Topic outline

  • Exercise 3 My personal strengths

    Personality is a unique way of thinking, feeling and behaving for each person. Knowing your own strengths and weaknesses gives you a better understanding of yourself and how you function. 

    In order to use your strengths and improve on your weaknesses, you first need to know them. There are several ways of identifying your strengths. Ask for feedback from those who know you well, they interact everyday with your strengths and weaknesses. Learn from school projects and summer job experiences. Get to know people who have chosen a very different life than yourself.

    Understanding your strengths helps you to grow more and keeps you ahead in a lot of things. They also will get you recruited and enable to recognize career development possibilities.

    Knowing your weaknesses gives you a clearer understanding of things that may be holding you back, and you can then learn ways not to let them prevent you from going where you are aiming at.

    Here are self-assessment exercises about your qualities. Complete the exercises in about 45 minutes.


    • Exercises
    • Not available unless: The activity My observations from the value exercises is marked complete
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      Self assessment 16 personalities URL

      16 personalities is a fairly popular questionnaire which is based on classification of different types of individuals. Note that it is impossible to explain the diversity of human personality with a small number of types. Types are said to involve qualitative differences between people, whereas traits might be construed as quantitative differences. Take the results of this self-assessment as a very rough estimate of your likes or dislikes, remembering that behavior and your reactions in different situations also depend of the situation's needs.

    • Not available unless: The activity Self assessment 16 personalities is marked complete
      Questionnaire icon
      What is my talent? Questionnaire
    • Not available unless: The activity What is my talent? is marked complete
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      How self-compassionate am I ? URL

      Self-compassion entails being warm and understanding toward ourselves when we suffer, fail, or feel inadequate, rather than ignoring our pain or flagellating ourselves with self-criticism.  Self-compassionate people recognize that being imperfect, failing, and experiencing life difficulties is inevitable, so they tend to be gentle with themselves when confronted with painful experiences rather than getting angry when life falls short of set ideals. People cannot always be or get exactly what they want. When this reality is denied or fought against suffering increases in the form of stress, frustration and self-criticism.  When this reality is accepted with sympathy and kindness, greater emotional equanimity is experienced.

    • Not available unless: The activity How self-compassionate am I ? is marked complete
      Questionnaire icon
      My observations Questionnaire

    • Additional material

    • URL icon
      Strengths and problems of psychometrical testing URL

      Psychological tests can be a tool of developing self-knowledge when used professionally with a possibility to reflect what the results mean.  There is a long history of psychometrical testing.  As an example of the strengths and problems of testing, here is a wikipedia site of the Big Five personality trait model.  How does one's state of mind or intention affect to the personality trait that is to be seen in one's behavior? How many traits are there actually? Which adjective should best describe an individual trait as it is seen in a one's behavior? 

    • URL icon
      Sisu -- transforming barriers into frontiers | Emilia Lahti | TEDxTurku URL
      Students must
      View
      What is sisu? And how can we find it when we re struggling?
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      Compassion? CoPassion! URL

      In research, compassion has long been defined as alleviating another’s pain. According to another definition, compassion is equally also co-passion, the sharing of another’s enthusiasm. Co-passion is the twin of compassion, it is formed of the same elements as compassion: the ability to recognise another’s emotional state and empathise with it, as well as the actions expressing this empathy. For example, making another’s success visible within the work community by giving praise may be an act of co-passion.

      Compassion has the power to revolutionise human relationships and communities: in the working life, compassion steps up the pace not only of the experience of meaningfulness, but also social relations among colleagues, innovations, cognitive achievement, well-being in the work place, and good customer relations. Also the value of co-passion is irreplaceable: what if your successes were never noticed within your work environment, in any way? Wouldn’t it be crushing, if nobody would rejoice with you?

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Exercise 2 Values
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Exercise 4 Skills