Hi Everyone! This is Day 8 of my video series, 20 Days, 20 Quizzes, where I count down the 20 reasons why my book, All About You: A Personality Quiz Book will make a great gift for your loved ones this holiday season!
The eighth quiz in this book is about how private or expressive you like to be. Are you comfortable sharing all about yourself with people you’ve just met? Do you like to get to know people better before you share private things with them? Or do you prefer to keep a lot of your life private even from people you’re close with?
I wrote this quiz because I’ve seen and experienced a lot of pressure on both sides of the spectrum. Sometimes there can be a lot of pressure to share things that you’d rather keep private. It could be an individual person asking questions you don’t want to answer, or you could be expected to share personal things in a group setting. I’ve been in a lot of classroom settings where the teacher or professor would ask everyone to share their most embarrassing moment or other intimate things that you wouldn’t expect to have to share in an academic setting. Or it could be someone asking to be friends on social media or have access to your private blog when you don’t feel close enough to the person to give them access.
And on the flip side, you can face a lot of criticism when you do share things freely. People might tell you that you’re oversharing or that you shouldn’t share certain things with everyone. For example, if someone casually mentions that they have a mental illness or go to therapy, some people will criticize them for sharing even if the person doesn’t consider that to be private information. Many times when I had friends betray my trust in the past, I got criticized for trusting them with my private information in the first place.
The purpose of this quiz is to validate however private or expressive you like to be. If you’re more of a private person, you’ll get tips on how to protect your privacy. You may enjoy doing activities that don’t involve having intimate personal conversations. When you’re talking, it’s perfectly okay to say that something is private, or to change the subject. If you’re in a group setting where everyone is going around sharing their most embarrassing moment and you don’t want to share yours, you can pick a story that you are comfortable sharing even if it isn’t actually the most embarrassing thing that’s happened. I always have a couple of stories up my sleeve that fit the topic of most embarrassing moment but that I’m not actually super embarrassed about, for any time that I feel pressured to share with people I don’t know very well.
If you’re a more expressive person, you’ll get tips on finding people who you can trust. You may enjoy meeting people in one-on-one settings, where you can talk and really get to know each other. If you have something major to share with someone, but you’re not sure how they’ll react, you can start by sharing something smaller and working your way up. It’s also good to observe how people treat other people’s private information – if someone is gossiping about other people, it means they might also gossip about you. Since sharing is so important to you, you want to look for friends who are trustworthy. However you come out on this quiz, you’ll get advice on how to navigate the world just the way you are.