Self-awareness

Happy new year! Meet the newest addition to our family... Mochi! 

“The key predictor of success among leaders is self-awareness.” (from a Cornell business school study of 72 high-performing CEOs)

I’ve never been one to do or have much interest in personality tests. But, through this recent season of God resetting and redirecting my life, I thought it’d be helpful to see how I’m actually “hard-wired”... and to simply become more self-aware. 

So I reached out to a few dear friends of mine, Jeremy and Hyelee, who have a consulting business where they help folks discover and better understand their natural abilities, and thus hopefully aid them in finding what type of vocations they might most enjoy or prosper in. 

You can check out their website here

https://www.qv-consulting.com/

I took the Highlands Ability Battery (HAB) assessment which is the gold standard for testing natural abilities (as opposed to the skills we may have learned in life.) After taking the test, Jeremy, a certified Highlands consultant, helped explain my results to me. It was fascinating to learn more about myself, many things I never realized. It was also encouraging to be affirmed that my vocation of physical therapy was in fact a great fit with my natural abilities and personality style!

 

Jeremy insightfully made sense of the 50+ page HAB report during our consultation! 😅 This personalized meeting was invaluable in helping me to understand my results and give me examples on how to apply them to my life. 

I also took the Enneagram which is one of the most effective self-awareness tools out there. I had an opportunity to discuss my “profile” with both Jeremy and Hyelee as well as Mike Crawford, who is certified in Enneagram. 

You can check out his website here

http://www.michaelcrawfordsblog.com/

Through the Highlands and Enneagram tools and moreso through the insightful counsel of these dear friends, I learned a lot about myself, many things I never understood. I also realized that I have quite a ways to learn and grow in the area of self-awareness. I trust this is just the beginning of this difficult yet so helpful journey of discovering how God has created me and how I could most effectively use the gifts He’s given me. 

On a side note, I can’t believe it’s been exactly one year since I started this blog. Who would have known all the events that would have transpired during that time? As I look back at my posts, there were many tough but life-changing lessons. On top of my tumultuous cancer journey, this year was wrought by an unprecedented pandemic, ongoing social and racial injustice, and a divisive presidential election... all reminders of the frailty of mankind. 

Yet, as we look ahead to a new year, I hold onto hope. Hope not in a vaccine or in certain people (including myself), but in the One who sovereignly holds all things together. I don’t know what the future holds, but I know that He goes before me and will be with me through the storms of life as He has proven Himself faithful over and over again this past year. May we all press on in faith and hope in our respective battles. 

Continuing to steadily wean my meds down. 🙏 Please pray for me as I transition from my immunosuppressive meds to my own body’s immune cells to fight off potential infections and regulate symptoms of GVHD going forward. With the stoppage of these meds, there’s a chance that GVHD symptoms may flare up. But my doc said that as long as I don’t look like a lobster, I’ll be ok! 🦞