idealawg

Of course, learn your strengths but measure them accurately — and objectively

Penelope Trunk in a post at her Brazen Careerist (To find your best next job, focus on the company not the job) recommended learning your individual strengths when choosing a job. I certainly agree with her advice but I do not agree with her recommendation for learning your strengths: to take a self-report assessment. I have before explained many reasons I do not trust the results of self-report tests.

Lazar Emanuel (a lawyer of many hats, including being the co-founder of Emanuel Law School Study Aids) and Dr. Thomas N. Tavantzis include, in an article they wrote for T+D magazine, a quote from Peter Drucker: “Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong.”

(Note: Emanuel and Tavantzis are editors of Don't Waste Your Talent: The 8 Critical Steps To Discovering What You Do Best.)

In their article "The Road to Self-Knowledge" (PDF format), the authors agree with my opinion of self-report tools . . .

What passes in many organizations for opportunities to learn our strengths rests more often than not on tools that are based entirely on self‐report or the biased reports of others. These tools assume self-knowledge, are one‐dimensional and easily manipulated, and measure only personality orientation, not how to use our hard‐wired abilities to work easily.
. . .
All of these instruments tap into the same limited area— what we have come to know as personal style.

Whether or not they measure accurately what they purport to measure, we are compelled to recognize that personal style

This is your lawyer brain on blogs

In their post "Brain of the Blogger" at Eide Neurolearning Blog Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide contemplate the effects blogging may have on our brains.

Why ask this question? The primary reason can be found in one of the central tenets of modern neuroscience: "The neurons that fire together, wire together." What this basically means is that our mental activities actually cause changes in the structures of our brains--not only what we think, but how we think as well.

(In an earlier post I discussed this brain changing.)

Given such activity-directed change, it always makes sense to ask whenever large numbers of people start using their brains in new and different ways, what effects these new activities are likely to have on brain structure and function. Blogging, which only seems to be accelerating in popularity, is a prime candidate for such investigation.

The Eides exercised my brain with the following conclusions. Be sure to click over to "Brain of the Blogger" to read much more about each of these five points. What they have written is well worth the click.

1. Blogs can promote critical and analytical thinking.