Let me present myself: An introduction to me & my blog through Jung's test

I thought the best way to present myself, is to just start writing. I'll give you hints about myself so I'm sure that it won't take long for you to realize what kind of person I am. The idea about starting this blog is simple; I have always loved writing and I believe it comes more natural to me than to many others so I thought it would be nice. Before I used to think that only persons on trips or on study exchange could keep a blog but now that I've talked with some of my friends, I have realized it's not like that at all. Anybody can share one's thoughts, and just hope somebody cares to read about them, hehe.

So here we go. Let's brake this blog virginity.

Organization and management: Jung's test

I take a course in organization and management at my school. I attend the program of tourism management at Arcada, a polytechnic in Helsinki, Finland. As a part of this course, we had to take a personality test. I found it very nice, once read the result. But basically, we have been studying the ideas of the researcher Jung. So just by googling the words "Jung's test" I found this website, where you can take a personality test. Why my professor chose this kind of test is because it is quite well known and proved to be accurate to some extent. The actual test has 72 questions about how we act in ordinary everyday situations. The questions had mostly to do with social and cognitive behavior.

According to the test, I fall into the ENFJs, the idealist so to say. Furthermore, I belong to the teachers. I thought it was fun to read through the description of my so called personality. According to the test I have a natural talent to lead students and trainees. My best quality is that I can see potential in others. These teachers, to which I'm told I belong, only stand for about two percent of the population, so it's clear that we are talking about a minority. Nothing new there. I'm also warmly outgoing and it's easy for me to use languages as a tool to make myself understood. I should be good at keeping speeches too. And yeah, good in face-to-face communication.

What I liked was the fact that the test called me "bubbling with enthusiasm". I liked that expression. That is me. Besides me of course, other famous teachers are Mikhail Gorbachev, Oprah Winfrey, and John Paul II.

I must say that even though I did this test for school purposes and just for fun, the results can awfully close to reality. When I was reading through the description, I was reading about myself. Or to be more correct, about the way I perceive myself. Of course, the answer was a little over the top, but there was some truth to it. Earlier I've done some other types of personality tests and they have never come as close, must say. Tests related to our horoscopes seem like they just throw out whatever kind of personality features and just hope to be right. In this test, I did get a whole page of information.

Career options

This awakened my curiosity so I wanted to know what kind of career options this test would give me. According to the test, there are four fields of work that could suit me; the social sector (tutoring, psychology, social work, education), health care sector (physician), science/technical sector (science, computer programming) and finally the management sector (management, fashion merchandising, politics). Surprisingly some of these fields have actually been on my list when I have thought about my future options. As a child, my dream job was a teacher, but nowadays I am leaning more towards management in the field of tourism. Scary that the test agreed, again.

There are some lacks in the test of course. What the test actually tells you is your own point of view, how you see yourself because you are the only one answering the questions. In order to see through a test with accurate results, you would have to ask the opinions of other people too. The questions is though, who knows you well enough to answer? Who would give the real answers, the ones that are actually accurate? The fact is that one person has many personality characteristics with different persons. At least I know I act differently with different persons. In that way, we are all chameleons, with changing characteristics. The way we act, our behavior, depends on the roles we take upon us with the people we interact with. Because of this, I think in the end it's impossible to place a person just under one category like here in my case the teachers. I can have some features like the ones of this group, but in different situations, I can act in a surprising way.

Personality

I think our personality is formed by the choices we make during life. The harder and bigger the choice is, the more it changes our personality. Like the Dalai Lama says, a person is a sum of his choices. I think our personality is not invariable, but something ever-changing throughout our lives. Of course, we all have our basic principles that originate in the guidelines our parents gave us during our childhood about what is right and wrong, but sometimes I have had to realize that everything you hear needs to be questioned. Even parents, teachers, professors can make errors. Besides that, I know plenty of people who are completely different from their parents so I refuse to put too much value in genetic factors when it comes to the drifts of our personality.

Social factors affect us much more. In order to maintain for instance an extrovert personality, one needs to get positive feedback from talking in front of others and uttering what's on one's mind. The way to express ourselves that we find successful, that is the one we keep on using.

Cultural factors also affect our personality to a great extent. That's another reason why I find this test lacking. A person on the other side of the world can't have the same cultural influences as you do. A person for instance in Italy that might seem shy there, might be very outgoing in Finland where our culture is much more introvert. A compliment in Finland might be "you're nice" while in the rest of the world it might be something more, hehe. Behavior differs although it might have similar features. I would say though, that a test on personality could be more accurate when we cross borders than for instance an opinion test. Our opinions are far more affected by cultural factors than our personality features, but the tricky part is that you can't separate one from the other.

I would recommend the test for everybody, as something to think about. Go on, it won't do you any harm!