Mental & Physical Health Big Data.

I’ve recently had opportunity (thanks to where I work) to take part in a Myers Briggs / Jung-esque Psychometric profiling day with insights.com. As a co-incidence, I’ve also recently had my DNA-Fit profiling done and the data yielded by both has been so fascinating I wanted to share on my blog.

READ MY PERSONALITY PROFILE HERE

Nay’say’ers will feel the Psychometric & Personality profiling somewhat ‘horoscopy’ whereby in actual fact, I (and many others) find it super-accurate and hugely useful. I thoroughly recommend having a screening done either through your HR dept at work if they offer such a thing, or paying for one yourself if you can, if you are keen to learn more about yourself.

My reasoning for being into (and passionate about) this stuff is looking at yourself from outside, and noticing not only your key strengths but also weaknesses & blindspots, and to then be able to use this awareness to enhance your character & get better outcomes through your interaction with others. I’ve written about understanding your ‘sphere of influence’ & I’m deeply interested in human psychology and how we work with one another. I also want to use this insight to make me better at work & in my personal life.

We’re all a ‘work in progress‘ right?

Personality Insight

So you can read the full-report here. I can’t really argue with any of it. Both the positive and negative aspects of my character I’m more or less fully aware of, but having contextual understanding has started to make me look at things (and people) differently. One of my key frustrations in my professional capacity is my lack of empathy with people who are not similar to me. Why would you not want to be me, I’m awesome right? On the odd occasion I get negative outcomes from interactions with others I’m often left frustrated & heavily blaming the opposing party for me not getting what I want. Often I fail to look at how I’ve gone into that interaction and what I could of done differently to achieve a different and often more positive result.

The Shadows you cast.

I’ve written here about the shadows you cast, in reference to my observation of others (especially leaders) being unaware of themselves & how they come across to others. At that point, I was arguably not thinking so much about how I, myself, also came across. As a leader of people I’ve been given that opportunity at a fairly young age and made many mistakes along the way. As I become more commercially and professionally mature, I can see that I also must be aware of the shadows I personally cast. I’m very careful about how I interact with others but am still not perfect, and the insight gleaned from this day out of the office has been useful, as I can now see some of my confidence and passion can occasionally come across as arrogant and agressive. It’s interesting isn’t it,  two words but can be taken differently by different people.

I believe I’m confident and passionate, those who know me well would say the same. But rarely have I thought that to those who don’t know me so well, may consider these traits arrogant & aggressive. Learning how to dial up & down these behaviours certainly helps day to day interactions with people.

The graph below shows the variance between my conscious & less conscious self and how I dial up or down different aspects of my personality of when for example, I’m at home, or work.

Genetics & Physical Health

Now I’ve started taking up more & more competitive running & my first marathons coming up this year & next, finessing & fine tuning my diet and training has become important to me. I’ve known for a while I have certain intolerances and having a genetic screening & map done to confirm that has helped me under-pin faults in both my diet & training.

Pop over to this page to download my DNA overall screening results.

Again, it’s easy to discount this type of information, but it’s really important that you understand how your bodies composition is made up, as we are all different and what works for some won’t work for all. I’ve had opportunity to learn for example that I have a very quick reaction to carbohydrate, (which massively impacts my blood sugar, raises my HbA1c and increases my Type 2 diabetic risk) but I also now know I’m on the Coleriac spectrum also, and deficient in a couple of vitamins. This super-fine tuning has had a super-dramatic impact to how I eat, lose weight & subsequently train.

I really do recommend genetic screening if you can get it done, with both swab and finger prick blood testing. Getting this screening of your body gives you insight & understanding so much more than you would have otherwise. You can then make so much more informed decisions. For more information on my Biotech company Lifely which I started because I’m interested in all this stuff, visit the website at lifely.io

Disclaimer: This is NOT a paid review, all services and experiences I’ve paid for myself and/or had no free gifts, offers or been asked to write a review, positive or negative.

UPDATE: I was approached by a lady called Leslie who runs honestproductreviews.com recently. I have to say taking a look at the website, it’s got some great un-biased reviews on a range of things from Pets to Technology. The article which was brought to my attention was the review of all these various types of blood and saliva screening – I’ve read the article, it’s really good and you should check it out https://honestproductreviews.com/best-dna-test-for-ancestry