Identity, Values and Strengths Exploration

Describe your core personal values.

Some of my core personal values include kindness, honesty, integrity, empathy, compassion, treating others with respect and consideration, inclusivity, celebrating diversity, cooperation, fairness and acting in ways that make things better in the world better rather the worse.

Describe how your culture has influenced your values and identity.

My values and identity have been influenced by many cultures. I have had the immense privilege of having lived in a few different countries and having worked in an organisation with people of 40+ different nationalities. I noticed that living within and experiencing other cultures changed aspects of my own values, identity, habits and world view.

I believe the culture(s) you grow up in have an especially strong influence on your values and identity. I grew up in an area where the cultures to which I was mostly exposed were Pākeha, Māori and Pasifika cultures. But, because as a child and teenager that was all I knew, I didn't really recognise what was around me as "culture(s)". It was just "how things are".

You may have heard the analogy of a fish not being able to see water used as a metaphor for how we often fail to notice our own culture. I think the comparison is apt. It wasn't until in my early twenties, when I left Aotearoa to live overseas for the first time, that I really started to notice that I even had "a culture". In other countries, I experienced different notions of "right and wrong" and the "normal" way of doing things. The contrast of those differences began to define for me the contours of what "my culture" was.

Through these experiences I learned and adopted some things that I thought were done "better" in other cultures than my own. I also learned other ways of thinking about things or behaving that were neither better nor worse, just different. That taught me cultural flexibility, where I adapt to one way of doing things within one culture, but do things differently in another. However, there are some values that are so much a part of my identity that they never change no matter what cultural context I am in. Maybe that is because they are such important parts of the family culture I grew up in. These include things like the utmost importance of treating all people as equally worthy humans and equal citizens, not discriminating against them based on things like their gender, sexual orientation, race or religion. It is good to adapt and be flexible, but not to the detriment of others.

Using the evidence gathered, describe your strengths and limitations. Evaluate your strengths and limitations in terms of your learning and career development. Identify which of your strengths might help you in your learning journey and how they might intersect with learning obstacles.

I am very fortunate to have a mother who instilled in me, from a very young age, the belief that I could learn anything I wanted as long as I put in the effort. I became a confident life-long independent learner. Other strengths I have that might help my learning and career development are excellent verbal and written communication skills, being multi-lingual and having a high degree of cross-cultural awareness. I work well both autonomously and collaboratively with a team. I am trustworthy, reliable, conscientious, highly motivated and disciplined and have good attention to detail. I am creative, naturally curious, have good problem solving skills, and love learning. I am also good at teaching/training others.

Time boxing is important because the downside of being conscientiousness and attentive to detail is the possibility of spending too long on something, getting it just right. Similarly, the downside of curiosity can be getting led off on interesting technological tangents. Prioritising focus, just-in-time learning and time-management techniques are important for preventing this in the context of this bootcamp.