Complete 4 page APA formatted essay: Analyzing my personality.Download file to see previous pages... Each time a person chooses an answer that assumes external locus, they gain a point, so high equals

Complete 4 page APA formatted essay: Analyzing my personality.

Each time a person chooses an answer that assumes external locus, they gain a point, so high equals external locus and low equals internal (Yarnell 2008). My Score My score was 19, which is a relatively high score considering there were only twenty questions that were scored on the test. I think this is probably a bad thing, because if I see the locus of control as being outside of me I have little incentive to become a better person, work harder, etcetera – I just think everything that happens to me is essentially random, though I am also curious if the fact that this was made for a different culture might affect the outcome (Smith 1995). Interpretation I can see now that I have an external locus of control though a lot of things that happen in my every day life. For instance, when I get a bad grade I tend to look to the teacher as being the reason more than me – they are the grader and decide the grade, so I kind of disassociate my work that I actually did with the grade that I received. This also creeps into my interpersonal relationships – when something goes wrong and I have a fight with a friend, I often blame them, or think that they misinterpreted something, or something else like that. Rarely do I actually think of what I did or could have done to cause the problem, or else what I could have done to prevent it. I also realize that I do not just locate control outside of myself for bad things, I also do it for good things as well. When I get a good grade and a friend compliments me on it, I will often tell them that I got lucky or that the teacher just likes me. Locus of control is something that affects all aspects of my life, both the good and the bad, and that is probably unhealthy. This also happens when I am good at basically anything, like video games or anything like that – I find that I do not consider the time I spend trying to be good at something, but instead only think that it happens naturally. So I show that I do not have an internal locus of control in several ways: by blaming others such as friends or teachers when things are bad, and by not congratulating myself enough when I do something that is good. Changing my Locus of Control I think that I need to be very self-aware to change my locus of control. I need to constantly be on the lookout for the feeling that I have been wronged, and every time this happens, try to see how it could have been my fault. Especially with grades, I need to look at my essays to understand why I did the way I did. I also think that this is important in my interpersonal relationships – I find it very easy to blame others for anything that happens, good or bad, and if I can admit when I am wrong to others that will be a great help. Finally, I think the most important part of changing my locus of control is the realization that I need to take both the good and the bad – realize that both are in my control much of the time. Myers-Briggs The Insturment The Myers-Briggs personality inventory was a questionnaire developed by Katherine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers in the 1940s (Gale 2001). It is a much longer forced-choice questionnaire, being 80 questions. The scoring is done on a continuum for each trait, indicating a preference towards one type of thinking or doing, which creates a matrix of characteristics (Townsend 2011).