Zach White is a widely regarded Coach known worldwide for changing the game in engineering career coaching. He has worked with engineers at all levels from dozens of top companies like Apple, Google, and General Motors to escape burnout and achieve breakthrough results. Zach is the founder and CEO of OACO, a fast growing company with unique and proven coaching programs exclusively for engineers.

He also hosts The Happy Engineer Podcast, which I am very happy to share that I have been a guest on. Through this podcast, listeners discover the steps to engineering success through expert interviews and Zach’s own transformational framework, the Lifestyle Engineering Blueprint.

You might be thinking, I already know this. I’ve already used a personality profiling tool.

Well, hold on. We want to challenge you. Don’t allow the part of your brain that says, “I know this,” cause you to click away right now. That’s often your ego in disguise to prevent you from the opportunity for new discovery, new possibility, and a new level of success and happiness in your own life.

We have an automatic pattern in our psychology that takes new information and categorizes it based off of our experiences in what we already know. It’s a useful function that allows us to operate in the world, but it’s not designed to create new possibility and deep success and fulfillment in life.

So if you’re tempted to say, ah, this is just another one of those. Instead, come with a beginner’s mind.

Here are four steps that I would encourage you to take with what you heard today.

Step 1: Know yourself 

Use the tool, take the assessments, get your own scores, study what it means and know yourself. If you’re green, you like to seek knowledge anyway. So go to town. If you’re not green, maybe this is a bit more of a difficult task for you, but regardless, take the time to know yourself, understand your own personality and your own profile.

Step 2: Know how you relate to others 

This means taking a bit of extra time to understand these other colors or these other personalities, depending on what tool you’re using. And get familiar with how each color relates to the others. What’s it like when you put yourself in a room with the other three colors? It’s going to explain a lot of the things going on in the relationships that you have in your life today, and it will help you lead and be a great situational leader for all the different types of people.

Step 3: Get curious 

Step three is to go that extra mile of literally asking and getting clarity on how others from these other colors perceive you. Not just how do they work with you and relate to you, but how do they perceive you. If you really have the courage to go out there and ask those people directly. It’s great to get the feedback. A lot of times the negative feedback out there is difficult to get because nobody wants to critique a friend or family member or say what they’re really thinking.

So you may need to use a resource like me or an expert in these fields to understand closer and better what it really means.

Step 4: Take action

Take action on what you’ve discovered. The number one problem with all of these tools is that we consume it as knowledge and we don’t do anything with it. You’ve got to turn it into action.

Knowing this information doesn’t mean anything. Knowledge isn’t power, implemented knowledge is power. So make sure that you turn an understanding of personality and understanding of perception into action. Know yourself, know how you relate to others, know how others perceive you. And then step four, stop worrying about knowing and start.

So I do encourage you to reach out and get the support that you need. It makes a difference. Pursue those dreams and be relentless.

Check out The Happy Engineer Podcast! Click HERE!