Who am I?

I believe the key to being a better leader, a better wife, a better me, is knowing as much as I can about who I am and who I am not. To that end, I have looked at the MBTI, studied various religions and philosophies and read about right vs. left brained thinking.

What have I learned?

I'm an ENTJ (Extrovert, Intuitive, Thinking, Judging). And can I tell you how much it helped to learn what makes me a "J"!
I don't believe in organized religion. I believe the greatest gift is to love and to be loved in return. Compassion, wisdom, strength and beauty are the true miracles. I will strive to be a Bodhisattva.
I am a strange combination of right and left brain thinking, more right than left, but unmistakably both.

It's not everything, but it's a start. At work, management introduced a new training program two years ago, and I've found it useful in filling some of the gaps, especially in terms of what I am good at and what I enjoy. Even before the program was introduced, I'd bought and read First, Break All The Rules, a book by Gallup Press. It focused on 12 basic questions that help gauge employees' engagement at work. That led to Now, Discover Your Strengths and the Strengthsfinder test. Strengthsfinder is the basis for the Strengths Every Day training launched at work. I was fascinated by the underlying research and even more fascinated by what I read about my top five strengths: Input, Strategic, Learner, Responsibility and Achiever.

To start, the fact that I'd already taken the test, read the books and could explain about synaptic connections and the role they play in our natural talents -- even before the training at work was launched -- became clear when I read about "Input." Everyone got a good laugh at that in the first training meeting.

I've often said to people that I am an open book. You may not understand what you read, but I have nothing to hide. I'll share some of the details about my top five strengths. You may see some of yourself in them. Maybe they'll inspire you to learn more about yourself through whatever tools you find most useful. Before I talk more about my strengths (also called talents or themes), it's important to note that each has it's own characteristics, but the combination of them and the order they're in play a big role in how they apply to each person. Like I said, I believe the way to become a better person altogether is to learn what I am. Maybe I'll talk more later about what I'm not. I'll have to check on how big the Internet really is first.

(Note: I'm not affiliated with any book, author, program, or anything else I talk about in this blog. This is just me and my opinions.)