“yes” or “no” to the response that most often, though not always, applies to you.

Yes No ____ ____ 1. When you are under pressure, do you usually do something about it immediately?

____ ____ 2. Has anyone ever told you that you eat too fast?

____ ____ 3. When someone takes too long to come to the point in a conversation, do you often “put words in his or her mouth” in order to speed things up?

____ ____ 4. Do you often find yourself doing more than one thing at a time, such as working while eating, reading while dressing, figuring out problems while driving?

____ ____ 5. Do you feel irritated if someone interrupts you while you are in the middle of something important?

____ ____ 6. Are you always on time or a little bit early for appointments?

____ ____ 7. Do you feel impatient or restless when forced to wait in line, such as at a restaurant, store, or post office?

____ ____ 8. Do you find competition on the job or outside activities enjoyable and stimulating?

____ ____ 9. Do you consider yourself to be definitely hard driving and competitive?

____ ____10. Would people who know you rate your general level of activity as “too active” and advise you to “slow down”?

____ ____11. Would people who know you well agree that you tend to get irritated easily?

____ ____12. Would people who know you agree that you tend to do most things in a hurry?

____ ____13. Would people who know you agree that you have more energy than most people?
____ ____14. Do you enjoy competition and try hard to win?
____ ____15. Is it very difficult for you to relax after a hard day?
____ ____16. Do you think top executives usually reach their high positions through hard work rather than social skills and the luck of “being in the right place at the right time”?
____ ____17. During the average busy week, do you usually spend over 50 hours working or studying?
____ ____18. Do you usually work or study when you are not expected to (e.g., evenings or weekends) at least once a week?
____ ____19. Do you bring work home or study at night and weekends more than once a week?
____ ____20. Do you often stay up later than you prefer or get up early in order to get more work done?
____ ____21. Do you regularly keep two or more tasks moving forward at the same time by shifting back and forth rapidly from one to another?
____ ____22. Do you often set deadlines or quotas for yourself at work or at home?
____ ____23. Rather than plan in advance for a holiday, do you prefer to take it as it comes?
____ ____24. In the past three years, have you ever taken less than your allotted number of vacation days from work or completed term papers during vacation time?
____ ____25. Did you ever hold more than one job simultaneously or work while taking a full load in school?

Take the following 10-question, true–false quiz concerning self-awareness. Answers are at the end of the quiz. If you miss any, go back through the text and find out why you got them wrong.
Circle the right answer.
True False 1. To increase self-awareness, your need to know needs to be stronger than your fear of knowing.
True False 2. Comparing actual results with your expectations will show your strengths and weaknesses.
True False 3. Writing down your thoughts about significant experiences increases the likelihood of learning from them.-M./

True False 4. To be most productive, you should go into solitude with a list of things to accomplish.
True False 5. Self-assessments should always be verified by soliciting feedback from relevant others.
True False 6. Learning style is based on four very different learning processes.
True False 7. Interpersonal needs have two subdimensions: the expressed desire to give the need and the wanted desire to receive the need from others.
True False 8. Aggressive behaviors are more effective in interpersonal relations than either passive or assertive behaviors.
True False 9. Personality traits are relatively stable over time and in different situations.
True False 10. Cognitive style affects how you think about relating to others, not how you actually behave.

Exercise 1: Checking Self-Assessments with Feedback from Others Meet in established learning groups or form small groups with three to five class members. The following activities take approximately 40 minutes to complete and should be conducted within these groups.
1. Each group member spends 3–5 minutes introducing himself or herself. Highlight your background, career goals, and most important accomplishments to date, and briefly describe what you believe are your interpersonal strengths and limitations.
2. After all group members have completed their introductions, discuss this statement: “First impressions can provide a lot of insight into people.”
3. Then, one person volunteers to be the focus.
4. Based on their first impressions of the focus person’s behaviors exhibited in steps 1 and 2 of this exercise, group members give the focus feedback about how they perceive his or her scores on the self-assessment questionnaires in this chapter: Learning Style, FIRO, Assertiveness, the Big Five Personality Factors, and Cognitive Style. Use the Summary that follows for a framework.
5. Then the focus shares his or her scores on the self-assessment questionnaires and feelings about their accuracy.
6. The group discusses how the group assessments corresponded with the focus’s individual assessment profile scores: How different or similar were the assessments? Why? What does this imply?
7. Finally, based on these assessments and discussion, the group members help the focus develop an action plan for becoming an effective group member, including what the focus should do and how other group members can help the focus.
8. After the first focus clarifies this feedback, another person volunteers to be the focus, and steps 4–8 are repeated. The process continues until all group members have shared and received feedback.
Time. 40 minutes to complete steps 1–8.

