EDA

Kahikatea

2021

Sam's EDA Blog

Sprint 1 - Core Blog


Identity, Values, and Strengths


Evidence Gathering


My Values:


16 Personalities Test:


Type: Turbulent Adventurer
Code: ISFP-T
Role: Explorer
Strategy: Constant Improvement

VIA Institute on Character - Top Strengths:


DOPE 4 Birds Personality Types:


Owl
Logical, mathematically minded, methodical, and sometimes seen as a perfectionist that loves details.

Values


Using the evidence gathered, describe your core personal values:


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 the action you took.

I really struggled to think of any examples where I have had to make an ethical decision. It has only been in the last six months where I’ve done any reflection on my values and what I want to place importance on in order to guide my decision making. I’m sure there have been many occasions where I’ve had to choose between right or wrong, or operate in grey areas - I just can’t think of a good one to discuss. These days, when faced with an ethical decision, I think I would try to consider which of my values this problem calls in to question and how the different choices I have would reflect upon my values. If I think about making a choice, how does that make me feel? Am I living up to my values?

Choosing to sign up to EDA to begin this coding bootcamp was a decision that was in line with my values. I felt good to pull the pin and sign up. It feels like a more intentional career choice in something that I’m interested in as opposed to my previous line of work that I felt like I fell into.

I still have work to do on this but I suspect the more I can make decisions in line with my values and the person I want to be, the more I’ll become confident in myself and my identity as an individual.


Describe how your culture has influenced your values and identity.

I’ve lived in New Zealand all my life so far and had not really spent much time thinking about what it means to be from here. I only really felt the individuality of this country hit home during a recent trip to Waitangi in January this year. During the course of walking the grounds, walking through the museums, and participating in a tour with a cultural performance I really started to feel for the first time the individuality of this island in the Pacific Ocean and better understand its early history. Rather than feel like a person from the British Commonwealth I began to feel like a Pacific Islander from New Zealand which was grounding. I felt a sense of belonging that I haven’t experienced in any meaningful way before.

I think that growing up here I’ve been shaped by Kiwi values like honesty, fairness, and placing importance on friendships. In my family I never really felt like we had a culture as such. I suppose culture for us was eating dinner together around the table and catching up on the day, and spending time together watching television in the evenings. My parents also placed importance on education; completing homework and studying hard for exams. I wasn’t much of a scholar but over time this attitude impressed upon me that if you work hard at something you can get a positive outcome. In life you need to put in effort and while you are at it you may as well try your best.

Strengths


Using the evidence gathered, describe your strengths and limitations:


Evaluate your strengths and limitations in terms of your learning and career development.

Some of my character strengths help to establish a solid foundation when it comes to both learning new things, or undergoing a career change to follow my interests. I consider myself to be reliable, honest, and dependable; where these things all help to keep me turning up day after day and sticking at something. I think this helps to make me a good member of a team, which is an environment and mode of working that I enjoy. It’s a great feeling when a group of people can come together with their individual skillsets and all contribute to achieve a goal.

One aspect of my approach to working is to be considered and thoughtful. I prefer to display judgment and will likely not speak up in a group setting unless I’ve thought something through and still think there is something to be said. I’m trying to actively work on using my voice more as I think there is still something to be said for openly not knowing the answer to something and to ask a question, or even to say what you think you’d do in a situation - chances are someone else also doesn’t know and will benefit from hearing the answer or that a proposed solution could prompt additional ideas.

I have found that sometimes find it challenging to continue to extend myself beyond a good all-around ability to perform a role or to drive my learning even further beyond what is required of me. This was the case in my previous career in project management in the construction industry. Once I had a solid ability to execute many aspects of the role I found that my learning and growth slowed significantly. It is something that I want to remain mindful of as I think it is dangerous to stagnate for too long - there are so many interesting things to pursue in life and so there is little point in losing interest and stalling whilst staying put. I think ultimately a large contributing factor for continued growth is being able to retain curiosity and an interest in whatever it is that you are learning or doing.

During Covid-19 lockdowns and subsequent period of redundancy I became adept at procrastinating from tasks that I felt were necessary, or hard, or confronting. Not at all a helpful habit, as nothing (or not a lot) gets done and you can start to feel down on yourself. I’m working on resisting urges to procrastinate and thankfully haven’t struggled much since starting with my EDA studies. I’ve found the Pomodoro Technique helpful, as it encourages you to simply begin a task and give it just 20 minutes; once starting an activity I tend to find it isn’t as hard as I thought it might be.


Identify which of your strengths might help you in your learning journey and how they might intersect with learning obstacles.

One of my strengths that will aid me in my learning journey but that will also have an interesting effect on me when I encounter obstacles is my dependability. Being reliable and dependable when it comes to work is something that I’m proud of and I like that I can bring that to a workplace and team. I don’t like to let others down and will continue to turn up to help the team succeed.

When it comes to the work or learning material itself, I think this attribute can slow me down at times, trying to make sure I have covered everything, dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s. Sometimes following the rule of ‘good enough’ and having something to an 80% level where it works perfectly fine is called for. Taking this ‘good enough’ line of action can be difficult for me to come to terms with.

With that in mind I think that it will be interesting to pit this strength of mine up against increasingly tough amounts of workload to get through in this course; first in Foundations and then in the Bootcamp. One thing I have already learned to do that helps me is to create a plan to break down the work requirement into smaller chunks to determine how much needs to be completed each day - and stick to this plan. It helps to make me feel more relaxed and confident about my chances of success.


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 my previous career as a project manger we would often work in teams with roughly each person, sometimes two, coming from different companies and professions. On a project we would all regularly meet to discuss progress, risk, delays, and upcoming works. On occasion one or more of the team members would start displaying a trend of not delivering upon their tasks for the week. For a project to succeed one key aspect is for the team to work well together and to keep producing work to move things forward. It was my job to run these regular catch-up meetings and so it could get rather awkward if one party started to consistently under-deliver.

In the past I think I would have done my best to make it as pleasant as possible for that person in the meeting, and to then talk to them one on one afterwards. I would have asked why the work isn’t done yet to try to understand this, and then to ask when they can deliver it by. Often this wouldn’t be that effective. These professionals were usually working across a number of projects and if yours was not a priority for them, chances are they will continue to show it less attention.

I think now I would try, if I could, to consider the bigger picture of the project, their organisation’s performance in the market and their overall workload. Try to understand why this underperformance is happening. Is it something local to the project? Is someone else on the project team hoping them up? Are they overloaded with other work and simply not able to be effective at their work? Has their boss told them to focus on another job? Or maybe they have had something happen in their personal life that is effecting work?

Looking at things from a more global and even a compassion based perspective could help to take the negative emotions out of the fact that this individual is underperforming and negatively impacting the team. It might also help you to ask better questions and to narrow down to what the real cause for the issue is. I think that as a problem solving mindset I can use this to assist with my coding work and learning journey at EDA.