My Identity, Values and Strengths
18 April 2022
In this blog, I am going to look into myself. I will talk about my values, identity, strengths and limitations. Looking into myself is kind of a scary and sentimental thing to do. It brings back all the memories, goods and bads. But it creates thoughts for me to help me with my study and also for my long term goal. Ok, let's get started.
My core values and identity
To be honest, I've never been sitting down and taking time to think about what values I am living by. After searching back my memories and asked a few friends and families of mine about how I am as a person in their opinion, I can finally conclude it here.
The top 3 of my core values are respect, gratitude, and honesty.
Respect tells me to treat others the way I want to be treated. Gratitude help me to stay positive, to be grateful for what I have. Honesty here is not just about not telling lies, it is about staying real to myself about who I am, what I want and what I need.
I consider myself really lucky that I have not yet had any major ethical decision to make in my life. But I can talk about some small things happened in my daily life. This might happened to any of us already: when you are paying at the cashier and the staff forget to ring up one of the items or too much change is given to you. It happened for me many times. When it happens, honesty guides me to do the right thing: reminding the staff to ring everything up or to give back extra change. Another example is when one of my friends asked me come over to her place to have dinner, she cooked all the dishes and asked me how was the food. The fact was, when everyone was ready, the food was already cold and was not as tasty as what I expected. At that moment, respect and gratitude outweighed honesty, I just said everything was perfect and did not mention anything about food was cold. Being honesty or being respectful to others makes me feel good about myself. Both the consequences of my action I mentioned above all brought me positive emotions.
How my culture has influenced my values and identity.
I was born and grew up in China. I love my country and am proud of where I am from. Living, studying and working for more than 20 years in China, I believe most of my values and identity was shaped under the influence of Chinese culture. Confucius said, “what you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others”. That's exactly what my core value Respect is about.
The Chinese are a collective society. It is always the collective interest comes first. Probably not only in China but also in some other countries in Asia, group harmony is stressed over individual achievement. We can not judge it simply whether it is good or bad. But as a result, I don't like conflicts. Actually, I am scared to have conflicts with others. Instead of trying to solve the problem, I am always trying to run away. I am learning to value myself as an individual as I grow. The learning process seems to speed up after I moved to New Zealand. My other value honesty to myself developed recently. I am trying to listen to my own voice and respect myself. Influenced by both eastern and western culture, I tried and still trying to find the balance in between and trying to adapt the best part of both cultures to myself.
My strengths and limitations.
To find out my strengths and limitations, I've done some personality tests. Here are the results from 16 personality test. The result shows that my personality type is INFP-T (Introverted, Intuitive, Feeling, Prospecting, Turbulent). According to the test, my strengths are idealism, integrity, dedication, open-minded, passionate and thoughtful. My weakness are overly sensitive, impracticality, overly idealistic, selflessness and conflict avoiders.
The test results are quite in line with my own understanding of myself. Interesting to see that idealism is my strength but overly idealism is my weakness. Same rule applies to thoughtful, as thoughtful is my strength while overly thoughtful which is selflessness is my weakness. Looks like to find the perfect balance between my strengths and weakness is my task in life.
My strengths and limitations in terms of my learning and career development
My strengths that can help me with my learning and career development are dedication and passionate. It is the first week of my learning journey in Dev Academy, I am really enjoying it and very passionate about everything I am learning, especially something that I've never heard of! My limitations that I need to be aware of are overly idealism, overly sensitive and conflict avoiders.
I noticed that I've been talking a lot about avoiding conflicts in this blog. If I need to start to work on something, it might be a good place to start. I have to amid that harmony is important for the community but I should think of myself as well.
When I was in university, there were pair works and group assignments. There was one pair work partner was not communicating with me. Instead of trying to reach out to my partner, what I did was to ignore this and just did my own parts. Just on the day before due, the person finally contacted me and told me nothing had been done. Since we need to share the same mark, I had to do some of the other part to avoid loosing points. I was not satisfied with what I have done. If there will be similar situation in the future, I should talk to the person directly and immediately, if that doesn't work, I will seek help from the team leader or the manager. To avoid or ignore it, there will never be a perfect solution.