I love taking personality quizzes. I know it’s kind of weird, but I sincerely enjoy learning about different personalities as well as my own, especially when it comes to leadership.
(Fun fact for any other obsessive-quiz takers: I am anISFJ in the Myers-Briggs personality test, which is by far my favorite online personality quiz.)
This past weekend I attended a leadership conference in Chicago with my sorority’s executive council. In one of our sessions, we took a quiz to identify our leadership personality. The leadership styles were divided into cardinal directions: North denoted action, East represented vision, West stood for analytical and South was empathy.
I fall into the East category, which means I am vision-oriented. I love to dream big and brainstorm and create a vision for the future. I definitely experienced the “this is so me”moment after I got my results. I mean, it is getting a bit ridiculous how many times I say, “We just need our members to catch the vision of…” or “I’m envisioning…” in my executive council meetings. I can’t deny my obsession with vision.
I truly believe in the power of believing in something greater, striving towards a vision, pushing on towards bigger and better things.
One of the drawbacks of my personality type is dealing with reality when it falls short of my vision. Another is becoming easily frustrated when things don’t pan out they way I envisioned them to…and let me tell you, I have a vision for many things. I have a vision for how conflict should be handled, how people should treat one another, how leaders should lead, how events should be planned, etcetera etcetera.
And oh my lanta, did I run into this issue head-on when working with InDesign this week.
There was a perfect vision for what my design should look like provided to me in the form of an annual report cover I had the task of mimicking. I didn’t even have to create the design, I just had to copy it.
I started clicking away in InDesign, trying to match my work to the model. I couldn’t seem to match colors or angles or font sizes just right, now matter how much I tried. Being the perfectionist I am, it started to bother me more and more as I went along.
The computer mouse caught the brunt of my anger. I clicked more aggressively as the minutes melted away and my laser-focus grew stronger. The closer I got to having a finished product, the more I realized how many mistakes I’d made. My background was too grey and my shapes weren’t the right size, my text wasn’t aligned correctly… needless to say, this visionary greatly missed her vision.
I sat back in my chair, frustrated, as my professor congratulated us on finishing our first-ever date with InDesign. “It’s like going to the gym, it’s going to take some practice,” he said.
I pushed from my desk and took one more look at my assignment. Yes, it fell short of the expectations I set for myself, but then it hit me: what if I set the wrong expectation?
Instead of expecting my assignment to look perfect after my first ever rendezvous with InDesign, maybe I should have focused on eagerly learning my way around the program. Maybe the assignment had very little to do with the aesthetic, and more to do with the process.
All of this to say, while I was quite frustrated with my “failed” vision, the reality of the situation had very little to do with my original vision at all. It had everything to do with learning the program. And if this is the standard by which my vision should be set, I have to say, I left the class period with a better understanding of the program than when I entered.
For now, it may be ok for this visionary to focus on learning the program rather than perfecting the product. Baby steps. And just a little refocusing of the vision.