Exercise 2: Developing a Team Resumé
1. Meet with your learning team, or form teams of five to six people.
2. Develop a team resumé that includes the results of every team member’s self-assessments and members’ other skills, experience, and attributes.
3. Each team presents its resumé to the class.
4. The rest of the class provides feedback on what they see as the team’s strengths and areas they need to enhance.
Time. 60 minutes 1. How do you describe your personality? How could you improve it to enhance your interpersonal competence?
2. What are your interpersonal strengths and weaknesses? How can you find out more about them?
3. Think of people you know who are high and low in self-awareness. What are the differences in their interpersonal styles? What are the consequences?

4. How can your self-awareness from completing each of the self-assessment questionnaires in this chapter help you interact effectively with others?

a. Learning Style

b. Interpersonal Needs

c. Assertiveness

d. Big Five Personality

e. Cognitive Style

f. Locus of Control g. Type A Personality The following suggestions are activities you can do to reinforce the self-assessment and selfawareness techniques in this chapter. You may want to adapt them to the Action Plan you will develop next, or try them independently.
1. Review the section on journals in this chapter. Keep a daily journal for the remainder of this semester. Record significant events and insights that will enhance your self-awareness.
At the beginning of each new week, study your journal entries from the previous week to see what you can learn about yourself.
2. Share your self-assessment inventory scores with a significant other. Explain their meaning.
Discuss their implications and see what you can learn from the other person’s reactions and experiences with you.
3. Visit your campus counseling center. Ask which self-assessment inventories are available.
4. Ask a good friend to share with you his or her perceptions of your strengths and weaknesses as a friend.
5. Practice finding solitude for 30 minutes a day for a week.

ACTION PLAN 1. In what areas do I most need to improve my self-awareness?
2. Why? What will be my payoff?
3. What potential obstacles stand in my way?
4. What are the specific things I will do to enhance my self-awareness? (For examples, see the Reinforcement Exercises.)

5. When will I do them?
6. How and when will I measure my success?

True False 1. If you don’t have goals, it really doesn’t matter what you do because you don’t have any desired outcomes.
True False 2. Your values determine what you believe is desirable or undesirable.
True False 3. Honesty and ambition are “instrumental” values.
True False 4. Your personal mission statement is your life philosophy or creed.
True False 5. A vision should be a part of your mission statement.
True False 6. Goal setting is an ongoing process and sometimes requires changing direction.
True False 7. Planning is concerned with what, how, and when things need to be done.
True False 8. A SWOT analysis examines the fit between your personal Situation With appropriate Organizational Theories.
True False 9. Once you have found a niche, you can stop scanning the environment and concentrate on producing.
True False 10. No matter how effective your strategies are, they cannot succeed if they aren’t implemented properly.

Rank the first column, terminal values, 1 (most important) through 17 (least important). Rank the second column, instrumental values, 1 (most important) through 23 (least important).
Rank Terminal (End) Values Rank Instrumental (Means) Values ______ Achievement ______ Action-oriented ______ Aesthetics ______ Ambitious ______ Contentment ______ Athletic/physical ______ Equality ______ Brave ______ Excitement ______ Compassionate ______ Harmony ______ Competent ______ Health ______ Considerate ______ Liberty ______ Creative ______ Love ______ Decisive ______ Peace ______ Dependable ______ Pleasure ______ Disciplined ______ Prosperity ______ Energetic ______ Security ______ Friendly ______ Self-esteem ______ Good-natured ______ Social status ______ Honest ______ Spirituality ______ Intelligent ______ Wisdom ______ Open ______ Orderly ______ Outgoing ______ Rational ______ Reserved ______ Spontaneous ______ Tough-minded Debriefing Share and compare your rankings with those of someone who knows you well. Discuss what your own past behavior tells about your values. Discuss the difference, if any, between what you say you value (terminal end values) and what you do value (instrumental means values).
Total Time. 25 minutes (ranking, 10 minutes; dyad discussion, 15 minutes)

