Let me see, wow, the last dated post was in September 22nd of this year, and before that was July, of which I have not been writing much this second half of the year. Feeling guilty over this, and the urge to write something down, I thought I would share a few words.
For the past two days, I have been attending a class “Influencing Skills” sponsored by the government. I walked into the class without any expectation, and today, I walked out slightly enlightened about behaviors and most importantly, I learnt a little more about myself. Like many soft skill classes these days, behavior profiling is part of the key curriculum. When the instructor Tony started to go through the main 4 quadrant of personalities, namely Socializer, Relater, Controller and Thinker, I found that I have characteristics in all of them. I could not identify with any particular group, mainly because in my mind, the characteristics of all the groups were playing. Just last week, I was the “Controller”, I was leading an audit in our Contract Manufacturer and I was taking charge, giving orders, and short in patience. I could also relate to “Thinker” where I have been doing Product Qualification Reliability engineer for the past year, where I have to pretty much work on my own and analyze and device qualification strategy and doing some research. I was silo and kept pretty much to myself.
Then, going back further, I could find myself as the “Relator” who have been emotionally engage in task and when I express and appeal to get things done, I usually approach from the emotional perspective, giving the task an emotional meaning and expressing how the person could relate to the task emotionally. As I sat in the class, living through these traits of life, I came to myself when I had my first job, a little over 12 years back. I was a socialize then. I was a Failure Analysis Engineer, a job that requires me to work in the lab, but I knew everyone in the plat, from facilities, to planning, not to mention, production, product engineering and even finance. I even knew the next plant people. This network enable me to be effective in my work and subsequently got me what I wanted then. I was also the socializer when I was in the University. While my friends prefer to stick with each others, I had friends from almost the continent. It daunted to me that me, myself and I have been a Socializer all this while. Then this trait of personality starts to pop up across my adult life. This explains many of the things that I do, and it explains in some way who I am.
It was a revelation that woke me up to some level. There is this level of joy and happiness for being able to know oneself. Being able to realize how oneself behaves and most importantly, why. For this, I am grateful that I was selected to join the course, I was grateful that the instructor put forward a compelling structure of the class and revealing content. Knowing this now can help me to move on in this journey of self discovery. Sometimes, one do not have to leave your home to find one self, and this is one instant.
