Why Upgraded Self Assessment Questionnaires are important

On any journey, it helps to know where you are starting from, what strengths and weaknesses you have, and what tools, stories, assumptions, modes of being and values you are consciously or unconsciously bringing along.  It also can help to understand how what you bring compares to the other travelers.  Where are you strong, where are you weak, what skills do you want to build and how do you build them?  Self Assessment Questionnaires can be a good Red Pill to help you figure these things out in a structured way.

I have taken over 1000 of these things and provide the most useful here in upgraded form.  Most of these questionnaires come from theoretical academics for research purposes and often lack any applied analysis or “What next” guidance.  My “Upgraded Self Assessment Questionnaires” attempt to provide four improvements over their purely research based cousins:

  1. Peer reviewed, well-studied assessment frameworks.  Stay away from pop psychology “quizzes”.  Choose questionnaires that have been thoughtfully designed, tested for correlations, run over large and varied data sets, and subject to critique and comparison to other available measurement methods (and survived).  I am not trying to find the “best” and “only” frameworks, just ones that have been proven to work well so far.
  2. Cohort analysis and objective results placement.  Provide some analysis of your individual results as compared to other people who took the assessment either through my tools and/or in the overall research samples.  This is the “where am I in relation to the other traveler” piece.  Understand this relationship may be an “ah Ha” moment or it may confirm what you already know/feel.  The pay off here is understanding, waking up a bit, become aware just a little more of yourself and your surroundings.  Pause a moment and let it sink in.
  3. Factor analysis where available.  Most assessment tests, while testing a high level item like “happiness” will have groups of questions that are testing the sub-factors that the questionnaire designer has found to make up “happiness”. For example, Jung would say happiness has five factors, health, relationships, ability to perceive beauty, wealth, and spiritual practice.  If you want to improve happiness, the biggest bang for your buck may be to focus on improving the weakest sub-factor.  My upgraded analysis will provide factor analysis where possible.
  4. How to improve recommendations and further reading.    I didn’t take hundreds of these things in a selfless devotion to furthering academic research.  I took them to gain self-awareness and take action to change things I don’t like.  So every analysis section includes extensive links to further reading on the subject as well as pointers to “interventions” which have been proven through research to result in higher assessment scores over time.  Many of my favorite “interventions” are on my blog section called “Try This”.

 

I have started using the words “assessment” and “questionnaire” purposefully instead of “test” or “evaluation”.  I have found “test” and “evaluation” to have a somewhat pejorative connotation toward a yes/no, pass/fail, you have it or you don’t have it mindset.  “Tests” can tend to put you in a box and keep you there.  Early mental health practices were big on this approach, picking out the “bad apples” and putting them in institutions.  Even today, a “diagnosis” (read “test result”) of depression tends put the patient into a treatment “box”, usually pharmacological, the vast majority palliative in nature.

It is important to remember with all assessments and measurements that you are not the sum of your parts. You are not your test results. You are not your grit scale, or Meyers Briggs type, or any other measurement.  You are not your job title.  You are not your relationship status.  Many of these assessments, the results change over time, or when applied to different circumstances.  Just like your emotions change, and the weather.  You are not your temperature reading.  These are characteristics, parts, points in time.  Your authentic self is something else. Something larger.  Something deeper.  In my experience, in the search for these larger, bigger more meaningful things, the assessments can help uncover pathways, stepping stones, issues which are enabling or preventing discover of your authentic self.  Keep in mind these are all just tools.  Your analysis, synthesis and implementation of  growth/change is the most important thing to move the journey forward.

Based on my own self awareness work and supported by more modern existential psychotherapy and positive psychology science, I find that most things measured can be changed.  The purpose of an “assessment” is to calculate a set point, a starting point.  If you want to change the measurement, do some interventions, therapy, growth work, whatever is suggested by the science to improve what you are measuring.  Then take the assessment again.  And Again.  Over time if the interventions are working you should see improvements.  If you don’t, change what you are doing, try something else.  An assessment can lead to awareness which can lead to growth OUT of the box.

I provide these Upgraded Self Assessment Questionnaires to help you wake up and get out of your Boxes.

