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[Mary Enriquez] In selecting your top three from Rokeach's instrumental values and terminal values, you were forced to evaluate what is really important to you and they would be absolutely be appropriate for these things to change overtime. As you've grown older, you obviously learn more about the world around you and in turn more is expected of you. With this comes the development of your value system and the recognition of what you want for your future. In looking at the instrumental values you listed as your top through, why do they matter to you? Are they characteristics you already think you have or things you'd like to work on? How do these values affect the choices you make? I think it goes back to the unique uniqueness that every person has. If you don't know who you are, you don't know the principles and the staples that you have in your life, whether it's beliefs, ideals, anything like that you are not able to make a formulated and honest opinion or a decision, sorry.

Going forward, because it's you're trying to make a decision based off what somebody else, may make or what somebody else would make if they were in your position. So, knowing that you're your individual person and knowing that it's not. People are coming for you to make that decision because they value you who you are as a person and they know that your beliefs and your principles are respected or respectful enough to make that decision so they're not looking at you to make that decision based off of what somebody else would make. They're doing it because they want your opinion on it, and so it's kind of taking that into your own perspective. So it helps you be more confident in your decisions.

You know I've had a lot of situations where I've been questioned on certain decisions, and motives, and why I think a certain way, and knowing myself has allowed me to look at that person and be like this is exactly why, and it makes them feel more confident too and like, why do certain things you know? So if I make a decision that might be unpopular, I'm like, hey, you know I want all of our uniforms look the exact same. You know I want it to be this perfect standard like, why not like I want to do it differently? I want to do my own way. But since I know that I'm in a military environment and standards important and appearance and, you know uniformity is important, I've thought that through you know other people might have a different opinion, they may not really care, they may be like, oh, that's not really important, there are more important things, but we have to do is look yourself and realize what's important to you because it's not going to be online with every other person in your position. You know all your peers, all your coworkers. It's not going to be the same.

Your levels of importance are not going to line up, but you have to know what yours are and you cannot base your decisions off of what you think is important to other people. Knowing yourself would basically mean that you know your strengths and weaknesses pretty well, and that's something that also comes with maturity, is kind of figuring out how you work and how you think through things and how you think best and what you're best at thinking at. And so if you don't know yourself then you may not be able to use, you know, your thought process, you may not be able to use your strength to your advantage and you may not recognize the time and place where you need to ask for help for things that your disadvantaged at. And so coming to terms with that, and having the humility to ask for the help when their stuff that you're not strong at is pretty important.

Take a moment to think about someone you admire, someone you look up to. Why'd do you look up to them? What is about them that is worth admiring? More often than not, the values are heroes display are the same values and characteristics we prescribe to the most. They're the way we would hope someone would describe us. So we can see that there is a direct correlation between our values and the choices we make. For example, if a healthy lifestyle is important to you, then that will be reflected by the way of food and exercise choices. If wealth is important to you, your choice of education, profession and lifestyle will be designed to achieve that goal. Terminal values are direct influence of your career and lifestyle choices. For instance, can you see a correlation between the values that you selected and maybe a hobby that you have or your favorite classes, or a career that you're interested in? So let's pretend that we're going to a desert island for a year. Your food, shelter, clothing, and basic essentials are all provided for you.

We have electricity, but there's no entertainment or communication, and you can only bring three things with you. What would you bring? Now the choices that you make of what to bring with you are probably going to be a reflection of the values on that Rokeach's survey. Once we start identifying what are motives truly are, we can evaluate how to make better choices and how to communicate with others. Have you ever done something and someone asks you why did you do that and you answer? I don't know. Well, once we start thinking of the why behind our decisions, we can begin to alter how we make our decisions and make more deliberate choices. So our personal values lead us through decisions. We can begin to understand how someone makes decisions based on their experiences and value set. When we do this, we better understand those around us in our personal and professional lives, our family, our work groups, our group projects and we need to understand what others are coming from and that they make decisions based on their value system, just like we do. This interpretation leads to better communication. If you don't understand how they perceive or how they learn, you will not effectively get to them. And this is something that I learned through my baseball team here that you have to treat every person differently based off of how they are as a person.

So there's certain people that you may need to be constantly up on and kind of like making, I don't wanna say micro-manage, but kind of, kind of give subtle reminders like hey, you need to do this, you need to do this, whereas other people you need to tell them once and they got it. So kind of understanding how they are as a person, and also the belief that they have 'cause you never want to disrespect them by going making them do something that goes against what they believe. Stuff like that is definitely something that it kind of takes a bigger perspective, and knowing that it's what you believe and what you hold true to yourself, may not be the same for somebody else, so knowing that in taking that into perspective, whenever it is that you go to somebody else. A lot of times, people sort of just speak without really thinking, you know and that's where a lot of people get into trouble because they don't recognize how their words are being interpreted. You talk about communication a lot, but you also have to like, think about like how receptive they are like comprehension as well. You know you can communicate all you want, but it doesn't comprehend what you're saying, your words mean nothing. So you have to take into account you know their background. That's when you really need to get to know the people that are in your class that you work with, so you can look at their background and think while you're speaking to them and while you're working on a project or something like, where are they coming from? Why are they suggesting that we do with this?

Or anyway, maybe they've seen it done a different way and they don't want that to happen again. You know something bad happen, they don't want to happen again, so that's why it's important to think about other people. That is a huge thing with being a part of a team, being part of either a command team within the military or on a business project together. I mean, you're going to have to work with these people. And you're never going to see eye to eye on 100%, and that's something that you just kind of have to deal with. But if you take a step back and look at it from their shoes and put yourself in their shoes, and while that's kind of said a lot, you really have to take that into account because they are going to have different priorities in their life. They are going to have different ways that they would typically see things done if they were in charge, and so when you're on the same platform and working for a common goal, the need to compromise is talked about is brought up, and it's something important, but you can be a little bit more sympathetic to their mindset if you understand a little bit of how they tick and how they work.

Let's turn our focus to personality traits. Using personality classifications to explain the behavior has been around since Socrates. The true Colors Personality Quiz was developed by Don Lowery and has been used in business, education and psychological settings for decades. There are five boxes containing word clusters. You'll do them one box at a time. Take a look at Box 1. You'll see four clusters of words. You're giving the cluster of words that is the most like you a 4, the cluster of words that is the next most like you a 3, the cluster of words that are kind of like you a 2, and the cluster of words that is least like you a 1. You repeat this process through all of the boxes and when you're done, you should have numbers 1 through 4 in each of the boxes. To complete the scoring at the bottom, record the number you gave each letter on the line beside the correct letter. And be careful because they were not in alphabetical order. You'll then tally them and have 4 numbers across the bottom. When you've completed, the quiz we'll come back to talk about the personality classifications and how you can use this information in your decision-making, personal lives, and future career.