Don’t You Dare Do This.

Over the years I’ve fallen in love with personality tests, learning people’s stories and what makes them tick.

This love came not only work environments making us do it so we could be better teammates and seeing the positive results there, but also doing a lot (and I mean a lot) of taking that personality test to the next level and mixing in a little therapy. I was able to truly learn how I tick, why I think the way I do, what triggers I have, why my first intentions are and how to handle that and so much more.

It truly has been an amazing transformation for me to reflect back on and it’s made me a better person for it. And when I work with a new team I share those pieces so that 1 – they know my personality traits and how I like to work so we can jump start this teamwork together and 2 – so they can hold me accountable if one of my traits is hindering a project or causing a road block.

Now if someone has spent that much time trying to understand themselves and has given you the gift of knowing their story – the good, the bad, the ugly – don’t you dare start to hold it against them. Never. Don’t take what they tell you their flaws are or their bad tendencies are and use that against them or blame them for something that goes wrong.

They have worked so hard on themselves to be a better person, a better friend, a better coworker and if you take that and twist it so all you focus on are their faults.

Just please don’t ever do that. It creates so much doubt in them because we know our faults and are working hard on them, but to be reminded of them daily and have them “be” the reason for a misstep or a failure just sets our progress back 10 steps.

Again, we told you that so you could help us, make sure it didn’t cloud our judgement, to understand where I’m coming from when I say something. We didn’t give you that piece of us to be used as a weapon.

So please if you are ever given the gift of seeing what’s inside a person, like really inside them, don’t ever take advantage of that.