115: Personality Tests

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Questions about the Video File:

  1. What was Myers-Briggs type indicator originally designed for?
  2. How popular is Myers-Briggs personality test today?
  3. What does this test do for you?
  4. When did women start working out significantly?
  5. How are extroverts/introverts characterized?
  6. What does the method of collecting information tell about your personality?

 

General Questions:

  1. How often do you think about your personality?
  2. Do you often analyze your actions and motives? How about those of the others?
  3. Do you believe that either being an extrovert or an introvert is a virtue?
  4. What would be the one thing you admire about yourself?
  5. What would be the one thing you wish you could change about yourself?
  6. Have you ever taken a standard test to identify your character type? Why? Why not?
  7. To what extend are you aware of your weaknesses and strengths? How did you gain this awareness?

 

Related Quotes:

  • "To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment." Eckhart Tolle
  • "The more you know yourself, the more patience you have for what you see in others". Erik Erikson
  • "A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don't know ourselves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox's or bear's, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there." Meister Eckhart
     

Related Idioms and Expressions:

  • Get the more out of someone or something: to gain a better possible result
    • If you are more organized, you can get more out of yourself..
  • Go with your gut: to trust your feelings when making a decision.
    • Don't overthink it, just go with your guts.

 

Related Words and Phrases:

  • Get into (phv) to manage to get elected or chosen
    • My hard work and good grades at high school finally got me into Harvard.
  • Idyllic (adj) very nice, beautiful or pleasant
    • This is my idyllic city to live in. it’s big but not that crowded, just like I want.
  • Indicator (n) something that shows the status of a condition
    • The number of students who get into university can be an indicator of success for the high school they graduated from.
  • Trait (n) a specific feature in one's character that can lead into a particular behavior
    • Being caring is one of his remarkable traits.
  • Psychiatrist (n) a doctor who has studied mental illnesses  
    • She was diagnosed clinically depressed by several psychiatrists and she's currently on medication.
  • Psychologist (n) a person who has studied human mind and its effect on human behavior
    • To deal with your phobias you need to talk to a psychologist.
  • Therapist (n) a person who is expert in treating a specific kind of mental or physical illness or problem
    • I see my therapist once a week regularly.
  • Workforce (n) a group of people who work for a company, industry, etc
    • Women joined the workforce actively in 40s.
  • Well-suited (adj) appropriate for a specific purpose
    • With all your experience in car industry I’m sure you are well-suited for the job. Don't worry about the interview.
  • Stimulate (v) to trigger a reaction
    • If you ask the right questions, the audience is stimulated to think deeply.
  • Pump somebody up (phv) to cause somebody feel more confident and energetic.
    • The kids get pumped up when their aunt is present. They start act more lively and confidently.
  • Fulfilled (adj) happy because you have everything you want in your life
    • She felt fulfilled when she got her dream job as a violinist in the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.
  • Tangible (adj) real as opposed to imaginary
    • A tangible result of traffic lights is lower number of accidents.
  • Nitty-gritty (n) the fundamental facts of a situation
    • Let's get to the nitty-gritty, how much salary are you thinking of?
  • Think something through (phv) to think about the possible outcomes of something carefully
    • You have plenty of time to think it through so don't rush.
  • Dilemma (n) a situation in which you can't make a choice between two things
    • He is struggling with the dilemma of getting the more interesting job with lower salary or the dull one with the better pay.
  • Compass (n) a device that shows directions with a needle that always points to the north.
    • Let your feelings be a compass for your choice.

 

Related Collocations

  • Take a test (v) to take part in an exam in order to answer the questions
    • The students had to take two tests in one day.
  • Fall into categories (v) categorize; divide into some groups based on similarities
    • Depending on the main instruments and major beats, metal music falls into several categories.
  • Think through a problem (n) consider all aspects of a problem carefully
    • You need to calm down and think through your problem.

 

Please leave a response to the following question as a comment: 

What would be the one thing you admire about yourself?

There are 8 Comments

The personality is the distinguished  pattern of thinking, feeling and behaviors that makes you a unique person and dissimilar to anybody. It is very difficult to talk about my personality without considering my acquaintances’ viewpoints.
Definitely everyone wants to be attractive and admirable to others. It means how well you interact with others, they are more interested and pleasant to hang out with you. I have to point out having a good personality is vital for your social relations and probably has more significant effects than a good appearance. As a matter of the fact, a good personality can be permanent and gradually improves by passing of time despite a good looking.
According to this concept, I think the most admirable thing about me is integrity and treat people with respect.
Being honest and true with the others, not only makes me feel good inside but also bring me the admiration and respect of others. Simply when you respect another with your rectitude and honesty, you respect yourself indeed and show your sense of human morality. Ultimately I always believe from the bottom of my heart that the happiness of my life is connected to others’ happiness and the easiest way that I can make somebody happy is just respect them and their dignity and be true with them as much as I can. Sometimes it is very difficult to keep going in this way and I am not a prefect person but at least I will try my best.

Personality tests can be so useful because they help people to find out more about themselves but they couldn't reply all questions and define the best decision that every body need to know. They are just some tools to help you recognise different character categories and make you think about them to understand which category you belong to, what characteristics you may have. It is important for everybody to know and think about their personality to find out better ways to decide, choose or think about every day life. 

There are many useless tests which are like games (I don't mean that games are useless!), you can't rely on every personality tests because most of them are just for fun or advertising or maketing, designing a true personality test need a huge research and alot of trial and error to become something that is relyable.

First of all, I would like to indicate my answer in personality test of humanmetrics site:
INTJ
Introvert(16%) iNtuitive(47%) Thinking(28%) Judging(56%)
• You have slight preference of Introversion over Extraversion (16%)
• You have moderate preference of Intuition over Sensing (47%)
• You have moderate preference of Thinking over Feeling (28%)
• You have moderate preference of Judging over Perceiving (56%)
I think it’s so hard to speak about own characteristics especially about personality. Because, personality is the thing that other peoples should comment on it. A characteristic that I can admire about myself is that I am punctual for my tasks related to myself or related to others. In this context, I can mention my appointments with my friends which admire me for my punctuality. To the best of my knowledge, great personality can has influence on the other people who have relation with. In this way, I believe that we should care about our personality and nice characteristics. We must try to foster them and then hold them in a constant status. Primarily, we should control our feelings in different situations. Most of all have different personality in distinct circumstances. Actually we try to adapt our characteristics with diverse people and diverse places. Furthermore, we should find nice characteristics and afterward we should try to foster them in ourselves.

In my opinion humans personality is really complicated; even we really don't know much about ourselves! But having enough awareness of it helps us to have a better self-reflection of ourselves and the other phenomena around us. In this way getting assistance from valid sources which can help us to understand our personality better, is effective; like personality tests and psychology books.
I think one of my positive traits which I admire about myself is my perseverance in different tasks. Usually I try not to give up in different situations and improve my various abilities, because I want to do my best in every task ;also my daily schedule helps me a lot to manage my time.
Even though personality is complex,we can identify and form the various characteristics in the way we want and improve our communications with others.

It's surprising to know more about yourself just with some questions! I think it shows that human being is so simple to understand in spite of being complicated in some ways. Mots of the time we think that every single one of us is unique and there is nobody similar to the other one but these kinds of test show that our personality definitely belongs to one of the defined divisions. That means that there are many many people who feel like you and behave like you or maybe have problems like you as well. It's good to hear that because you can think of not being lonely with your feelings and it's scary to hear though because it seems that you have programmed before you can decide what you like to be.

However you clearly belong to one of these divisions, I think every one of us can be unique with his or her decisions, changes and feelings.