It's All About YOU and your personality!
To set your own goals, you need to understand yourself and your personality first. Goal setting is a journey with yourself, so it is important for you to know what makes you unique and what makes you tick.
But what can I tell you about yourself that you don’t already know?
Well nothing. But I can help you to understand how your natural traits and characteristics – the way you behave, your interests, your motivating needs – affect how you succeed and therefore how they affect your individual goal setting journey. After all, it’s all about you!
Personality Profiling in Goal Setting
You are unique, and only you can understand what makes you tick – profiling just helps you to gain that understanding.
Think of someone you know who is successful – how do they act or behave? What are their traits? Do you think this helped them succeed? How do you compare? What characteristics of yours do you think affect the way you achieve?
Some traits are more in tune with success and achievement than others, but it doesn’t mean that the rest of us are doomed! We just need to be aware of what characteristics help us achieve and use these to our advantage - and what characteristics hold us back and turn these into positive drivers.
I am not a psychologist and 'people' can be very complex, but there are a couple of well-known theories that we can use to help understand ourselves and therefore help with personal goal setting:
- Behaviour Preferences – we all act differently to different things. This is a natural behaviour that is unique to you and affects how you view success and failure. Find out what your natural behaviour tendency is and how this will affect your goal setting.
- Intelligence preferences – we all like and are good at different things, and this affects what goals we set. Find out what your interests are. No this is not an IQ test, but rather an assessment of what type of things interest you and therefore what your ‘natural’ intelligence or aptitude is.
- Personal motivation – we are all motivated by different things, some inherent to our traits and some driven by our life situation. Find out what motivates you.
So, there are several personal indicators that influence what you do, how you think, how you relate to other people and how you succeed. The key thing is that you understand YOU as a person and what this means for your own goal setting journey and ultimate success.
There are many other self-assessment tests available – a model commonly used by companies around the world for executive training is the Myers Briggs Type Personality Indicator. It is important to note that none of these indicators are intended to pigeon-hole you into any particular category or tell you how you should behave or feel, but they are intended to help you understand yourself, which is one of the most important things to understand if you are truly going to be successful in life.
I encourage you to explore as many of these self-assessment tests as you can find to help you on this journey of
self-discovery and awareness. Or perhaps you can tell us about YOU and help others understand who they are…
