I recently asked my Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn networks to give me feedback by filling out a survey. I also said I might share the results. Here they are...
3 words that first come to mind when thinking about me
My 3 best skills/personality traits/features
My 3 worst skills/personality traits/features
How likely are you to recommend me to others?
Net Promoter Score: 33 (Based on this method). Terrible!
My thoughts and interesting tidbits
Contradictions
The most interesting thing to me is the fact that some of my positive traits are at direct odds with my negative traits.
For example:
Some of the responses to my positive traits were as follows (note: The number in brackets represents how well they claim to know me.…
Approachable (10)
Confident (7)
Positive (9)
Smile/laugh (7)
On the other hand, some other people listed my negative traits as…
Unresponsive (5)
Low self-esteem (10)
Pessimistic (9)
Sullen (5)
Initially I thought this was maybe related to the fact that the negative responses came from people who didn’t know me well. I feel like this theory is debunked by the fact that at least 2 of the negative contradictions in this small sample above claim that they know me 9 and 10 (out of 10).
Another possibility is that I’m not as consistent as I hope and strive to be to all the people in my life.
The only other possibility I can think of is that people project onto others what they hate or see in themselves.
What do you think?
Authenticity
In my worst skills tag cloud, the word “Inauthentic” obviously looms large. The fact is that the word was only used once in the feedback, but I summarized another piece of feedback using that word because it seemed to be what they were suggesting (with many more words). Unfortunately due to the small sample size (22) even 2 occurrences make the words (good or bad) loom large over the others.
That being said, I’m going to take that feedback (and the others) seriously and check in with myself as to why I might be behaving in inauthentic ways, or in ways that might be miss-perceived as inauthentic.