A lot of people underestimate the power of understanding who you are. We think we know ourselves because we are with ourselves daily but few take the time to study themselves. We study math, English and all of these other subjects but we never study ourselves. How does that make sense? We can never truly excel in life until we know who we are. That is why I am huge on taking personality tests. The more tests you take, the better because they all give you some more information about who you are.
As an athlete, you can excel and reach your full potential until you understand what makes you tick, what makes you weak. One can only excel from a place of strength and not weakness. The problem is that most people have no idea where their strengths lie. If you don’t know where your strengths lie then what will you build on to succeed?
How Personality Tests Help Athletes
Feeling Understood
When I first read through my personality test, I was shocked at how well it pointed me out. I felt like this test knew everything about me. Something is refreshing in life about being understood. When we finally meet that particular person, it feels like someone finally gets us. No one wants to be misunderstood. It makes us feel alone and lost, and that is never good.
Sometimes there are parts of us that we know to be true, but we duck and dodge those truths. We know that we have a weakness dealing with criticism for example. That will affect how coachable we are. A huge part of being a great athlete can be coached. Michael Jordan was great because he was very coachable and he listened very intently.
Focus on Increasing Your Strengths
As I said before, you can’t build on weaknesses. A lot of times in life we think about why we suck, and we focus on it and grip on to it. The problem is that working on weaknesses continually is just not fun. If Shaquille O’Neal had spent all of his time focusing on his free throw, that would have been time lost working on his fantastic paint game.
He did not need to be an excellent free throw shooter because he was so good in so many other areas. You need to be like Shaq and get so good in your areas of strength that people forget your weakness.
It applies to athletic ability and your personality traits. Let’s say that you have strong communication skills, but you have an issue seeing small details. That is just hard-wired into your personality. A lot of people will start trying to be more specific oriented. When you should start focusing on using your communication skills better to work with others who are more detail oriented. You see the difference? When you know yourself well, you can use your strength to cover your weakness.
Work From a Place of Truth
Many people work from emotion and not from truth. When you work from a place of passion, it allows you to skip over critical details that you need to succeed. When you are shown your personality results, it is like an in-depth look at yourself in the mirror. You only have two choices and this point, and that is to accept who you are both the good and the bad. Or you can keep being delusional, and you can run away from yourself.
Here is the thing, you have to stop running from yourself at some point. You can’t keep living in this protective bubble. You have to face the truth of life and see things for what they are. Before anything can improve, you must see it for what it is right now. If you want to be a better athlete, you have to look at where your skill level is now.
Most people spend their whole lives looking in the mirror and seeing what they could be. The problem is that you can only become something more significant by working from where you are. If you get a map to a destination, but I do not start where you are then it is the wrong map. There is no way around this.
What Now…
Take your personality test and take time to study the results. Don’t just read it and throw it away never to be seen again. For this to work exceptionally well, you have to study it and look at it over and over again. A lot of people get these tests done, but few will use the information.
The first thing that will happen is you will have a better understand if yourself. Nothing can be achieved in life without this. Then you will stop wasting so much time on your weaknesses, and begin using your strengths to dominate.
Lastly, you will work from a place of truth once you understand yourself better. No more looking for alibis, excuses or thinking the world works a way that it does not. Working from a place of truth will help you to build more accurate maps to where you want to be.
