Quote:
Originally Posted by Fullcrum  I, too, shared little interest in these studies, until I actually read them. For our purposes, this is more than enough evidence that personality can be changed.
Don't believe the naysayers. There's too much evidence backing up the truth. |
As with all personal development, you should trust yourself. It it up to you to choose what to believe.
That said, I still see a lot of people throwing around words that aren't very well defined. From my experience, beware of that.
Also beware of studies that don't have significant focus on real-world application.
I'm not saying the neuro plasticity study is right or wrong; what I'm saying is that it is vitally important to define your terms. From my experience, people waste most of their time with communication because they're either arguing about semantics, or they don't understand what each other are saying conceptually.
I could define the terms I've used more (such as "talent"), but it's much easier if you look into
Now, Discover Your Strengths or any work by Marcus Buckingham and some of the strengths work by the Gallup Organisation (for the most part, Buckingham is who you want to go to). At least, my Twitter page has some decent strengths-based links on it to start off those who are interested off.
I see there's a real need for clarity in this area. Even when people reference studies, are they getting results from their knowledge--actually things they embody and can apply--or are they re-hashing from what they've heard or read?
I'd like to think that I get results from what I know, and honestly, I wouldn't focus on it if I didn't see significant potential for real-world application. I care not for theories or "truth"--I care about what works.
I'm considering sharing some of what I know about strengths and talent. I have a decent amount of education on the subject from reading and studying people who are strength aligned, as well as observing myself (I'm 49% talent aligned and estimated to be 73% in the near future--at least, at the time I took the SET test. 49% is significant; most people get in the 20% area or worse). I'm also fairly talent aligned myself (my 49% comes from other limiting factors, as well as my extreme specificness--which is my choice; if I was less specific, I could easily be about 65% talent aligned), and my particular combination of talents allows me to understand things with a certain depth that isn't too common.
My main hangup is that while I can sprout off all this knowledge, are people really going to use it? I've spoken to so many people about strengths and talents, and for the large part, their attitude is, "oh, that sounds nice" (or perhaps even skepticism and a complete disinclination to even consider the topic!), and they go back to doing whatever it is they do. I can't help those people; they don't want information, they want to maintain the way they're currently living and a myriad of other issues I won't go into.
This will of course happen with any type of knowledge work you do, especially in the personal development area. Right now though, I'm just weighing up whether it would be a good use of my strengths, given what I've recently learned about my talent themes.