Stephen's Self-Assessment Arcade

Why Is Self-Assessment Necessary?

If you want to be in control of your own life and your own results, you need to be able to determine where you are at and where you need to be. That way, you can perform a gap analysis and determine what you need to change to get you where you want to go. This is not possible to do without an informed understanding of where you are: that is self-assessment. You also need to determine if you are really getting to where you want to be: that is self-monitoring.

"Many people believe they listen to their hearts, but their other organs have learned to throw their voices."
-- Dale Dauten

Where are you going to get that informed understanding? You can't always rely on other people to give it to you, and you can't always accept everything you're told. Many people will never tell you the bad news. Others will faithfully tell you how to be what they think all people should be. Of everything you hear, what do you believe? One size does not fit all. Although there are common elements, such as integrity and prudence, in good character, there is no one single definition of who everyone should be.

"He who would live another's life, another's death must die."
-- James Thurber

The purpose of this site is to provide you with a starter toolkit for self-assessment, with leads to the sources if you are interested on following up on other people's ideas. Instead of having to go out and collect these sources on your own, you can see the materials that I have found valuable, understand why, and dig further into those that interest you. And if you have resources of your own that you have found useful, I would like to hear about them.

I am also including ideas of my own whose veracity I have learned along the way.

Your Host

You can find out about me here.

Feedback

Appropriate comments are always welcome: send me mail (but edit this address first).

I would also be pleased to hear from you about sources not on this list that you have found helpful. Or, if you are an author of a relevant book, I would like to hear from you. In either case I would appreciate a summary and an excerpt of the source material. It would be helpful if the material in question is commercially available, so that I can link to it on my site.

Self-Assessment Tools

Identification

Start here, especially if you think you don't need to.

Myers-Briggs/Keirsey: Temperament
Kurcinka: Are you cool or intense?
Learning styles
Listening styles

Analysis

Hierarchy of needs
Taking your own mental inventory
The leadership space
Relationship and task maturity (Humphrey)
Urgent vs. important (Covey)
Stages of power (Hagberg)
Ashby’s Law: requisite variety
The Intelligence Trap (de Bono)
Talents (Buckingham and Coffman)

Find What You Want

If you are looking for additional information not listed here, try searching amazon.com.

A Final Thought

"From everyone to whom much has been given, much shall be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more shall be demanded."
-- Luke 12:48b

Last Modified Monday, 14-Jul-2014 16:38:16 EDT