Face it¾ deciding what you were going to do for a living used to be a lot easier. Up in the morning, shake of the cold (and the flies), throw on your freshest animal skin, pick up your spear, a quick "ugh" to everyone else in the cave, and you were off to survive one more day of hunting and gathering.
Then, with a few minor steps in between, along came the computer, and things got really complicated. Computing went through lots of changes, driving all sorts of corporate upheaval. Up-sizing, down-sizing, right-sizing, capsizing¾ it was hard to tell if you'd been fired up, laid off, lopped off, knocked down, drug out, or steamrolled.
The 1990s arrived. Driven by stockholder scrutiny, employers stopped "taking care" of employees, favoring the immediate bottom line over long term workforce stability. Knowing that they could show lower employee head-count to their stockholders, employers fired thousands, only to hire contractors and consultants as replacements (companies can easily hide the expense of contractors and consultants from their investors). As a result, the market for consultants and contractors boomed, and will continue to do so as long as public corporations and foolish investors exist (forever?).
My first three paragraphs may provide a distorted and convoluted picture¾ but they contain all you really need to know about the job market. You can now make a case that every job is temporary, all employers are acting in their own best interest, and every person is responsible for themself. Your decision: take control of your own future, financial success and career track, or believe that a corporation will take care of all those things when you accept a "permanent" position.
Now, keep in mind that many of us function better believing our job is "permanent." In this chapter we'll figure out if you have the kind of personality that easily takes on full responsibility for your own success, or you prefer to veil the unstable nature of our times by working full-time for someone else.
Let's take a slightly deeper look at what happened to society between the Age of the Cave Person and the Age of the Consultant/Contractor. From the African veldt to the Gaulic countryside, from the outer reaches of Mongolia and Siberia to the islands of the South Pacific, from the Alaskan islands to the Southern tip of South America, our nomadic forebears concerned themselves with one overriding factor: their relationship to the physical world. Prowess in the physical world ensured survival, and humankind valued this trait above all others.
About 10,000 years ago, a change began to occur. Humankind discovered trends, cycles, and schedules. With cycles in weather and animal gestation understood, people could cultivate plants and breed live stock. Food no longer presented itself as a moving target.
To paraphrase the commercial, "This changed everything." For the next few thousand years the ability to gain control of at least some of what happened in the "present" through planning and scheduling allowed us to stop roaming the countryside, and supported the development of farms and marketing centers: basic civilization.
As history progressed, humankind began to store facts and knowledge. The resulting body of knowledge from past experience grew and grew, and eventually gave rise to speculation about the future¾ based on our knowledge of the past.
As we look into our history, we can see four discrete dimensions at work. Not the dimensions of height, width, depth and time that we learned in school. We can redefine the dimensions as 1) Physical Reality, 2) the Past, 3) the Present, and 4) the Future. After all, our senses really show us the physical world as one "chunk" of information. It's time that we have to divide into pieces in order to understand it.
Our personality sees reality through four portals of perception. Each of us possesses these four "windows" into the four dimensions. For most of us, one of these windows provides a very clear view into one dimension of reality. Another of the four dimensions will not appear clearly at all, and we will tend to avoid using that dimension because we instinctively know that we don't excel there. The remaining two windows into reality will allow us to see and use the remaining two dimensions, but generally not as well as our best, and not as poor as our worst. The mixture of these windows into the four dimensions of reality tend to support different behaviors and talents. It governs how we most effectively influence our environment to support our survival and "thrival."
Imagine that the mind and body represent a channel between the "soul" and reality. Our "soul," or whatever you want to call the core of our being, will only be able to work with the information provided through this passageway. To that end, we work with the information provided to us, to live as well as we can.
I find it important to mention at this point, that the theories I discuss herein are not my own. I draw from the work of such pioneering psychological personalities as Carl Jung and William Mouton Marston, who in turn drew on previous psychological explorers as well as the philosophers of the ages. From their collective works, various psychometric systems and instruments have evolved, including the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the DISC language, the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, the Strong Inventory and many others. I draw my observations from my experiences with these tools.
So what does this have to do with Contracting and Consulting? People who find long term success in Contracting and Consulting generally possesses similar mixtures of these Dimensional Perceptions. Use any system that you want to¾ Myers-Briggs, the Strong Inventory, the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, or the approach I've described above. Test a collection of Contractors or Consultants who have been successful for a while, and you will find common traits, no matter how different these people seem to be on the outside.
Let's take a look at the four redefined dimensions, and the activities that each supports. Pay attention, there will be a test!
Our most rudimentary dimension is that of the Physical Reality. It was the first to develop in society, and is the first to develop in newborn humans. Animals use this dimension almost exclusively. People who have great affinity for this dimension prefer to work in the physical realm. They may be watchmakers, explorers, ranchers, builders, excavators, demolitionists, truck drivers, etc. No matter what scale they use¾ large or small¾ they will pursue mostly physical endeavors.
