Impact
Development

Your personality both orients your decisions and animates your behaviors.  It’s the starting point of all things development related. So if you want to have a handle on your impact, you have to have a realistic understanding of your personality. This means knowing yourself from the inside, how you are, and the outside, how others see you.

There is no one way to define personality. For the purpose of development, this process considers three components.

Belief System
Your belief system comprises the core principles you hold to be inherently true. Your decisions are influenced, in part, by these beliefs, which have developed both consciously and unconsciously through your education and life experiences.

Values
Your values are the guiding principles that shape your life priorities. They form a set of standards that help you discern right from wrong behavior. While you may be more conscious of your values than your belief system, identifying them may still require some effort. They can be shaped by personal experiences or by aligning with a higher authority that your belief system regards as trustworthy.

Self-Awareness
Self-awareness refers to how well you understand your values and beliefs. Since many of these principles are formed unconsciously through experiences, you might not fully recognize the extent to which they influence your decisions.

You do not know what you do not know. How can you go about trying to understand beliefs and values that are beyond your awareness? You need observations from outside sources. If you can collect enough observations that are consistent, they may help point you toward possible factors for change to consider. This process uses two methods to collect these observations. The first is an assessment and will be your first assignment to complete.  

The Hogan Assessment poses a variety of questions and contrasts your answers with tens of thousands of others, as well as how individuals perceive those who respond similarly. Once all the data is analyzed, the results present a range of scales that illustrate how others likely view you. This insight is valuable for gaining a deeper understanding of how others interpret your behaviors.

For instance, if you receive a score of 76 on the ambition scale, it indicates that, based on your responses, people generally view you as more ambitious than 76 out of 100 individuals. Does this imply that you are genuinely ambitious? Perhaps, but what's more significant is how your demeanor conveys ambition to others.  This insight is valuable for grasping how to enhance your impact. Often, individuals believe they are making decisions based on specific situations, but in reality, they are demonstrating a behavioral pattern that recurs across different contexts. Recognizing these behavioral patterns can significantly transform your approach to impact development. The first assignment will assist you in gaining a deeper understanding of these patterns.  

Many people struggle with their results at first because they do not like being described with such strict parameters. But remember, this assessment is not so much about you as it is for you. You ultimately determine your behavior. But wouldn’t it be helpful if you knew better the most impactful ways to change so that who you are on the inside was more consistent with how you are perceived on the outside? This is the kind of insight the Hogan assessment can offer.