“What other people think of me is none of my business. One of the highest places you can get to is being independent of the good opinions of other people.” ~ Dr. Wayne Dyer

Whether they are skills, career, personality type, strengths, weaknesses, favorite color, birth order…I encourage you to look at why you are taking these types of assessment tests.

Most people think they identify who you are or what direction you should be going. Well every time I have done one of these the results are always the exact opposite of who I think I am or what direction I want to be going, and it has taken me years to understand why I felt this way.

I am a big believer in the belief that most of us are not being who we really are, but rather attempting to be who other people think we are. Good intentioned people started telling us who we are even before we were born. They assigned labels to us and began sorting and categorizing all of our behaviors and traits. And most likely at a very specific moment in time (probably before you were 8), you were simply being yourself and someone that had authority over you became scared, terrified, embarrassed, shamed or disappointed in what you were doing and projected that fear directly on to you and you adopted it as your own.

In that moment, you knew you never wanted to feel that fear again, so you began guarding it with your very life. You made sure that you never triggered that emotion in the person that gave it to you or in anyone you felt had authority over you. You did whatever was necessary to avoid that pain. You started doing whatever got approval and didn’t trigger disapproval. You became someone you are not. Eventually, you forgot who you were and believed this fake self was actually you. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Just wrong.

What does that have to do with assessment tests? Unless you know this about yourself (that you aren’t being yourself), your false self is the one taking the test and the more you believe your false self, the more you agree with the results of these tests. As you should, your false self is the one taking them.

Everyone close to me that I shared the results of these tests with, always agreed with the test results. They would point out how it described me exactly. I always had a feeling that they were not who I was or who I should be, but not being fully aware of my false self, I went with what the authority figures told me. Fortunately, I never gave up trying to find a test that would validate what I knew to be true… that is until I realized that looking for that validation was just the attempts of my false self to keep me distracted and staying away from who I knew I was. My false self is pretty smart and skilled at keeping me safe.

Validation of yourself, believing in yourself, knowing who you are — are all inside jobs. You have to look within for those answers. People with the very best of intentions are still only looking out for themselves (they need you to stay the same, so they can stay the same) if they are attempting to tell or show you that you are someone different than who YOU think you are. YOU are the only one that can know who YOU are. Period. Learn to be independent of those good opinions.

Darla LeDoux is the owner of Aligned Entrepreneurs and she coached me on some business decisions a few years ago. She did a video about assessment tests that I think is spot on. I invite you to watch it here. Please contact Darla if you are a business owner frustrated with your results not being aligned with your goals at http://alignedentrepreneurs.com/.

Photo: “Exam” by Alberto G. is licensed under CC BY 2.0