The Present
The next Dimensional Perception to develop in people is the sense of the Present. Those who best perceive the Present will find themselves driven to control¾ to set things in order. Among other things, they have great talent for spotting trends. Scheduling, order, and planning gives them a sense that they control what is happening. Whether they actually have that control is beside the point. They most successfully influence their environment to support their survival in this way. They pursue endeavors such as project management, meeting planning, organizational consultants, and technical writers (information organization).
The Past
On the heels of the Present, we develop an awareness of the Past and the Future. Individuals who operate best in the dimension of the Past concern themselves with things that have happened¾ sometimes known as "facts." This could involve the immediate past or the distant past, but their orientation remains "historical" at some level. They support the collection and transfer of information. They believe in learning and the setting of precedent. Because they have such focus on the clear storage and communication of information, they often have great facility for writing and reading. In many cases, they will have the same facility for learning how to use languages other than their own. They often become lawyers, researchers, scientists, linguists or writers.
The Future
People who prefer to focus on the dimension of the Future live in the arena of hope and possibilities. These people make lemonade when someone hands them lemons. They discover connections between events, people, and situations that no one else can see. They don't enjoy implementing as much as they enjoy having ideas. They get bored with projects quickly, so they usually work best by utilizing the assistance of others to implement for them. They see into the future and know they can't predict exactly what's coming, so they play the odds. They spend much of their time figuring out which ideas deserve the investment of their energy. The moment they see that an idea won't pay off, they stop investing their energy into it. For this reason, they often acquire the reputation of not being able to stick with anything long enough to finish it. In fact, they have too many ideas, and, often very publicly sort out what works and what doesn't. When they do bring an idea to full fruition, it often happens with a lot of last minute effort and frequently with brilliant results. These people become so used to selling their ideas that they usually make excellent sales people. Society at large will see them as either "visionaries" or "flakes," depending how they've chosen to manage other people's perception of them.
Remember, we all have some capabilities in all four dimensions. We tend to specialize in one dimension, do poorly in another, and perform "okay" in the other two. The magic is in the mix of what dimensions each individual uses. It accounts for most of our differences, and the motivation behind what each of us likes and dislikes¾ particularly in our work. It sets the path by which each of us influences our environment to support our own survival and "thrival."
Understand that our mixture of Dimensional Perceptions¾ our personality profile¾ will not change over our lifetime. Scientists have long argued over what determines our personality traits¾ our environment or our genetic make-up. As we understand child development more, the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle. We do know that children tend to develop neural pathways that support whatever is important to the people around them. If a child's family loves music, most of the children will have an affinity for it. If the family finds business acumen important, the children will tend to develop supporting talents. But our environment does not shape all of our talents, and our genetics don't account for all of them, either.
The scientific community generally holds that the factors that establish our personality traits, and also most of our values, "lock in" between five and 10 years of age. I would theorize that between 10 and 25 we spend a great deal of time discovering who we are, but our personality does not change. The tendencies and talents exist, and we're just figuring them out and developing them.
When an individual makes statements such as, "I used to behave like...," or " I used to believe that...," it doesn't necessarily mean their personality changed, so much as they have made self-discoveries of what works for them and what doesn't.
How does the mix of Dimensional Perceptions influence our careers? Allow me to use one of my favorite examples: sales people. The best sales people usually have an orientation toward the Future dimension. They become "natural" sales people because they live in the world of ideas. In order to get anything done, they have to "sell" someone else on implementing their ideas. They possess great adaptability, so they often have the capability to implement, but while they are implementing, they'll have 25 new ideas, and will become bored with the project they're working on. For this reason, they don't usually finish the work before they abandon it and move onto something they believe will pay off better.
So, the dominating influence of this individual's personality orients them to the Future, to hope, to possibilities. They work in this realm with the most ease, and therefore, have tremendous energy to expend there. Because of their natural visionary tendencies, they have the unique ability to visualize their "customer" using or embracing whatever they're "selling." Convincing the customer of the vision remains their final task, which they accomplish with ease and flair.
"Fine," you say, "so if I need a sales person I'll look for one who's Future-oriented." Not so fast. What kind of Future-oriented sales person do you need? What other dimensional influences does the sales person require to sell your product. The following chart might give you some ideas.
| Future dimension influenced by... | Supports selling... |
| Past | With facts, figures, features and benefits. This person will supply their customers with a lot of written material about the product, some of which they may write themselves. |
| Present | With flow charts and trend analysis. This person will draw a flow chart of what they're selling. They will probably use a methodical approach to the selling process. |
| Physical Reality | By showing. This person will be most at ease selling something physical (cars, houses, furniture) or something they can physically demonstrate with visual sales aids. |
I always suspected that most long term contractors and consultants used a great deal of this Future-orientation just as sales people do. Though I have never proven this clinically, I'll share an anecdote that finally convinced me that most of us have this trait.
