Time for another book review!
This post does contain affiliate links.
Joellen here :) Now, I have been told for much of my life that I am creative, so a bunch of what is in this book I totally agreed with and was able to just read it and breeze right along. If you wish you were creative and feel like you have no idea what that would look like for you, I recommend this book EVEN MORE!
You might already know, I can be a little obsessive when it comes to figuring out personality types. I discovered this book while I was reading another book about personality called Reading People by Anne Bogel. Ha! Being already into so many creative endeavors, I felt like this book would help me gain some more clarity regarding my strengths, weaknesses, and struggles. And boy, was I right!
Creative You is a book about how your personality affects your work and your pursuits. But the authors don't just talk about specifically artistic careers. Being creative can happen in the most standard, cookie-cutter type of jobs. We all need to think creatively to organize our time and tasks. Engineers have to be creative when navigating a new project or dealing with a group of employees. Moms have to be creative with their use of time, their meal-planning, and scheduling tasks that affect the rest of the household. The book has far better examples than I can give off the top of my head right now, but every job has areas where creativity is required in order to perform well. And learning how to harness the natural creativity that comes naturally to you and your personality type will help you make the most of it.
This book looks like an intimidating read based on its size, but there are actually lots of parts you can skip (and the authors even tell you that!). There are some descriptions about the Meyers-Briggs personality assessment, plus descriptions of the different personality types as well as each of the 8 labels that are used to create the personality type you get "assigned." It was all super fascinating!
I read most of the general information about the different personalities, but when things got specific I skimmed quite a bit and focused on my own (ENFJ). Actually, reading through the descriptions really confirmed my type and when it came to the actual work-related stuff, my jaw was on the floor!
The book goes through many types of creative endeavors and then lists out how personality shapes how we work within those realms, like with cooking, gardening, writing, sculpting or painting. I found this section truly enlightening! It helped reveal to me what kinds of artwork I like to paint and how, and what type of writing I enjoy and don't. It confirmed my suspicions that I like to paint from a picture or scene, rather than from my own imagination. It also told me that I like to paint more abstract instead of realistically (which I only recently had discovered). The book also confirmed in my mind that I will likely never write a factual, detailed, historical account of anything without a partner doing most of the nitty-gritty research work, which I was extremely relieved about. Not that I am planning to write anything like that anytime soon.
Even if your job or career or personal endeavors don't appear creative on the outside, this book will be really helpful to see how using the strengths of your personality have creative uses within any job and within all your relationships.
If you are into personality at all and want to get some really practical input regarding how to leverage it in your work or life, this book is for you! As far as business and productivity types of books, I would put it right up next to The Accidental Creative.
I really can't think of anything I didn't like about this book. It fed all of my loves: personality, creativity, productivity, personal growth, and more. Grab a copy and let me know what you think!
No comments:
Post a Comment