force is structure, where traditional approaches, defined systems, and proven methods of living drive me. The second driving force is selflessness, where I am more driven to complete tasks for the sake of completion without expecting anything in return. I am also intentional about assisting others for a specific reason, not just to help. Besides, I am harmonious with my environment and like to be driven by a particular experience or subjective viewpoints and strike a balance in my environment. I believe in winning and associating money with success. Therefore, it is important for me that everything I do is aligned with advancing my goals and traits towards achieving more money and hence, success (Hallo et al., 2020). I value people, thoughts, and ideas based on the artistic value and unique features they instill in me. I am also driven by healthy conversations that strike new ideas and creativity.
Significance of the results on my awareness
The obtained results from this assessment are very insightful on my behavior and traits. The assessment has presented my strongest skills and behaviors, which impact my daily activities and life. Through this assessment, I can know what to work on and what to keep improving in terms of behavior and skills. The assessment has also improved my self-confidence and relationship skills by learning how I deal with situations and interact with others (Kaufman, 2019). This assessment is essential for everyone seeking to understand themselves and how their various traits can be useful in their work and interpersonal interactions. It is also worth noting that personal development is a journey, and one may not acquire these skills overnight.
Areas of Improvement
The DISC score showed I had a high S and I and a low D and C. This shows that I have a problem dealing with anger-charged situations, competitive programs, and assignments with many rules and activities that demand quality and detail (Gianakos, 2023). Therefore, I need to improve my attention to detail and complexity to ensure that I can maneuver all complex or simple situations. This improvement will increase my chances of working under pressure and deliver results on tasks requiring much attention.
Strong and weak areas
The high S score on the DISC tests shows that I am understanding, loyal and patient. I desire well-defined goals and expectations and can work patiently with everyone. I also had a high score on influencing skills, meaning I am enthusiastic and sociable. This trait is important in developing my connections and relationships with people and learning from them. I am also loyal to my cause, great at maintaining a process, and highly tuned to new environments and synergy.
My weak areas include poor attention to detail and rules, which are too complex to follow through and work with. I need to improve my attention to detail and learn to work in complex environments. Besides, I am poor at dealing with anger-charged situations and managing chaos. I mostly avoid conflicts instead of finding ways to solve them, which lowers my self-esteem if I am involved in them. I must work on my conflict resolution methods and dealing with anger-related situations. My other weaknesses include depending on others more, even when I know I am right, holding grudges when personal beliefs are attacked, poor projection of urgency, and underestimating my abilities.
Part 2: Impact of my traits on career and work performance
Identifying one’s traits is important in determining their ideal work environment. From the traits identified above, my ideal work environment is one where I have to connect with people personally, have a democratic leader to follow, and where creativity and innovation are appreciated. My decision-making skills will help me solve problems and make the right choices in my work and interpersonal relationships (Fernández-del-Río et al., 2019). This trait will also allow me to make decisions promptly and ask the right questions without making assumptions about the subject matter. My ability to continuously learn new methods and technologies will be important in keeping up-to-date with current information and being considered a resource of knowledge by others. Other traits such as creativity and innovation, teamwork, and appreciation will be important in creating meaningful relationships with other workmates and achieving desired results by combining knowledge, imagination, and curiosity.
Critical success traits
The major trait that is critical to my success is creativity and innovation. Creativity will allow me to create new ideas, methods, and technologies to improve business operations. All employers look up to employees with creativity since they help grow their companies significantly. Through this creativity, I will be able to participate in major decision-making processes, interact with many people and gain respect as a knowledge resource. Another important trait of my success is teamwork and cooperation (Andrade, 2019). I value working in a team and sharing ideas with other people to have a broad platform to work with. Working with a cooperative team and creating healthy networks with them is also easier.
Traits to work on carefully
Some of the potential challenges that I may face in work and career environments include struggling with change even when it complements my way of living, lack of comfort in sharing ideas with new people, difficulty dealing with diverse situations involving objective views, using inappropriate forums to share my beliefs and spending too much time self-reflecting and not enough time following through. After identifying these challenges, I need to work on my time management skills, communicating in new environments, and accepting change.
Part 3: Action Plan
The first trait I need to improve is accepting change. I am sometimes reluctant to change environments for fear of criticism and rejection. To change this, I need to accept that I am very competent and that any environment suits me to showcase my creativity and other interaction skills. I need to learn to be comfortable sharing my ideas with new people and get their feedback without fear of rejection (Bleidorn et al., 2021). I also have problems dealing with complex environments or those requiring many procedures and rules. It is important to follow the rules, but it becomes too tedious when there are too many. To handle this, I will start by working with fewer rules and progress to tasks involving many rules. Doing this will teach me to work with complex instructions and rules.
Besides, I need to improve my time management skills. I spent too much time reflecting on what to do and never actualizing what I reflect on. As much as self-reflecting is good, I need to learn how to actualize my plans. To achieve this, I will have a spreadsheet of what I reflect on and tick when each is actualized. By writing down all the goals and plans I need to achieve, I will stay committed and work towards achieving them. I also need to improve on dealing with anger-charged situations. To achieve this, I must learn to control my emotions and investigate problems before getting aggrieved (Andrade, 2019). I will also work on managing my conflict-resolution skills, a step toward managing my anger. I plan to follow this action plan to improve my weak areas, which will also improve my relations with others now and in my career.
Conclusion
In conclusion, this self-assessment has helped me realize more about myself, including my strengths and weaknesses. The identified skills are decision-making, continued learning, creativity, and innovation. These skills are very important in my career, and I aim to grow them to achieve the best from my work. However, I am weak at time management, changing environments, dealing with anger-charged situations, and working in complex environments. I have developed an action plan to help me improve on these weaknesses and target to follow it for a significant change.
References
Andrade, H. L. (2019, August). A critical review of research on student self-assessment. In Frontiers in Education (Vol. 4, p. 87). Frontiers Media SA.
Bleidorn, W., Hopwood, C. J., Back, M. D., Denissen, J. J., Hennecke, M., Hill, P. L., … & Zimmermann, J. (2021). Personality trait stability and change. Personality Science, 2, 1-20.
Fernández-del-Río, E., Koopmans, L., Ramos-Villagrasa, P. J., & Barrada, J. R. (2019). Assessing job performance using brief self-report scales: The individual work performance questionnaire. Revista de Psicología del Trabajo y de las Organizaciones, 35(3), 195-205.
Gianakos, D. (2023). Building Emotional Intelligence Through the DiSC Assessment. Physician Leadership Journal, 10(4).
Hallo, L., Nguyen, T., Gorod, A., & Tran, P. (2020). Effectiveness of leadership decision-making in complex systems. Systems, 8(1), 5.
Kaufman, J. C. (2019). Self-assessments of creativity: Not ideal, but better than you think. Psychology of aesthetics, creativity, and the arts, 13(2), 187.
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