I feel the need to start this blog post with a little note to say that this was a difficult task to complete. Not because I don't know what my identity and values are, but because it's hard to choose specific ones to reflect on for the purpose of this exercise. I found it challenging to identify the ones which help me with this learning journey, as well. My approach for this exercise was to compare now-me to high-school-me.
I immigrated to New Zealand at a young age and with that came a lot of perserverance and determination. It brought me closer to my family and the new friends that I made, something that is still my number one priority today is maintaining the relationships that add value to my life and to me as a person.
I also highly value honesty, integrity, ownership and responsibility. I see these as four (of many) pillars that are extremely important when going on a learning journey such as this one with Dev Academy. In being honest about your work and taking ownership, you're only helping your future self.
Having worked as a personal trainer, I made ethical decisions almost every day. Oftentimes, clients would want to do exercises that either they physically weren't going to be able to do, or that could've been detrimental to their injury, etc. I would speak them through the (possible) risks and would help them to make an informed decision. Oftentimes, I would see PT's just saying 'yes' and they would end up with an injured client. Another example of an ethical decision when it came to personal training was the choice every day to not share the personal information or stories that my clients would share with me.
The people around me have a major influence in the way I make decisions. Not due to peer pressure, but because my family raised me to have strong beliefs that I consider every day when making big or small decisions. These values were honesty and responsibility, as well as being true to myself no matter the consequence.
Some of my strengths when it comes to learning would be my organisation skills and my openness. I thrive on structure and instructions, I like to keep written to-do lists or task lists, and it helps me to hold myself accountable. I like to think I am open and honest when it comes to my work because I will not pretend to understand something at any point if I don't know about it.
My limitations, however, would probably be that I am known to rush sometimes. Not in a way that affects my quality of work or my marks, but it affects the way I take in the information. If it's all learned too quick in a short amount of time, I tend to forget it further down the line, rather than focusing on learning the right way. This is something I've been prioritising since starting with Dev Academy.
An example of when I was working productively with others but there was resistance would be in my time as PT. Often, clients would come in asking for programs that were exactly like the ones they saw online. Most of the time, it wouldn't suit their lifestyle (in terms of frequency of the program) or their injuries/capabilities. My approach was to explain the reasons behind my alternative suggestions, letting them know that their health and safety was my number one priority. Most of the time, due to the openness of the conversation, my clients would see what I was meaning and they would usually prefer the program I'd suggested. There were a few instances where the client would go home and try the program on their own and end up worse off, but they knew they could approach me with honesty because I had been honest with them in why I believed it wasn't right for them
To close, the ideas of values, identities, strengths and weaknesses are really hard to analyse. It's usually been done at every workplace I've been to, every course I've been to. I have found this exercise to be insightful, but also slightly repetitive as I found it hard to explain myself at different points and I ended up having to re-write a lot of it. Thank you for your time.