10: The Enneagram (and Other Personality Tests)

Life

May 3

In Episode 10, I talk with friend and Success Strategist, Eryn Morgan, about personaliy tests. I had originally pitched it as a conversation about the enneagram test (and our own journeys with it - neither one of us are experts), but we talked our way through and around five different tests: the enneagram, 16 personalities, strengths finder, the kolbe test, and business chemistry.

I loved having this conversation with Eryn, it helped me figure out how to use the personality tests to learn even more things about myself. And inspired me to take another personality test I never have before. So that was awesome.

And just to clarify - while I'm definitely a personality test addict, I don't believe that you're supposed to live your life by them, nor do I think all of the answers are black and white, or you can use your responses as an excuse for why you're doing things a certain way in life. I just think it's an interesting framework to use to learn something new about yourself.

Onto life this week -

I've 100% failed at work-life balance this week. Over 70 hours on the books this week. I'm hoping that what I did was drive myself so far towards the "worked too hard" side that I can finally calm down for a while. My brain found some space today to create new ideas today, so that seems promising.

Podcast News:

The was the last of the batched episodes I recorded, that means in the next two weeks you'll be getting more real-time content that I'm excited to both create (and share).
One interview I want to line up is with a few fellow co-workers I have who I think do a great job managing teams. It's a concept I'm trying to learn more about. Goodness it's hard to try to figure out that balance of challening directly and caring personally (new language that I've learned from listening to the Radical Candor podcast this week).
I'm also currently super interested in hearing about how people raise families in cities. As somebody who grew up at the end of a dead end street in a town that was small enough to be called a village, I can't even begin to figure out what that would look like, even as somebody who has lived in a city for 14 years. Maybe I will try to find someone to talk with me about this.

Self Improvement of the Week:

John and I have started watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. I've immediately taken to the perspective of looking for leadership tips from Captain Picard. He seems like a solid choice of a person to try to immitate. I think John is amused. We're four episodes in, and so far, I'm enjoying it!
I challenged myself to make minestrone soup this week. The reason it involved challenging myself is because it was one of those recipes for which I didn't have all of the ingredients so it invovled a lot of substituions. (So for example, I didn't have tomato paste, but I found out that I could use 3x the tomato sauce that I would have used paste and then just cut out some liquid. It worked well!) And substitutions stress me out; that's why I like baking. So, props to me for trying to get out of my comfort zone.
We used Microsoft Teams this week to write a proposal. I haven't quite gathered all of my thoughts on it yet, but it was a journey. You can't tell who's editing (like, if an important person makes a change, but you don't know they were an important person so you override them), the system kept crashing (because apparently if you mark tracked changes it saves all the words you delete and your document gets up to over 300,000 words), and only half of the changes saved every time you needed to do so. I'm sure there's a better way to manage this for next time. I just need to figure out what it is. (It's possible that with the 4-day turnaround time we (thought we) had, it was just always going to be complicated, but I'm going to try to see if there's anything else to learn in addition to that.)

Thanks for being on this journey with me, I hope you enjoy the episode!

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