I have included all of the material I received on my survey. In the assignment, I realize it says to include my "Top 4" results and nothing else, however I found that there were further breakdowns of my strengths that proved to be much more useful in answering the questions below, so I included them for reference.
I think I have a few strengths that have really propelled me along in life, and if I had to choose, one of my top strengths would be my developing of grit. After I graduated from university, I went on a trip through Europe to see some of my favorite soccer teams play, a lifelong goal of mine at the time. I landed in Munich, Germany randomly and absolutely loved the city. I decided I wanted to live there at some point in the near future. For two years I worked in sales even though I loathed the work and figured out how to make it happen. I taught English for two years at a kindergarten and despite some ups and downs had the absolute time of my life, and I would still be there if it wasn't for my need for a career with technical skills and more financial stability.
Over the years since that decision, I have discovered that the only way to make something happen is to figure out what you want and make a plan to get to where you want to be. The seemingly far-away can become much closer with a good and detailed plan and the drive to achieve it. This includes not only life and career goals but personal development as well. If you want to get in shape, you have to research and formulate a work out plan and stick to it. If you want to be more disciplined, start making incremental steps towards that goal. If you want to learn how to code, start teaching yourself with available resources! If something is realistically possible, then it is achievable with a little determination.
I work best when I can set a plan and provide myself with metrics that will help me meet that plan. I am a pretty active person and workout every day. It has taken some a lot of time and research, but I have over months and years put into place a workout plan that is systematic in my approach to my exercise goals. Every week I evaluate my progress and make changes when I need to. With this system I get visual confirmation of improvement, however sometimes a skill's progress (like coding or a foreign language) is not quite as easily measured. In these situations I like to use apps to log time spent studying or learning or working towards the goal I have set. Even though I get no performance metric like in exercise that says I have gained this much strength in a month, I know that the more hours I log the more I improve.
It is hard to parse through the portions of my PAIRIN assessment and find any negative qualities, as almost everything is presented in a positive light, so answering this question has proven difficult. In the problem solving section under entrepreneurial insights it suggests that sometimes I think large problems that need to be solved can be overwhelming for me. I think this only remotely comes up during problem solving when other parties are involved and usually only when dealing with some sort of conflict. While I am very confident in my ability to navigate conflict, when a resolution to it is forming I can tend to take the shorter end of the stick. Or when negotiation needs to happen over a difficult situation, I can bend over a bit too far backwards to keep everyone happy or to end the conflict quickly. I have made improvements over the years, especially after living in Germany where the culture tends to favor directness, but I would still like to keep getting better.
I think my previously discussed grit and determination will be one of the better strengths to leverage during my time at Turing and beyond. I think it is key in any new career jump or directional life choice or skill-learning process. The standard feeling in these situations can oftentimes be uncertainty or inadequacy. When I changed careers from corporate sales to teaching English in a foreign country a couple of years ago I went through this. I experienced a phase of imposter syndrome that was made all the more scary by being in a country that wasn't my own, with no support group or family members on the same side of the Atlantic ocean as me. Eventually, if you don't give up, you find your stride in whatever it is that you choose to do. I may have to deal with imposter syndrome again this time, but I know that putting my head down and powering through until I feel confident and comfortable in my choices and abilities is what will get me through.
Having the knowledge and self-awareness to recognize your strengths usually means you inherently have the ability to recognize areas that need improvement. More so than sticking to the strengths you're good at to further your development, it is this ability that is important to me. The old saying goes "A chain is only as strong as its weakest link". This is usally said in reference to a group of people or a society, but can easily be applied to a single individual as well. Your skills and strengths are the individual links of the chain and it behooves you to make an effort to improve all of them.
What efforts do you make to manage your learning process? Are these efforts successful? What challenges have inhibited your ability to manage your learning process effectively?
One of the best tools that I have put into practice is setting a schedule or routine and allotting time for whatever tasks I want to accomplish and then sticking to that schedule. Since 2018 while I was working full time, I set my alarm where I could get at least an hour or two of studying in before work. While some days I would be more tired than others, or I would not have quite as much time or be as focused and productive as I wanted, the setting of the routine and the average effort put in every week proved to be immensely beneficial and successful in the long run.
I think Sierra's talk about the ideas of overload and congitive leaks are so important. While sometimes I have the urge to kind of binge on coding because there is one particular problem that I can't figure out, it can be draining. In the long run, I usually find success if I stop around the self-given allotted time or just shortly after and revisit the material at a later time. Coate's article is the perfect feeling for everyone learning a difficult new skill. I had the same feeling while learning German while living in Munich. I went to my intensive classes for three months and then began studying on my own. I was learning and trying and it was frustrating, but eventually I had this moment where I got through a doctor's appointment and spoke only German (bad German, but hey). I was thrilled! I loved that feeling. Coates is right, there is nothing like sucking at something and being frustrated, and then realizing you have made a modicum of improvement.
What role does your emotional state of mind play in your learning? How do your successes and failures at learning affect your emotional state?
I think that at first (at least for me), the emotions involved with learning something difficult can play a large role. It can be frustrating, especially if you compare yourself to others that are in the same process and they seem better at grasping the subject matter or performing the skill you're both learning. It can also be scary and intimidating to learn something new, and can make you feel insecure. Eventually you get to a point where you just accept these feelings as part of the learning process, and they become the norm. They have less of an effect on you. Some time after that, this may apply to learning anything new. For example, maybe when you were young and you got a new job and were learning the ins and outs of it, you were nervous about making mistakes. Now, you realize that the learning process is full of making mistakes and bound to involve some setbacks so every time you get a new one, it is less scary, less intimidating, and you may even feel less frustrated when you run into problems because you realize that objectively the frustration is useless except as a motivational factor. This hits home when I think about the process of starting my career as a software engineer. When I moved to Munich to start a career as an English teacher, I felt so out of my depth. I did it though, and overcame more doubts and fears at once than I ever have before in my life. Now, I am taking a new risk and it comes with it's own associated doubts and fears, but they have less of an effect on me because I know the process and yes it is scary and yes it is intimidating but I will only fail if I let myself do so. If I could figure it all out in Germany I can figure it all out here, too.
I think that I have spent the last two years preparing; sometimes inadvertently, and sometimes directly. Inadvertently I prepared myself mentally for this whole new chapter by starting the last chapter of my life by becoming an expat. Making any grand changes to your life is its own process and has some forms and functions that you can follow to be successful at it. I think that I have learned a good number of those and they'll prepare me for life during and after Turing. I prepared myself more directly by learning how to set goals with studying and achieve them. I have always had areas of diligence (like with exercise) but have really learned how to apply the discipline that I achieved there into other pursuits like learning German and now coding. Studying coding for the better part of the last year probably won't hurt either!