Ep. 80 – Self-Awareness: The Key to Personal & Professional Growth – with Julie Scher
One of the quickest ways to accelerate achievement and progress in your own personal development is to understand how you are manufactured. We touched on this idea in Episode 77 when Dr. Colby Jubenville discussed his experience with the Harrison Assessment.
Today we’re diving deeper into the power of self-awareness, and Harrison Assessments specifically, with Julie Scher, a die-hard entrepreneur and a Founder of Peak Focus, a business coaching and consulting company.
Julie’s first experience with Harrison Assessments was about 15 years ago, when she was a shareholder in a startup company. There was a major internal management conflict, so they brought in a Harrison expert. It was an extremely painful experience for everybody involved, but the assessment helped them resolve the conflict.
“At that point, I was just sold on Harrison. It was an amazing tool. It not only helped us all understand ourselves – it helped the team understand how our behavior impacted ourselves and impacted others.”
After the conflict was resolved, Julie left the startup, pulled her father out of retirement, and started Peak Focus. They became managing partners of Harrison Assessments so that they could help others resolve similar conflicts.
It all comes down to developing self-awareness around how your behavior impacts other people, and understanding that behavior is a choice. We can choose to adapt and behave differently, if we are aware and willing.
So what exactly is the Harrison Assessment?
The Harrison Assessment helps you understand your strengths, challenges, enjoyments, and interest levels – and it provides a roadmap of the next steps you can take to get where you want to be.
Specifically, it gathers data to measure the strength of behavioral tendencies, which is your preference level for specific behavioral traits. From one assessment, a Harrison expert can generate multiple reports that will enable you to explore your successes and challenges, and the reports describe your likely behavior based on your answers to a questionnaire.
This will give you insight into specific, actionable behaviors that you can use to further your personal development; an opportunity for self-awareness.
There are two theories behind Harrison Assessments:
- Enjoyment-Performance Theory – When we enjoy a task, we do it more often, and when we repeat a behavior, we tend to get better at doing it. This results is positive recognition and feedback, which further increases our enjoyment of the behavior. On the flip side, we tend to avoid the things we don’t enjoy, and we don’t usually do them enough to get better or improve.
- Paradox Theory – Paradoxical traits are those that may seem to be contradictory, but in fact are complementary and synergistic. According to this theory, a trait can either be constructive or destructive, depending on other complementary traits. For example, when frankness is complimented by diplomacy, it takes the constructive form of being forthright and truthful… however, without the complementary trait of diplomacy, frankness can become bluntness. There are 12 sets of paradoxical behaviors, and each of these pairs consists of a dynamic trait and a gentle trait.
What’s wrong with Mike Flynn (AKA Mike’s Development Report for the Analyzes Pitfalls trait)?
If you want a better idea of how these assessments work, here you can view a report analyzing the development area of Analyzes Pitfalls, or Mike’s tendency to scrutinize potential difficulties related to a plan or strategy.
The first part of the report is an assessment that concludes, “If you keep a balance of optimism and scrutinizing potential pitfalls, you are much more likely to achieve your goals at work and in your personal life. Although strategic decision-making is usually only important in the workplace for management positions, each of us could benefit from better strategic decisions in our personal lives.”
Following the assessment is an exercise Mike can use to analyze the potential pitfalls of a plan or strategy.
If you are interested in working with Julie for personal or professional development, head over to PeakFocusCoach.com.
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Resources:
- Connect with Julie: PeakFocusCoach.com | LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook
- Learn more about Harrison Assessments
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