Best Self Profile

Step 1: Identifying Respondents

            Identify 6 people and ask them to describe one or two stories about a time when they saw you at your best. These should be people who know you fairly well and can be truly honest with you.

Try to obtain these “best self stories” from a wide range of people in your social network. I suggest identifying two friends from outside of the WashU community, two people from within the WashU community, and two colleagues from work (past or present) to write for you.

If you do not have work colleagues available to you, consider three friends from outside WashU and three colleagues/friends from inside WashU. Consider emphasizing colleagues from non-work organizations, such as athletic teams, student organizations, and so on.

Step 2: Request Reflected Best-Self Stories

            Compose a request for each person you plan to contact asking them to write one or two stories about a time this person saw you at your best. Below are instructions I’d like you to share with your writers:

INSTRUCTIONS FOR STORY WRITERS

Thank you very much for agreeing to help one of our University students with an exercise for my class. I’d like you to spend some time thinking about your interactions with this student, and to identify the specific times when you saw this person at his or her best. When writing your story, be sure to provide contextual details about the event as best you can remember so that the student can understand what exactly happened. Be sure to describe as clearly as you can the positive contribution that you saw in this particular case. This is a business course about ethics, so please relate your story to an ethical characteristic.

When writing each story, please start by saying clearly in the opening sentence what ethical character strength your story reveals, or the positive impact you observed. Provide as many details as you can.  Describe why the event was meaningful to you.

Thank you again for agreeing to help with this class experience.  It will be very meaningful.

Sincerely,

Step 3: Write your own best-self stories

            While you are waiting for responses from your friends and coworkers, I’d like you to do some personal reflection as well. I want you to write about two different times when you were at your best, and identify what ethical character strength this reveals. You must write these stories BEFORE receiving the stories back from your friends and coworkers so that you can see whether they identify strengths that are similar or different than the two stories you write yourself.

            For each story, describe the character strength you identified, the positive (ethical) contribution you made, and then describe the event itself (the context, the role you played, the actions you took, the characteristics you displayed, the results, and what you were thinking as you in the situation).

Step 4: Analyze your Best-Self Stories

Once you have written your own two stories, and received them from others, try to identify the key ethical traits identified in each story. These stories should reveal the core elements of your ethical identity when you’re at your best. Once you’ve read through them, create a table like the one which includes each story. 

TABLE 2: INDIVIDUAL STORY REFLECTIONS

Step 5. Analyze your stories in aggregate 

After you have pulled out the central themes about each story, look for patterns and themes that emerge across all them (including your own). These patterns are recurring behaviors, contributions, or motives that you can see across all of your stories. 

It’s possible that you may find stories that exemplify opposing characteristics, in which case you may be observing flexibility or adaptability to the context you are in.

As you find patterns or themes in your stories, fill in a table like the one below. For each pattern or theme you identify, write down examples that were given from your writers, and identify which value from Schwartz’s framework the pattern best exemplifies. Your behavior may be connected to more than one value 

Please fill in the table below with as many strengths as you can see in your best-self stories.

TABLE 3: AGGREGATED STORY REFLECTION

… {Please expand to include as many patterns/themes as you think are appropriate}

Step 6:  Create a Reflected Best-Self Portrait

Based on the stories you received, I want you to write a portrait of your Best Ethical Self.  This portrait will be the main product you submit for this class exercise, along with your version of Tables 2 and 3 in this instruction packet and each of the stories you received as part of this exercise.  Be sure to make your stories anonymous.  If any of the content seems too personal to share with me, then you may redact any amount of any story that you like.  Your Best Ethical Self Portrait can be no more than 300 words long.  The document you submit on Canvas should then include three components, in the following order:

1.  Your Reflected Best-Self Portrait (300 words, maximum)

2.  An Appendix that includes Tables 2 and 3 from this packet, created to reflect analysis of the stories you wrote or received, plus...

3.  The stories you wrote and received from others. (Note that we have a very international student body. If the best self stories you receive are not in English, you DO NOT need to spend time translating these.  These stories are for your use only going forward.)

Your Best Ethical Self Profile should capture the character strengths and insights gleaned from your analysis.  Relate these to the values that we discussed in class.  What does this tell you about your primary ethical concerns when you are at your best?  What does this say about your core identity?  What moral principles or foundations seem most important for you?

This profile should synthesize the themes and declarations you identified in the tables above. However, be sure that the themes are authentic to you—not necessarily just things you do well, but that reflect your core identity, motivations, and intentions as a person.

Your profile may be best represented in the form of written narrative.  However, you can write this profile of yourself in whatever form you like.  The more important element is for your profile to describe what you are like at your best, what your key character strengths are, and what your guiding moral principles seem to be.