How to Self-Describe

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