: Write Your Eulogy14 Imagine going to the funeral of a loved one. Picture yourself driving to the funeral, parking the car, and getting out. As you walk inside the building, you notice the flowers, the soft organ music. You see the faces of friends and family. You feel the shared sorrow of losing, the joy of having known, that radiates from the hearts of the people there. As you walk down to the front of the room and look inside the casket, you suddenly come face to face with yourself. This is your funeral, 3 years from today. All these people have come to honor you and to express their feelings of love and appreciation for your life.
As you take a seat and wait for the services to begin, you look at the program in your hand.
There are to be four speakers. The first speaker represents your family, immediate and also extended—children, brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents who have come from all over the country to attend. The second speaker is one of your friends, someone who can give a sense of who you were as a person. The third speaker is from your work or profession, and the fourth is from your church or some community organization where you’ve been involved in service.
Think about what you would like each of these speakers to say about you and your life.
What kind of husband, wife, father, or mother would you like their words to reflect? What kind of son or daughter or cousin? What kind of friend? What kind of working associate?
What character would you like them to have seen in you? What contributions and achievements would you want them to remember? Look carefully at the people around you. What difference would you like to have made in their lives? Take a few minutes to jot down your impressions.
1. Family 2. Friends 3. Work 4. Community If you participated seriously in this exercise, your responses touched on some of your most fundamental values for living a desirable life. The idea of beginning with the end in mind is to behave each day in ways that contribute to the criteria you have established for living a worthwhile life. If your values are clear, you can be proactive and make decisions about how to act instead of reacting to emotions and circumstances. You can act with integrity, which means practicing what you preach regardless of emotional or social pressure, and not allowing any irrational consideration to overwhelm your convictions.15 Total Time. 15 minutes for writing personal eulogy

: Determine Your Personal Mission Statement One of the most effective techniques to ensure that you always behave in worthwhile ways is to develop a personal mission statement that focuses on what you want to become (your life goals)
and how you want to achieve this state (your instrumental values).16 Preparation Take a few minutes to review your values, rankings, and the eulogy that you wrote in the previous exercises. Next, review the examples of mission statements in the text.
Write Your Personal Mission Statement Your personal mission statement is your life philosophy or creed. As you write it down, include sections on (1) the kind of person you want to be (character), (2) what you want to accomplish in your life (contributions), and (3) the principles you want to guide your behavior (values).
Debriefing When you are finished writing your personal mission statement, pick a partner you know well and share the statement with him or her. Your partner will ask clarifying questions and provide feedback. Then share your eulogy and values rankings. Your partner will provide feedback about the congruency between the three. When you are finished, switch roles and provide your partner with feedback.
Total Time. 45 minutes (writing personal mission statement, 15 minutes; dyad sharing, 30 minutes)

1. What are your operational goals in important life areas that when achieved will contribute to your personal mission?
• Career • Family

• Education • Finances • Religion • Community • Others 2. What opportunities and threats does the future hold with respect to achieving your goals described in question 1? How can you keep abreast of developments that may affect your goal achievements?
3. What are your strengths and weaknesses with respect to achieving your goals described in question 1? What can you do to increase your ability to achieve your goals?
4. What were the differences in missions, visions, values, and plans of the last two presidential candidates?
5. How can you ensure that you continually assess your progress toward your goals? What can you do if you discover that you are off course?

1. On a sheet of paper, draw a large pyramid with five levels. In the bottom level, write out your terminal or end values. They are your foundation for decisions about what goals to pursue.
Write your mission statement in the fourth level. In level three, fill in the instrumental values that will guide your behavior in achieving your goals. In level four, write your long-term goals (determined in application question 1). In level five, write your operational goals for the coming year. Carry your pyramid with you and refer to it for guidance whenever you are in doubt about making short-term or daily decisions. Remember that any action you take should be congruent with your values and goals.
2. Apply the SMART formula to goals you wrote down for the first application question. Make sure each goal is specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound.
3. Watch an episode of a current TV series. Determine the differences between characters in their goals, values, and planning processes.
4. Watch a movie in which the story is about achieving an important goal. Try to discern the main character’s mission, values, and plan. Look for how the main character applied the planning process and reacted to environmental threats and opportunities.
5. Determine a strategic plan for achieving your mission and vision in life. Use Figure 1—The Planning Process, as a guide. Your plan should start with (1) a clear mission statement, followed with your (2) vision of what it will be like five years from now if you are successful, (3) a personal SWOT analysis, (4) a gap analysis, (5) a statement of your operational goals, and finally (6) an action plan for achieving your operational goals.

1. In what areas of value clarification, goal setting, and planning do I most need to improve?
2. Why? What will be my payoff?

3. What potential obstacles stand in my way?
4. What are the specific things I will do to enhance my self-awareness? (For examples, see the Reinforcement Exercises.)
5. When will I do them?
6. How and when will I measure my success?