Upload Date: 8th September 2020
Hi folks! My name is Andrew and welcome to my blog :)
Greek word "Persona", which is the root word orign for the English word "Person", means a "mask". So if someone asks "What kind of person are you?", what they are asking is "what mask do you wear"? When we talk about our identity, are we asking for the content of the mask, or ourselves behind the mask?
My core personal value is innate meaningless in anything in life (wow that suddenly took a turn). I guess it is closer to a personal truth, rather than value, I suppose...
In any case, while most will see this nihilistic idea to be very depressing and dark, I see it as quite the opposite. It means that it is up to the individuals to assign their own personal meaning to things and how much to value them. Now, some could say “meaning” is a synonym for “truth” in a certain sense. This would mean everyone has their own version of truth, hence it is always worth listening and learning from others to expand upon your “truth” or “meaning”.
An example of close friend in my circle needed my support as he was desperate for help. I was religious at that time and unfortunately, helping him during those circumstances would have meant I had to question many of my religious teachings and principles.I eventually decided that my rigid beliefs and view of the world, my preconceived notion that there is innate truth and meaning in this world and my religion was “it” is making me a willfully blind person and hence then on, I dropped my religions, l my ideologies and school of thoughts. I was able to help my friend, and I am glad I did.
My MBTI testing shows that I am an ENFP-A, which more or less describes as an extrovert, an outgoing and personable person with search for something meaningful and often something new to learn. I happen to agree with a lot of the description of the ENFP-A personality types, including that of its strengths and weaknesses.
Due to my extroverted personality, I enjoy interacting and working with different people, and I also want to do meaningful work that helps others. That was probably the reason why I was working in the HR field as a recruiter until now. It was also apparent that my points of improvements were my attention to detail and ability to stay consistent when doing repetitive routine tasks. Thankfully for the past few years, I have been volunteering myself any kind of extra administration tasks from my workplace and have been improving on that. While there is more to improve, the weaknesses aren’t as apparent as before.
The break I had to take due to Covid-19 gave me time to reassess my strengths, weaknesses and desires. I came to the conclusion that I had a strong desire to be more creative and collaborative with my work. I was also largely into technology (I was in IT recruitment afterall). Factoring these aspects of myself, I decided I wanted to take a leap of faith in the software development space.
I am confident that my ability to communicate and engage with people well will make me a strong team-player not only for this course, but for my future work-space as well. I am hoping to work in a team where we can grow mutual respect amongst each other and willing to take responsibility for at least their own share of their workload, if not the whole project. Often in a team where there were those who weren’t “pulling their weight”, I would often try to carry that weight myself. But that often meant I didn’t get to develop a long term relationship with them. Overall, I am also hoping that my previous efforts on attempting to improve on my limitation will also prove useful for my team.