My core personal values align quite highly with my Myers Briggs outcome which is ISTJ-A, a Logistician. I have been the same personality type ever since i first did the test about 10 years ago. I value honesty and integrity above all. If i feel someone is being dishonest or not living up to their word, I can find myself having resentful feelings towards them. I also value duty and dedication to whatever it is people do. I am a big believer of showing up on time and putting in the work. This can lend me towards things like owning a car over the bus as the car feels like a more reliable means of reaching duties on time. I also value openness in myself. I am very much an open book these days about just about everything i have been through, from workplaces, to difficult situation, to even therapy. I also highly value inclusiveness and self identity.
During my time in my last job, I was the Team Leader for a small branch of the company working at a remote site. The company had a set of values around how we should work which were very company focusced and strict. My head office manager also had a way in which they wanted the site to run and would often impliment those. Both of these sets of guidelines were very company focused firstly. When i took over the role I had my own ideas about the kind of work environment i wanted to create. I was at odds with both my manager and the company so i set about establishing the way i wanted to run the environment and showing my management that there could be a different way. I achieved this through a number of means, mostly being knowledgeable, proficient at everything and building a great work environment. The consequences for this was a large increase in the burden of knowledge and amount of work i did during the early days of the job. I thought this was a task worth taking on and the work that went with it was definitely a lot for the first year. The positive side is that i was able to establish a really great work environment and recieve a lot of amazing feedback from staff who worked under me about the environment.
I will mostly quote my Dad here as i had a chat with him about me as a person. My Dad says, "He has a classic mcnie sense of humour. We are very pun based and love to laugh all the time. Humour is always around. He is a very thoughtful person who works through problems. Far more interested in people than technology. An introverted, caring person who enjoys his family." I grew up in a probably middle class part of the Hutt Valley. We always had a lot of different cultures around and people from all sorts of backgrounds went to my schools. I always remember getting along with everyone and not being judgemental about anyone. Humour was the great door opener to friendship, I thank my family for that one. I think growing up around so many different cultures and identities was a big influence on how I viewed the adult and working worlds. I alwasy like to make environments inclusive for people to be themselves. I have changed a few of my values growing up but i think the core foundation of who I am is easily traceable from the environment I had growing up. A final quote from my Dad - "A practical and pragmatic sort". This is high praise coming from someone raised in a farming world and also most sums me up. I know I identify with this quote a great deal. A lot of my identity is based around being seen as a practical and useful person rather than an emotional one. Apart from laughing, my family was a bit shrouded with our emotions so I am still figuring those out.
I have always found it easy to advance to position of leadership with my strengths. I am very practical and honest which is a bonus in most industries I have worked in. I am also very quick to make friends and make people comfortable, this is also very condusive to leadership. It always helps to be self-cofident enough to laugh at yourself. In terms of limitations, I have definitely been too stubborn in the past to make changes to myself when things go wrong. For a long time, I was convinced that study wasn't for me. I didn't have the ability to override a very stubborn idea that had entered my head in my early twenties. But, here I am now, so I got there eventually. I can also be reluctant to change jobs, even if it would be better for me. I am usually very loyal to a place and unwilling to throw myself into the deep end of an entirely new environment too often.
I feel being open and honest will be a huge strength in my learning journey. I'm never too afraid to ask for help or to discuss ideas amongst a group of people. One of the big learning obstacles for me is, honestly, just starting learning. I'm a little bit older and wiser now but coming back into study is a big change from what I am used to. I think my dutifulness and dedication to tasks I set my mind to are big strengths that will help me with this. I see my age as a strength too. I'm 31 now and have had 12 or 13 years of work experience and life experience to grapple with any difficulties I might face. I had an experience when I was 19 that I think of often. I applied for a bank job and after the interview they rejected my application because they said I lacked life experience. At 19, I thought they were just mugging me off and didn't really know what they meant. At 31, I get exactly what they mean.
In my last job, a couple of people were hired to take over from me while I attend this course. One of them could not have been more different from me. I had to work with this person to train them and it became apparent very early that they were struggling with the workload and the tasks they had to do. I usually really like direct feedback in most situations so I tried this with them. I sat them down and we had a discussion about how we could work towards getting them up to speed faster. We basically disagreed about every possible solution. I thought more structure and dedicated one on one learning time was the way to fix the problem. They were intent on more freedom and figuring out their own way to solve the problem. The meeting was not very effective. After some reflection with my partner and one of my brothers, I decided that perhaps the solution here was to give them their freedom and let them stumble over the hurdles and see what happened. I backed off from the hands on approach and let them figure it out, fall over the hurdles and then I would step in if they got super stuck. This was mostly effective, they have a system now that is different from mine and works. I took a big learning from this experience. I had never really considered letting people fail and learning from those mistakes as a solution to learning. I would have always assumed people would just want to know the right answer first time. I feel there is a nice balance here between falling over every hurdle and being told the answer first time. A bit of exploration when learning new things and seeing what problems you run into and, what you can figure out, with the safety net of I can always fall back on this person/answer if it takes too long or I run out of ideas.
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