Psych Profile - Strengths Test

My new job is pretty big on personality tests. This particular one is my top five "strengths" from StrengthsFinder by Tom Rath. I guess it is a pretty popular one - http://www.strengthsfinder.com/home.aspx

I will say that they are creepily accurate.

Belief: If you possess a strong belief theme, you have certain core values that are enduring. These values vary from one person to another, but ordinarily your belief theme causes you to be family-oriented, altruistic, even spiritual, and to value responsibility and high ethics – both in yourself and others. These core values affect your behavior in many ways. They give your life meaning and satisfaction; in your view, success is more than money and prestige.  They provide you with direction, guiding you through the temptations and distractions of life toward a consistent set of priorities. This consistency is the foundation for all your relationships. Your friends call you dependable. “I know where you stand,” they say. Your belief makes you easy to trust. It also demands that you find work that meshes with your values. Your work must be meaningful, it must matter to you. And guided by your belief theme it will matter only if it gives you a chance to live out your values.

Communication: You like to explain, to describe, to host, to speak in public, and to write. This is your communication theme at work. Ideas are a dry beginning. Events are static. You feel a need to bring them to life, to energize them, to make them exciting and vivid. And so you turn events into stories and practice telling them. You take the dry idea and enliven it with images and examples and metaphors. You believe that most people have a very short attention span. They are bombarded by information, but very little of it survives. You want your information – whether an idea, an event, a product’s features and benefits, a discovery, or a lesson to survive. You want to divert their attention toward you and then capture it, lock it in. This is what drives your hunt for a perfect phrase. This is what draws you toward dramatic words and powerful word combinations. This is why people like to listen to you. Your word pictures pique their interest, sharpen their world and inspire them to act.

Focus: “Where am I headed?” you ask yourself. You ask this question every day. Grounded by this theme of focus, you need a clear destination. Lacking one, your life and your work can quickly become frustrating. And so each year, each month, and even each week you set goals. These goals can serve as your compass, helping you determine priorities and make the necessary corrections to get back on course. Your focus is powerful because it forces you to filter; you instinctively evaluate whether or not a particular action will help you move toward your goal. Those that don’t are ignored. In the end , then, your focus forces you to be efficient. Naturally, the flip side of this is that it causes you to become impatient with delays, obstacles, and even tangents, no matter how intriguing the appear to be. This makes you an extremely valuable team member. When others start to wander down other avenues, you bring them back to the main road. Your focus reminds everyone that if something is not helping you move toward your destination, then it is not important. And if it is not important, then it is not worth your time. You keep everyone on point.

Activator: “When can we start?” this is a recurring question in your life. You are impatient for action. You may concede that analysis has its uses or that debate and discussion can occasionally yield some valuable insights, but deep down you know that only action is real. Only action can make things happen. Only action leads to performance. Once a decision is made, you cannot not act. Others may worry  that “there are still some things we don’t know”, but this doesn't seem to slow you. If the decision has been made to go across town, you know that the fastest way to get there is to go stoplight to stoplight. You are not going to sit around waiting until all the lights have turned green. Besides, in your view, action and thinking are not opposites. In fact, guided by your activator theme, you believe that action is the best device for learning. You make a decision, you take action, you look at the result and learn. This learning informs your next action and your next. How can you grow if you have nothing to react to? Well, you believe that you can’t. You must put yourself out there. You must take the next step. It is the only way to keep your thinking fresh and informed. The bottom line is this: you know that you will be judged not by what you say, not by what you think, but what you get done. This does not frighten you. It pleases you.

Responsibility: Your responsibility theme forces you to take psychological ownership for anything you commit to, and whether large or small, you feel emotionally bound to follow it through to completion. Your good name depends on it. If for some reason you cannot deliver, you automatically start to look for ways to make it up to the other person. Apologies are not enough. Excuses ad rationalizations are totally unacceptable. You will not quite be able to live with yourself until you have made restitution. This conscientiousness, this neat obsession for doing things right, and your impeccable ethics, combine to create your reputation: utterly dependable. When assigning new responsibilities, people will look to you first because they know it will get done. When people come to you for help – and they soon will – you must be selective. Your willingness to volunteer may sometimes lead you to take on more than you should.