We are living in a world where adults expect you to know who you are by
a very young age. When you apply for a job or admission to a program, one of
the first questions are always, “Who are you?”.
As a young person, this is sometimes the most daunting question. WHO AM I or TELL ME ABOUT YOURSELF? How do
you figure this out fresh out of school and even later in your twenties after
UV or College? Sometimes wondering why one should know this as our parents in
their fifties also don’t know who they are. Life is the path to self-discovery
but how can you know who you are if you have not finished life yet?
What do people refer to when they ask, describe yourself. Are they
referring to the personality test you took when you were forced by your
parents, in order to see which course you should study? Or are they referring to
the way you look? When you look in the mirror your judgment is clouded by the
morals and standards which was enforced by your upbringing. So do you describe
what you see or what the community sees? Our view and prejudgments alter who
you are and what people think you are. Can you describe yourself in the most
basic ways or do people expect you to describe yourself in more complex ways
and strategies. Referring to the most intimate parts of your being.
Every race has its own
culture and within the culture there are numerous different morals, standards,
and expectancy. Different ways of doing, acting, and feeling all of which
influences the answer to the question, Who am I? But what if you feel you do
not fit into your community standards and can’t voice your concerns. So, are
you forced to see yourself in a false
image?
Let’s
take a step back!
You might hear “Tell me about yourself” during an interview and you
answer “Well, what do you want to know?” or “Well, I’m from Limpopo. I
raise goats and I have a rash.” That might not really be what they want to
hear, so what are they really asking! What
do they want to know when they ask; “Who
are you?”
The answer; “Tell me about
yourself as a professional. What do YOU think is important for the
job? How are you going to fit in with the company and provide value? Can
you answer an “unstructured” question on the fly?” Because that is what it is,
an unstructured question. You can answer it anyway you want, as long as you
refer to yourself within the position you are applying for. The interviewer
does not want to know who you are in general, but rather your professional self.
Interviewers leave some questions vague on purpose. They are less interested in
what you say but rather how you answer them. They want to know
what do you find important to tell your future employer about yourself?
What
to tell about your professional self?
There are two main things
people want to know about your professional self. Firstly, you’ll need to
identify your greatest professional
achievements. Secondly, you’ll need to tailor your accomplishments to the needs of the company.
IDENTIFY YOUR ACHIEVEMENTS!
An interview technique that can help you keep your answers on the right
track, is The STAR approach. STAR stands for Situation, Task, Action, Result:
Situation - You start by explaining a situation which
required you to solve a problem, use a
skill, or come up with a new idea.
Task - Next, you explain the action that your job requires
in such a situation.
Action - After, you
describe the action that you took. If it’s different than the required task,
you should also explain why you chose a
different path.
Result - What happened in the end? How did the situation play
out once you acted? It’s best here to illustrate successes with numbers and details if you can. Numbers help
reinforce the impact that your action had.
Your response should only last a couple of minutes and you should give
the interviewer a taste of the good stuff right away. Who are you as a
professional and what are you doing right now?
What
if you Self-enhance during an interview?
How accurately do you describe yourself without enhancement bias in the
description of yourself? People tend to describe themselves more positively
than normative criterion would predict. We as humans express our futures with
more optimism and think we control or lives. We describe our personalities as
highly favorable terms. Systematic and egocentric individuals with high
self-esteem, would use desirable attributes to be more descriptive of themselves
and undesirable attributes as less. People also compare themselves to the common
person, but who is the common person?
When faced with all of the a fore mentioned, we are faced with the
question “Who am I, without being biased?”
There are different theories and
paradigms which can explain how a person creates a self-perception and how to
measure it to reality.
Most self-theories suggest that people are motivated to increase their
feelings of self-worth. People achieve this by boosting their desirable traits
and lowering the desirability of the traits they do not possess. A person can
achieve cognitive balance by anchoring their desirable traits to that which
they possess. However, an illusory precept is evidently inaccurate when
measured against an objective standard.
What is this objective standard,
or should we rather say who?
The common-target paradigm is
used by personality psychologists to accurately evaluate the self-perception of
an individual. This is when several diverse observers are aggregated to ensure
the reliability and validity of your self-description. For example, during
interviews, when there are diverse individuals evaluating what you tell them.
The observer harshness ensures that the correct self-description is
formulated. When adding the outcome of
the common-target paradigm with the common-rater (which is your perception in
comparison to the average person) you will receive the best outcome.
What else influences your
perception?
The situation you find yourself in, also forms the choices you use to
self-describe. For example, when applying in a specific field whether for a job
or university degree, one would be judged by the socio-normative paradigm. This criterion indicates that your
self-description will be influenced by social norms. Here it is assumed that
the persons’ description is influenced by the perception of trait desirability.
In each field, there are some traits that are more desirable than others and to
make you feel like you belong in that field, you would use these traits as your
own. Because of this theory, we have a bias we use in different social
situations, whether with friends, family or superiors.
How to prevent being biased about yourself?
One more criterion that explains self-enhancement is awareness hypothesis. This hypothesis
indicates that people do take inconsideration their egocentric variance. People
usually take this into consideration when they must refer to themselves in
causal attribution, in-group favouritism and social projection. Thus, people know
that they enhance their own traits in certain situations and expect other
people to self-enhance too. People feel that a certain cognition such as being
talkative might be a trait considered very valuable in some situations or jobs
and because of this, they add it to their associated sentiment or personality
trait.
Taking that into consideration, we know that all people can be taught
to change their automatic perceptual experience to a more controlled cognitive
response. Meaning, you can prevent automatic biases when referring to your
traits if you wanted to. However, the new opposing question is “Do you want to
be less biased when it comes to your self-enhancement?”
In
the end, do we really know who we are or are we just pretending we do…
References:
http://files.clps.brown.edu/jkrueger/journal_articles/krueger-1998b-enhancement.pdf
Written by: Somari Louter
Registered Counsellor
