Progress

Last spring, I attended a pre-college planning session at my daughter’s high school, and decried in a blog the counselor’s reference to “a little personality test” as essentially a throwaway adjunct to the real stuff of standardized academic testing.

I’m pleased to report that in the latest of these pre-college sessions, the counselor this time – a different one — talked about the importance of the young adults creating a real plan for college, which is linked to their vision of their best-fit career, which is ultimately grounded in, yes, you guessed it, the personality tests.

These are evidently the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and the Strong Interest Inventory, two great assessments of the self.

The battle to get people to see the importance of understanding the self, and not just how to do more, better, faster and cheaper, is a long one. Many organizations just want more of the same.

But when people take responsibility – and it’s a very big responsibility — for figuring out where they are going to do their best work, then new and better things can start to happen.