DO This:  My favorite quotes on living well

MY OWN THOUGHTS:

“You are what you do, not what you dream.” Martin Tobias

“If you are only a consumer, you will always lack wealth.” Martin Tobias

“Be decisive.  Right or wrong, make a decision.  The road of life is paved with flat squirrels who couldn’t make a decision.”  Martin Tobias

“When I can buy anything I want and decide to buy nothing, that is something.”  Martin Tobias

“The grass isn’t greener on the other side. The grass is greener where you water it.”  Martin Tobias

“Have a budget for all the fucks you give.”  Martin Tobias

“Not making a decision IS a decision.”  Martin Tobias

“Tranquility is achieved through equality, not superiority” . Martin Tobias

“The journey is the destination.” Martin Tobias

“Do not be the tilt you want to take advantage in the world.” Martin Tobias

“The past doesn’t matter and the future doesn’t exist. The only thing that matters is doing the next right thing.” Martin Tobias

“Truth” is determined by your frame (stories). You can choose your frames.” Martin Tobias

“Judgements are not the Truth. They can’t be. They are opinions.” Martin Tobias

“Science is an analogy, a theory.” Martin Tobias

FROM OTHERS:

“I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.” Mark Twain

What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” Peter Thiel

“Not making a decision is a decision.” Terry Rose, my highschool debate team teacher.

“Non action is action.” Tai Chi.

“The half life of any negative state is incredibly short.” Sam Harris.

“Be scared. You can’t help that. But don’t be afraid.” Faulkner.

“The ideal psychic state is not something to be newly made or created but experienced with the removal of those accretions which have hidden and thus prevented a realization of the self which we already are.” Pierre Hadot

“Happiness is an inside job. Don’t assign anyone else that much power over your life.” Mandy Hale,

“All of humanity’s problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room.” Blaise Pascal.

“You will never find yourself in what you have built to define yourself.”  Untethered Soul

“If you take the blue pill, the story ends.  You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.  You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland and I will show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”  The Matrix

“It is all just stuff that has to be done.  So do it.”  Linda Treger (former therapist)

“Put fear in its place – as and advisor, not the captain.”  The Flinch (book)

“Be like water my friend” Bruce Lee

“The master should have the selling habit, not the buying habit.”  Cato the Elder

“Distraction destroys Destiny” . Sachen Patel

“Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive”. Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values.

“A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time”, Mark Twain.

“The thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.”  Soren Kierkegaard.

“Work is about the search, too, for daily meanings well as daily bread, for recognition as well as for cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”  Studs Terkel, Working.

“One swallow does not a summer make, nor one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.”  Aristotle

“When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind.”  Seneca.

“It is no exaggeration to say that every human being is hypnotized to some extent either by ideas he has uncritically accepted from others or ideas he has repeated to himself or convinced himself are true. These negative ideas have exactly the same effect upon our behavior as the negative ideas implanted into the mind of a hypnotized subject by a professional hypnotist.”
Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics, A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life

“In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.

On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.”
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“Always pass on what you have learned.”  Yoda

“Do. Or do not.  There is no try.”  Yoda

“You will find only what you bring in.”  Yoda

“Just keep swimming.”, Dori, Finding Nemo

“The happy man is not he who seems thus to others, but who seems thus to himself.”  Publilius Syrus.

“The first step towards getting somewhere is to decide you’re not going to stay where you are.”  John Pierpont “J.P.” Morgan

“The man without a purpose is like a ship without a rudder.”  Thomas Carlyle

“The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent, but if we can come to terms with this indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning.  However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.”   Stanley Kubrick.

“A thought is harmless unless we believe it. It’s not our thoughts, but our attachment to our thoughts, that causes suffering. Attaching to a thought means believing that it’s true, without inquiring. A belief is a thought that we’ve been attaching to, often for years.”
Byron Katie, Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life

“Don’t believe everything you think.”
Byron Katie

“Placing the blame or judgment on someone else leaves you powerless to change your experience; taking responsibility for your beliefs and judgments gives you the power to change them”
Byron Katie

“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop and look fear in the face.  You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.”  Eleanor Roosevelt.

“We have two lives.  The first life and the second life after you realize you only have one life.”  unattributed.

“There are only two tragedies in life:  One is not getting what one wants; and the other is getting it.”  Oscar Wilde.

“Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful”  Warren Buffet.

“Objective judgment, now at this very moment.
Unselfish action, now at this very moment.
Willing acceptance – now at this very moment – of all external events.
That’s all you need.”
Marcus Aurelius

“Our actions may be impeded … but there can be no impeding our intentions or dispositions.  Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle of our acting.

