Okay, you may look at the title and feel like throwing the lemons back at the life. Let’s start with how frustrating the situation is at present for everyone in the world. It doesn’t matter if you are famous, rich, poor, where you come from, or even, where you are in the world, right now. It is May 2020 and we are all going through a global crisis, yes, some people may have it easier than others, being able to work, not having to support a family, having a massive house to live in, and so on. But as my earlier posts discussed, we are all in this together. This post is not going to be about COVID-19 or anything like that, but it is a good place to start the discussion.
I don’t know about anyone else, but, I know how I felt the first couple of weeks, I was keeping myself overly busy. I am an active person, who is always doing 3 different things at the same time and I love it. I take downtime when I need it, but, all of a sudden, I was faced with having to take a lot of downtime, and, time alone with myself. We have all got used to this new age of life, where we don’t take time with ourselves the way we should and live in a world where everything has to be done now. It can be great to spend time by yourself and really get to know who you have become, but on the other hand, it can be scary as we have a tendency to be extra critical of ourselves and not see what others can potentially see in us.
If you are struggling with making the most out of this situation and finding it hard to centre on yourself, I would like to point you in the direction of, what I believe to be two magical, and simple, online free assessments to give you a better sense of yourself. Well, as a starting point anyway.
The first one I want to talk about is the Myer-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). It was developed in the 1960s and is based on studies and theories by Carl Jung. Myer’s and Briggs wanted to develop their understanding and findings around personality types in a way that would be effective for people. It is broken down into 16 individual personality types and can help explain why you may act a certain way or do certain things. There are many free ones online but one I like particularly is https://www.16personalities.com/. It gives you a breakdown of what your personality type means, your strengths and weaknesses, how you act within relationships and at work and what would be a useful career for your personality type. It can identify things you know about yourself but don’t always or fully believe. For example, my personality type is an Advocate, one of my strengths is being insightful. I didn’t always believe this as I can see that as being arrogant. Yes, it can be if I tell everyone I am right and know everything, but if you look at it more deeply, it is having a better understanding of people and what they are going through and helping to guide them, which I am actually good at, most of the time, anyway, when I can admit it also.
Another useful tool is the VIA character strengths, which you can do here https://www.viacharacter.org/survey/account/register. They believe that we have a mixture of 24 different character strengths. The ones at the top of your list are the ones you use the most, it doesn’t mean that the ones at the bottom are weaknesses but they aren’t ones that come naturally to you in everyday situations. The first time I did the survey was 3 years ago and I did it last night again in preparation for writing this post. Like your MBTI grouping your character strengths can fluctuate, Judgement was in my top 5 the last time and has moved to number 20 this time. It just means it isn’t one I am using at the moment, it could also mean that I have grown or changed in some way and it has made a difference to what strengths I need and use right now.
Right, so I hope by now you have done one if not both of the surveys mentioned above. Were you surprised by what you got in either of them? Or not really surprised, but found it hard having to admit it was true?
I want you to read through them and maybe from VIA pick the top five character strengths, or from MBTI your top two strengths. Do some writing about how and why these are your top strengths. What do you offer to yourself and others that make you who you are? If right now you are saying nothing because you are staying safe at home, or you don’t feel like you have anything to offer, then this is the perfect time to start working on yourself and building up your self-belief.
My top 5 character strengths are kindness, gratitude, love of learning, honesty and humour. Trust me again when I say a love of learning was nowhere near the top 5 last time, but at the moment I am using this time to be productive and doing my best to learn new skills and come out of this situation stronger and better. So, looking at these top strengths, I can focus on how I could show kindness and gratitude to other people, which would generally be what I would do, but I am going to start focusing these on myself and I want you to do the same.
- My plan is to show kindness to my body and exercise every day. it is also helping me put myself in a mindset as I do it before work and I can definitely feel the difference in the days I don’t manage to do it. I am also going to show myself kindness by not beating myself up when I have that extra biscuit or don’t stick to my plan for the day.
- Gratitude I am going to remind myself before I go to bed of 3 things that I was grateful for that day, they don’t have to be big, it could be that I went to bed on time. With gratitude it is sometimes good to write these down somewhere so especially on particularly bad or hard days you can look back on these.
- Love of learning, this is my goal, to embrace and actually love learning something new. I am a practical person, so I can find learning stuff online challenging, and that is what I have always told myself, I am now going to change my way of thinking and remind myself by being kind again that anything learned is positive even if it isn’t much.
- Honesty, I am going to be honest with myself when I am having a bad day and do whatever is needed to get through. If that is sitting and watching television and eating lots of chocolate, that is okay. I will be kind to myself and let myself do this and be grateful that I can.
- Humour, this one is important to me, no matter what the situation you need to find the humour in it, and if you are struggling to find your own humour, call a friend you know who will bring your spirits up.
Now for the important part, no matter what mine, or your, top strengths are, you need more than them to do well. You need enthusiasm, imagination and determination for them to be successful. It is hard to start anything when you are feeling in a rut as a lot of people are, our minds and bodies find it hard to deal with uncontrollable situations and it makes our minds go into overdrive thinking, which can be tiring. If you have done the surveys above, great, if not and you are unsure about doing them, write a letter to yourself for you in a years time, about what you would want to read in this letter. Don’t just think about it, actually write the letter and see what you say. Then do the surveys, if you need some more inspiration about setting yourself a goal and visualising it, check out my last post about vision boards to see if it can also help you on your way.
“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending” (C.S. Lewis). I plan to be an even better version of me by this time next year, I hope you are with me, and make the most out of a difficult, unpredictable situation.
