Always Learning

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator "personality" test is not worth the money it costs. I could link to numerous articles on why Myers-Briggs is unscientific.  Here is one from Joseph Stromberg and Estelle Caswell on Vox.  The various criticisms make a few key points: There is very little scientific evidence (i.e., peer-reviewed blind studies) to support it. Karl Jung, on who's work the MBTI is based, acknowledged that his theories were not scientific It leads people to assume that our personality traits are binary -- you are either an Extrovert or an Introvert. It reduces complex human personality to four dimensions.  Take 10 minutes and I'll wager that you can come up with other dimensions. How about Carol Dwerk's work on the Fixed Mindset vs. the Learning Mindset?  What about Resilience?  Spiritual beliefs? It is self-reported.  Many people deceive themselves of what their behaviour is really like. I have personally taken the MBTI assessment multiple times and have

"The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension", commonly referred to as just "Buckaroo Banzai" is a cult American science fiction film from 1984.  It is one of my favourite movies, mainly because it's pretty weird and contains a lot of throwaway jokes and quotable lines.  My friends and I in college watched it obsessively. I highly recommend it if you are in the mood for a silly and fun science fiction adventure. For all of its loopiness, there are some valuable life lessons that I have taken away from the film.  Buckaroo Banzai, played by Peter Weller, has a most famous line:  "No matter where you go, there you are."  As much as this is written to be absurd, the point that I take away from it is that you have to deal with the situation that you find yourself in -- there you are.  There's no point in moaning or blaming other people (blaming other people never solves a problem), you have to take responsibility for making bad situations

One of the more memorable experiences of my early coaching career occurred when I was having breakfast with a client.  He was going on about his people problems (two on maternity leave, one on sick leave, etc.) and his IT problems, and so on.  In the middle of his (healthy) venting, he made the comment "we're nowhere" without any further explanation of what that meant.  When he was done, I gave a thoughtful pause, and then asked him "what did you mean when you said 'we're nowhere.'?" To his surprise, and mine, he didn't remember saying that.  I assured him that he had, and then he thought about it, and replied that what he meant was that he felt that the organisation could be much larger, and that the number of clients that they were serving could be at least twice what it was.  It turns out this was his deepest concern, and that all of the other issues were secondary, or perceived by him as getting in the way of that goal. I've had several m

I don't like to think of myself as a procrastinator, but in some areas of my life, I really am.  For example, I chair the Homeowner's Association of the building that I live in, and I put related tasks off for a perilous amount of time.  I often ask myself why I do this, and I find that many other people put off starting tasks that are really quite easy. The common explanation is Fear of Failure.  I will own up to that, as I have never managed a property before.  Yes, I've owned a house, but managing a block of 10 flats in a country where I am still learning the Landlord Laws is all new to me.  Carol Dweck's writing on the Fixed Mindset vs. the Growth Mindset is instructive here.  People with Fixed Mindsets see things in terms of Success vs. Failure, Winning vs. Losing, etc.  I don't like to start something if I think that I will do it "wrong."  This results in a Fear of Starting. On the other hand, there are tasks I take on that I spend far more time on t

 I don't like banana bread.  Friends who are bakers say that brown bananas make the best banana bread.  So banana bread was invented as a way to make people eat a food that they would otherwise not eat. A member of a team I worked on was very proud of her banana bread.  A few times a year she would bring a few loaves of her banana bread into the office for everyone to eat.  I would take a slice, eat it, and say "this is best banana bread I've had in a long time."  This was not, technically, a lie. I would follow up with asking her "what's your secret?" which, inevitably, was the addition of nutmeg, which is not a banana bread secret. I could have said "no thanks" or "I hate banana bread" or something like that, but I knew that for her, sharing her banana bread with her co-workers was an important gesture of giving appreciation -- showing that we were important to her beyond just earning a salary.  It was also an assertion of her uniqu

The Unreliable Narrator is a device used in novels, plays, and films, wherein the character telling the story does not fully understand what is really going on.  Most often it is used for comic effect.  Examples include the film "Raising Arizona," the film "Badlands" and the "Jeeves and Wooster" novels of PG Wodehouse.  In these, the narrator is dimwitted, and the disconnect between what we see happening in the story and the narrator's understanding of what's going on is very funny.  Occasionally the Unreliable Narrator is used for tragic effect, the best example I can think of is the Terence Malick film "Days of Heaven" in which the narrator is a young girl, possibly mentally disabled, who's misinterpretation of the events of the film is sad indeed.  I believe that we are unreliable narrators of our own lives .  Our minds provide a constant stream of interpretation and the assignment of meaning to What is Happening to us, why we do w