I recently did a career-oriented personality test, hoping to unearth profound insights about myself for my professional growth.
The Gallup CliftonStrengths test is a widely recognised personality and performance assessment that professes to identify natural patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving. So I hoped it would reveal that I was deeply strategic, effortlessly adaptable or secretly a visionary genius.
Unfortunately, personality tests – when answered honestly – reveal who you are, not who you want to be.
The test told me I was competitive. Super competitive.
Out of 34 possibilities, “competition” wasn’t just one of my higher-ranked themes. It was Number 1.
CliftonStrengths states that people who are “exceptionally talented” in the Competition theme “need other people” because they measure their progress against the performance of others. (Yikes.)
“No matter how hard you try, no matter how worthy your intentions, if you reach your goal but do not outperform your peers, the achievement feels hollow,” the description states. (Double yikes.)
“You need to compare. If you can compare, you can compete, and if you can compete, you can win. And when you win, there is no feeling quite like it.”
I’ll be real. It was an accurate description of my competitive nature. But labelling it a “strength”? That seemed like a stretch.
I’d spent decades trying to downplay my competitiveness at school and work, often adjusting my standards – as much as I could without hating myself – to keep the peace in group projects. We didn’t need to be the best, as long as we did our best, learnt something new and had fun along the way.
But who was I kidding? A single, albeit reputable, personality test laid bare how evident my competitiveness had always been, the shame I still carried with it – and that perhaps, this contentious trait of mine wasn’t a weakness like I believed.
WHEN COMPETITIVENESS MEANS KIASU
Like many schooled in Singapore, I’d been conditioned to see competitiveness as “kiasu”. The local colloquialism loosely translates to the fear of losing out, and is often used pejoratively to describe hallmark survival tactics in an education system likened to a pressure cooker.
Think parents stockpiling past-year exam papers from so-called elite schools, so their children can outperform their peers. Or the tuition industry’s fear-based advertising tactics that prey on both anxious parents and students.
Back in school, more kiasu classmates intentionally let others know they were withholding their study notes – or worse, gave others the wrong information for exams.
I, too, regrettably participated in the widely encouraged practice of planning my project groupings one semester ahead. The possibility of having a teammate who was “less academically inclined” pull down everyone’s grade point average was unfathomable.