The impediment to action advances action.
What stands in the way becomes the way.”
Marcus Aurelius

“The things you think about determine the quality of your mind.  Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.”  Marcus Aurelius

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” -Thoreau

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” -Richard Feynman

Epictetus asked the question: “How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself?”

“You shouldn’t give circumstances the power to rouse anger, for they don’t care at all.”  – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 7.38

“You are not your body and hair style, but your capacity for choosing well.  If your choices are beautiful, so too will you be.”  Epictetus discourses 3.1.39b-40a

“We cannot choose our external circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond to them.”  Epictetus.

“You become what you give your attention to…if you yourself don’t choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone else will.” Epictetus.

Alan Watts: “To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim, you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do, you will sink and drown. Instead, you relax and float.”

“If you think you can or you think you can’t, you are right.”  Henry Ford.

“For such a small price, I buy tranquillity,” Epictetus’s line about ignoring small slights.

Philosophy,” Juvenal wrote, “by degrees, peels off most of our follies and vices, first shows us what’s right.”

“It is not that life is short, it is that we waste alot of it.”  Seneca

“Certainty is created within YOU not by your environment.”  Tony Robbins

“Beating the competition is relatively easy.  Beating yourself is a never ending commitment.”  No finish line.  Nike ad

“The duty of a man is to be useful to his fellow men; if possible to be useful to many of them; failing this, to be useful to a few; failing this, to be useful to his neighbors, and failing them, to himself; for when he helps others, he advances the general interests of mankind.”  Seneca

“A rock thrown in the air, it loses nothing by coming down, gained nothing by going up.”  Marcus Aurelius.

“Putting things off is the biggest waste of life:  it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising us the future.   The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today.  The whole future lies in uncertainty; live immediately.”  SENECA

From Kim-An Williams, wife of my friend Matt Williams who died young after a long battle with cancer.  “I did not like being sick, but I did realize some important things through that experience.  One especially important lesson I learned is NEVER TO ASSUME THAT YOU KNOW SOMEONE ELSE’S STORY.  Everyone has something that they struggle with in life.  Everyone understands what it means to miss someone that they love.  You will meet lots of different people in your life, and not all of them will share your experience of having a mom who died when they were young, but they might have a different experience that can help them to relate to how you feel.  You become a stronger person when you really understand what it means to be sad and what it means to be happy.  You will be able to help other people understand their own sadness and happiness too.”

“Knowledge can be conveyed, but not wisdom.  It can be found, it can be lived, it is possible to be carried by it, miracles can be per-formed with it, but it cannot be expressed in words and thoughts.”  Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse

“There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so” . Shakespeare Hamlet

“In war, the moral is to the physical as three is to one.”  Napoleon

“Complaining isn’t a strategy.  You have to work with the world as you find it, not as you would have it to be.”  Jeff Bezos

“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today” . Abraham Lincoln

“For countless generations our biochemical system adpated to increase our chances of survival and reproduction, not our happiness.”  Homo Deus

“A journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step.” Lao Tzu

Some thoughts on “enough”. 

Read this story about Joseph Heller ( author of catch 22) today on quora.  Fits right in with some other thoughts I have been having about happiness.  

As the new year is upon us and many people are thinking about what they want to do different in the new year than last I have been hearing many things that all basically come back to ” I want more”. Whenever I want more it has always lead to unhappieness. What I am starting to realize is that is not the lack of the thing that causes the sadness (because after getting the thing I have never ever been completely satisfied).   It is the search for more (or less) that is the source of the unhappieness. The key is to accept “enough” and enjoy the now.  

Last year my New Years resolution was to end the year with less stuff than I started. I was on a paring down kick.  I completely failed.  Oh sure I went though the garage and drove two trucks of stuff to the st Vincent de Paul and a load to the dump.  But I also bought a bunch of new stuff all of which seemed absolutely necessary at the time despite my best overall intentions.  One area of explosion was kids stuff.  How does that stuff seem to multiply at 10x the rate of anything else in the house?  

Have not figured out New Years resolutions incorporating these new learnings yet. But stay tuned.  

The Book agrees 

I have been contemplating much of my life on the fact that truth can only be found when you know the opposite.  You can’t understand white without seeing black.  What is left without right?  What is true without a lie?  Pleasure without pain is meaningless.  So many things can only be truly understood when you also understand their opposite. 

This morning I am re reading The Book from Alan watts.  He says  


Maybe that is where that brain work came from.  However long ago I read it I have found it to be true all my life so far.