I confess I got engrossed with my results in the Clifton StrengthsFinder personality survey I flung myself through last week, all 177 questions, 20 seconds to answer each, averaging less than three. Out of this assessment follow 34 category scores, of which the top five show up as your strengths , or as Gallup claims, “It only takes a series of insightful questions to uncover the one true you.”  I’ve taken surveys like this over the years, mainly through work. They were always at least mildly interesting. At least as interesting was observing colleagues lean in to their results, as in I’m this or that, because look, the scores say so. This is the true me. Like I’m an extrovert because Myers-Briggs or the like says so. Likewise, I’m a thinker, a feeler, an influencer, a seller, a commander, individualistic, competitive, creative, analytical, emotionally intelligent, empathetic and so on, matching themselves to the diagnoses from the answers. Well, sure. I’ve been interviewed at length for a detailed profile telling me and others who I am. I’ve clicked the most seeming answer between “never” and “always” on scales that range along some variation of “sometimes” and “often” and “neutral,” yielding acronyms, top scores in order, a chart around a circle, color coded bars, and once a weird graphic that required the written summary to understand at all. These summaries can’t help but be very definitive. That’s you, buddy.   They all have some variation in what they measure with presumed meaning for the individual and how the true you fits a group or team that works together. None are particularly scientific in their theories, but I’m at least giving answers vs. fitting myself to a set of locked-in personality quirks based on my birth date, say. The tests strive to unmask us, to get to the who we really are inside. The problem is we’re very, very unreliable narrators of our own selves. The trope from quantum physics is the behavior of something measured is changed by the fact of being measured. We can’t properly measure something as immutable as an atom on the move, never mind the hard seed of an electron. What we believe about ourselves in a moment is hardly solid by comparison. We do develop habits of thought, though, which might translate to the notion this score must reflect the true me. This came to me in one of these surveys years ago that probed for self-esteem among its categories. I happen not to believe I am anything particularly remarkable among humans, and I answered the questions in kind. My cohort then was colleagues who like me were responsible for the branch of our company in each of our communities. I was stunned to learn I lacked self-worth so critically that the color coding in that part of my results was deep, bleeding-out red, the lowest possible score. No hope whatsoever for success, horribly miscast in my position, maybe any position. Only my operation was thoroughly kicking all my colleagues’ asses in nearly every real measure: revenue growth, profit, employee satisfaction scores, awards, readership surveys and metrics. I’ll note that this had far more to do with our market, our workers and their supervisors than anything I did or was. Plainly this was the case since I scored like crap. My colleagues all ranked high in their self-satisfaction and confidence in being, well, something specials. Yet their operations kind of sucked, to be blunt. The StrengthsFinder survey seeks to end run perceived weaknesses, knowing we dwell on our flaws, and adheres to the theory we’re much better off focusing on our strengths. So my top scores, like all the labels, sound worthy: 1 Achiever; 2 Strategic; 3 Intellection (?); 4 Ideation; 5 Arranger. In my language: Grinder, if/then, think through, creativity, set the course and build the team to fit. These labels all fall into what I’ll call mind space in two of the four umbrellas over the 34 labels: Strategic Thinking (including my Strategic, Intellection, Ideation) and Executing (Achiever, Arranger). Tellingly, there’s nothing of Relationship Building or Influencer in my top five. I’m all head and no heart by this measure. Nothing fuzzy like Relator, Empathy, Harmony. I have to outsource all that, along with Self-Assurance, Command, Activator among the Influencer signposts. The surveys are fine, no doubt true as far as they go, though they can’t help but pigeonhole us. I believe we’re not pigeons but neural mandalas resistant to capture in a survey. The sparks and nodes that make us us don’t fit the distinct conclusions of these assessments. We each play the protagonist in our lives, telling ourselves stories about ourselves, tilting at our personal windmills. We see others in part truly and in larger part utterly without understanding, making up more stories to fill in the blanks of what we don’t or can’t know. The main value of these surveys is not in the presumed truths they reveal to us about us, fascinating as they may be, but ironically in breaking up at least some of the pigeonholes we’ve assigned to those around us. Sure, the scores themselves may provide a glimpse of insight into ourselves and our peers, and the group discussion that follows maybe more so. But I believe the fact of having such a conversation matters most of all, and the scores themselves are the least important. This might be a kind of koan as I think about it, and where the real epiphanies from the whole exercise lurk. Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745. The post Journalism Matters: The hunt for the real true self, a test appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less