I found it more difficult than I thought to whittle down what I thought my core personal values are. While there are other values I find important, these are what resounded the most at this time:
Values / Identity
Perspective
I believe that learning and knowing other people’s perspectives on issues is very important. It gives you a better understanding of why someone thinks/acts/behaves like they do. You don’t have to agree with other perspectives, but knowing and considering a perspective different than your own helps you question or solidify your own perspective as well, and shapes and moulds how you view things and interact with people each day.
Patience
Not everything, or everyone, works the way you want. Being patient with people or situations I think is accepting that everything is not under your control. It helps me step back and look at the bigger picture sometimes, or when working with people it helps build trust, it shows you are listening, and giving someone your time is something I think many people value.
Kindness
While a rather simple and broad value, I think everyday kindness shouldn’t be underestimated. It’s saying thank you to someone, being nice if you see someone is having a rough day, sharing a snack with someone, getting along with your colleagues, moving your bag off the seat next to you on the bus so someone can sit down. These small acts can change someone’s mood, can make them feel welcome, can help change their perspective of something perhaps, even be the highlight of their day.
Explain a situation where you have had an ethical decision to make. Discuss how you weighed up the values involved in that decision, the decision you made, and the consequences of your action.
Recently I was at my Mother’s house in Palmerston North and I saw a car come speeding around the corner, slamming on the brakes, and driving up on to the footpath. They then checked their car and drove off. Luckily no one was on the footpath and none of the passengers seemed injured. I made the decision to call the police to report it. Normally if I saw someone just speeding I would think it’s unsafe but not report it. But in this case I imagined what would have happened if someone had just been walking along the footpath at that moment? What if they keep on driving like this in another part of the neighbourhood? So I looked at it from different possible perspectives, and thought about what would be the most sensible thing to do, and I called the police and provided the information I could. I am unsure of what happened after this, but I did also go and speak to a fellow neighbour whose house the car nearly crashed in front of and they were glad to know I had also reported it.
Describe how your culture has influenced your values and identity.
My Dad is from NZ and my mother is Chilean. So I’ve seen how the same situation can be viewed in different ways depending on your perspective and background. It also lead me to be patient as English is a second language for my Mother. As well, the sides of the family are different so you need to be aware of the differenct perspectives. Despite different language/cultural barriers, showing kindness can help diffuse differences and help create connections.
Strengths / Limitations
Strengths:
- Working and getting along with a wide range of personalities
- Being patient, particularly when helping others
- Being able to adapt to new environments
Limitations:
- Sometimes second guessing myself or wanting clarification on something I know is fine
- Not taking charge or lead of a situation when I may have the skills to do so
Evaluate your strengths and limitations in terms of your learning and career development
I think my strengths as listed above are helpful when it comes to learning. I’m able to successfully interact with others and I’m happy to help others learning with me. Career wise as well, I am able to make good connections with people and help create a nice working environment. But I do believe my hesitancy to offer to take the lead on things could potentially stifle my career development in some cases and leave me with missed opportunities.
Identify which of your strengths might help you in your learning journey and how they intersect with learning obstacles.
I think my strength of being able to adapt will help my learning journey. I’m willing to adapt to how I study, try different methods, and not trap myself in a way of working or learning that I will struggle to get out of.
Share an example from your experience of where you were trying to work productively with others, but there was resistance or tension. Discuss the strategies you used at that time, how effective they were, and your reflections on what other strategies you would try now and why.
In a previous position we were quite understaffed all the time and always stretched too thin. So resistance and tension came from my own team leads, my immediate peers and also from agents I supervised. My strategy was to make sure I always did my best to make time for the people I supervised not take out any frustrations on them. I wouldn’t change this. It was a tricky situation to be in because while I wanted to make time to plan I couldn’t as new tasks would come in out of the blue and be prioritised. So planning was ineffective at times. Now I think I would use a time tracker that measures my own time so I could better see what I’ve been doing myself. Small things like the pomodoro technique would have been helpful too to make sure I was more efficient with my time. Reflecting back, it’s still hard to know how far these would have gone to help as many of the struggles we had came from how the business was modelled as a whole. It did help me realise though to not underestimate how important a culture is in a workplace, a learning environment, and institute etc.