Assessing

I promise that upcoming posts will have multiple references to A Burst of Light, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Health At Every Size, and Happy Fat. 

For now, though, after two days of on-boarding at work, with going through various exercises, I want to write about some of that. (Except for my new insights on preferring vampires to zombies; I think I will save that for October.)

There were two things that stood out.

One is that we took a brief DISC assessment. That rates you on factors of Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness.

I scored a 92% on Steadiness, 64% each on Influence and Conscientiousness, and 14% on Dominance.

A few years ago I am sure I would have scored higher for Dominance. I do care about results, I have become so averse to abuses of power now that even descriptions of some things that would probably work out as benign sound repugnant to me. 

As it is, I do take charge of situations pretty easily if people just need direction. If people need more of a "taskmaster" because they want to goof off, I would really rather not deal with that nonsense. Sometimes you have to, though, and I do what I have to do. (Is that the Conscientiousness?)

Those are the things that tests like this miss, and I get pretty skeptical of them. (Especially skeptical of people who put their Myers-Briggs result in their profiles, though apparently only INFJs do that.) However, looking at the recommended jobs for Steady people, there was everything I have ever done or thought of doing. Okay, it may have a point.

We also did a brief segment on body language, and encoding and decoding, and how often people do these things unconsciously, but you can think about them. 

We were asked what we thought people's first impressions of us were, and what we wanted them to be.

A lot of people said "quiet".

I could come off that way, and it would not be telling the whole story, but there is some truth to it. What bothers me most is my habitual frown. My smile still flashes easily, but then when it fades, I am frowning like a cartoon frog. I hate that. I am not that unhappy.

(This was through video conferencing, so there was my face in the bottom of the screen, relentlessly.)

I looked around at the other faces, though, and actually, that is a kind of normal face. I just feel like mine didn't used to be so pronounced. Am I fooling myself? 

We were asked to think about what we want people to think about us. I guess I don't need people to look at me and think, "Wow; she's really happy!" What I settled on was that I want people to think that I am "good", in the sense of being a good person, and good at what I do. Trustworthy. Competent. Good.

Based on the frequency with which strangers ask me questions or for help, I may have achieved that. It could be a relief, except that I still think that I look too sad.

Maybe I have not really reconciled myself to the last five years yet, and the losses over that time. But maybe, I am still healing.

Or maybe I should just be really grateful for face masks.