Personality

CATEGORY: PERSONAL

Why:

Thinking about personality helps us better understand ourselves and others.

Warm-Up:

How would you describe your personality? Or: how would you describe the personality of another member of the group?

Exploration:

When we understand and accept our personalities, we learn about how we can be happy, how we can take care of our emotions, and how we connect best with others. For example, knowing you're more introverted might remind you that it's helpful to have quiet alone time in the day to recharge, and might explain why your friend who is an extrovert needs social time to recharge. Try taking some online personality quizzes and seeing if they help participants understand themselves and each other better (see link). No quiz is perfect, but each can give you clues to better understand yourself.

Additional Resources:

Our favorite tool for understanding personality is the Enneagram, a system which categorizes nine personality types, each with healthier and less healthy ways of expressing their basic motivations. Unfortunately the best online personality quizzes for the enneagram are fairly time-consuming, taking students 10-20 minutes to complete many dozens of questions. If the group has the patience for this, we recommend the following test: https://www.truity.com/test/enneagram-personality-test.

If time is short, there are other options that will still stir up conversation and prompt reflection on our personalities, which is the bigger goal of this discussion. The Adobe Creative Type quiz is one fascinating and well-produced online quiz: https://mycreativetype.com/.

A mid-length quiz exploring the Myers-Briggs personality test can be found here: https://www.16personalities.com. The Myers-Briggs has come under controversy recently as not accurate or predictive, however it still prompts interesting self-reflection and conversation to note how you're categorized, seeing if it helps your friends understand you and vice versa.