My church, Holy Communion Lutheran, is going through a major transition with the recent departure of our interim pastor, Steve Samuelson, and the imminent arrival of our new senior pastor, Bill Grimbol. Ahead of his arrival, the church council decided that our congregation should engage in some serious, concerted self-examination to determine where we go from here. . . and part of that process involves having those of us on the staff do an appraisal of our own personal strengths and weaknesses. I think the hope is that this can help all of us sort out what our place can and should be as our congregation turns the page on a new chapter in its history.
I have to confess to feeling more than a little skeptical about how worthwhile a survey like this could possibly be, but that was nothing compared to the frustration i felt when I actually started answering the questions. First of all, there were 180 questions to answer – and in order to have people go with their first instincts rather than thinking every answer to death, each question had to be answered in less than twenty seconds before the question would vanish, never to return. I’m not kidding when I say that I felt a little like Lucy and Ethel sitting in front of that ever-more-quickly moving candy factory conveyor belt, frantically trying to keep up.
What made it tricky is that each of the 180 questions was set up as a binary . . . two choices and with each one you had to decide if you were a lot like the one, sort of like the one, right in the middle or neutral, sort of like the other, or a lot like the other. In some questions it was a matter of choosing between complete opposites, but in other questions the two options weren’t opposites at all and sometimes not even very dissimilar at all. Those were the ones that drove me up a tree and left me punching the keys on my laptop keyboard with increasing irritation.
Here’s one. . .
I care passionately about education
and
I care passionately about eliminating violence.
Now it so happens that I’m a teacher, and I’m married to a teacher, so this one wasn’t all that hard to answer, except that the idea of having to choose between these two essential concerns drove me crazy. Why are you making me do this? And in choosing education over the elimination of violence, what am I saying about myself? Or maybe more to the point, what does this survey giver thinking I’m saying about myself? Arrrrrgh! And all of that in the space of twenty seconds.
Here’s another. . .
I like to encourage people.
and
I like to strengthen people.
Or this one . . .
I am a reasonable person.
and
I am a responsible person.
What the heck is the difference and is it a difference that matters even a little bit to me? Am I missing something here and should I spend ten seconds just pondering what the distinction is that I seem to be missing at first glance? Or should I just click on “neutral” which (I hope) means that both options are equally true about me? Since the two are SO similar, is this an instance in which the answer “neutral” is essentially the only correct answer? (Such as “Whose the better boxer? Muhammad Ali or Cassius Clay?) Again, all of this is rattling through my frazzled noggin in the space of twenty seconds. . . ARRRGH!
Or how about. . .
I am a tidy person.
and
I am a stubborn person.
I happen not to be a tidy person (I don’t know if you’ve noticed) but I think I know enough about tidiness to know that the world is full of tidy people who are also stubborn as mules. In fact, the two go together in my mind like jam and bread. (Sorry, all you tidy people who I just offended.) So what in the world do I do with this question? I’m not tidy. I’m also not stubborn – or at least not badly stubborn, although about certain things I am fairly unyielding. Where do I place the “x” to convey that I am about as UNtidy as a person can be (the next season of “Hoarders” is devoted exclusively to me, with one week on my car, one week on my Carthage studio, one week on my email accounts, etc.) but I’m not exactly the epitome of stubbornness either. So how do I best tell them who I am? Again, ARRRRRGH!
Then there were all of the questions where the two options were cleanly and clearly distinct from each other, but I found myself really frustrated and maybe even offended at being asked to choose between them. Choices like. . .
I cry easily.
and
I am tough-minded.
Yes, I cry fairly easily, but I’d like to think that it has nothing to do with tough-mindedness. . . and the notion that crying easily and being tough-minded are contrary qualities sounds like an antiquated idea from the days of Dick and Jane or Leave it to Beaver. Yes, I cry easily. So does Brett Favre.
I am open to learning new things.
and
I am a person of stable values.
Yes and Yes, I hope. But to mark “neutral” – the only way in this survey to say that both options are equally important to me – feels strange because the word “neutral” has some sort of implication of sitting on the fence or withholding final judgment – or maybe just not caring one way or another.
I know that there were also several instances in which one of the options was “likes to attend athletic events” or “interested in sports” – in contrast to something about liking to read a book or enjoying contemplative solitude – but never once did you see the word “music” in any question. So never once in 180 questions was it possible for me to convey that this is an important part of who I am. And for that matter – and this is highly ironic, given the purpose for the survey- there was never so much as a mention of religious faith in any of the questions. There were many references to Values – many references to thinking about the future versus reflecting on the past – and a question where we were asked to choose between believing that everything that happens to us is part of a plan or believing that most of the things that happen to us are at least in part due to luck or coincidence. But not a single reference- even vaguely – to God. Grrrrrrrrrr.
Somehow, I managed to finish the survey, and I think in only 2 of the 180 questions did the 20 second time limit expire before I selected an answer. . . and I am very proud and relieved that I managed to finish the entire survey without throwing the laptop out the window in frustration. (It was my wife’s, so doing so would not have been worth the momentary carthatic pleasure it would have given me to do so.) I clicked <<Finish>> and waited for the results to be calculated . . . and then it gave me a list of my top five Signature Themes – characteristics that are key to knowing who I am, what makes me happy and fulfilled, and – maybe most importantly – what I am capable of doing. And you know what? They nailed it on the head. My top signature theme is “Input” and here is just the beginning of the description they provide:
You are inquisitive. You collect things. You might collect information – words, facts, books, and quotations – or you might collect tangible objects such as butterflies, baseball cards, porcelain dolls, or sepia photographs. Whatever you collect, you collect it because it interests you. And yours is the kind of mind that finds so many things interesting. The world is exciting precisely because of its infinite variety and complexity. . .
Bingo! And not only did they nail this aspect of me, but they also made it sound like a good thing rather than a quality half a step removed from some sort of minor mental disorder. In that respect, this survey is much like the famous Myers-Briggs test (or as I almost always refer to it, erroneously, as the Briggs & Stratton test) in which all 16 possible personality profiles are all described in ways that accentuate the positive, as though it’s perfectly fine to be that kind of person. By the way, Kathy and I took that as part of our pre-marital counseling, and I was very similarly frustrated by that as well . . . . confronted by one binary choice after another that left me feeling like the whole thing was a fruitless exercise in simplistic skimming the surface. But then our results came back – and lo and behold, they summed both of us up perfectly. Wonder of wonders. . .
I will never be a fan of questions that broach complex issues and topics and demand quick, succinct and overly simplistic answers….. questions that seem to spring from a black and white universe when we all know that this is a world filled mostly with shades of gray…… but when those questions somehow manage to uncover something about ourselves that we never knew before, I guess it’s worth the occasional laptop thrown out a window.
*On purpose, I have not identified the organization responsible for this survey – or the companion book which explains all this – but feel free to email me if you are curious. By the way, the questions I quoted verbatim were questions that frustrated me so much that I actually a few seconds to jot them down on a piece of paper- or at least enough of it so I could remember it all later. In some cases, I have short hand notations like “good t” and “good c” that now make no sense to me whatsoever. Oh well.