In November of 1996, I spoke at STC's Region 6 conference. My "slot" was on Saturday morning, an extended session including a consulting and contracting workshop scheduled after most of the conference ended. Contractors, consultants, and "wannabe's" filled the audience, and I made the decision to go around the room and ask everyone about themselves as part of my opening. Though I only asked for the minimum information (your name, what you do, what you expect to learn). The resulting introductions took forever, because each person had a career full of changes and wanted to talk about them. Virtually every long time contractor/consultant had an entrepreneurial approach to life. They had all sampled different professions, most were well traveled, and their careers created a patchwork that illustrated how adaptable they were and how quickly they became bored. Most spoke easily about their exploits and communicated very effective mental pictures of what they had experienced.
Further conversations after the session confirmed what I already knew. Everyone was "selling" something, whether it was their services or their vision of where we were headed.
Keep in mind, a person wouldn't have to be totally dominated by a Future-orientation to function effectively as a Contractor or Consultant, but a healthy dose would help them market, consult, anticipate, and see connections between things. How would a decision table for a Contractor or Consultant look? To oversimplify, we'll stay with the dominating Future-orientation:
| Future dimension influenced by... | Supports Contracting and Consulting... |
| Past | Where the assignment requires research and fact gathering through reading. Where the client highly values fact gathering and verification, along with impeccable, grammatically correct writing skills. |
| Present | Where the client values project organization and management, information organization, trend analysis and flow charting. |
| Physical Reality | Where the client values the physical look of documents, including layout and packaging. |
Acumen in the Future dimension helps a Contractor or Consultant to stay networked. It supports marketing, strategy, problem solving and most importantly, adaptability¾ perhaps the most important trait of a Contractor or Consultant.
People will almost always see this person as a "quick study," able to gain an understanding of most situations rapidly. This person may not develop very deep knowledge in any given subject unless influenced by the Past dimension, but they will intuitively gravitate to the most important facts, thereby un-cluttering their mind to think strategically. They will learn and communicate what really counts, sometimes avoiding detail all together. They will see connections between different events and issues that no one else can see, and they will communicate these observations with passion. They can help differing viewpoints develop consensus, and they often facilitate meetings well.
This might also create some problems for a "nuts and bolts" technical writer. People with this orientation must guard against staying too shallow and sometimes must push themselves into detail that they don't enjoy very much, for the sake of the project. Because they become bored so quickly, often requiring rapid changes from one assignment to the next, this person must also guard against the perception of never finishing anything.
If you find yourself very strongly Future-oriented, you might choose relatively short assignments, or those with frequent duty changes, to keep yourself energized. As long as you don't have to "live" in a world of very deep detail, you will experience relatively little negative stress in consulting situations, and will thrive on the constant changes that make up a Contractor's or Consultant's life. Because Future-oriented people spend so much energy looking forward, they quickly gain a sense of impending change and can act accordingly. Events rarely surprise a self-aware, Future-oriented Contractor or Consultant.
For a Contractor or Consultant in the Technical Communication field, some Past-orientation will serve them well. It supports gathering and recording of facts, particularly through reading and writing. It also supports the settings of ordinal precedence, particularly helpful when building logical step-by-step instructions. People influenced by this dimension will drive themselves just a little harder to actually complete assignments, because they enjoy having a completed book to point to as their accomplishment. They want to understand truths, which they discover in knowing the "facts," and their completed document represents this collection of truths that they have gathered. This is how they value themselves, and the completed book represents a physical manifestation of that value.
Just as any other orientation, Past has its downside. If you use the Past dimension too much ("too much" is my value judgment), you may get lost in the detail of what you're working on. You may forget the strategic reason for what you do, and thereby collect and communicate facts that have no relevance to the business problem you must solve. Where this would not cause great problems for a team worker with a good manager, it could destroy the career of someone who promotes themselves as a senior Technical Communication Contractor or Consultant. The more time that you remain a Contractor or Consultant, the more your clients expect you to address the strategic issues and solve them with your Technical Communication skills.
Present-orientation supports organization. This includes project management, information organization, trend analysis, and process analysis. Many Technical Communication projects benefit vastly from a person that uses some of the Present dimension.
In the consulting arena, the more organized projects have deadlines and deliverables. If you use this dimension, you will possess a heightened sense of urgency that will support meeting these deadlines and completing the deliverable in a way that fulfills most of the its requirements.
You will just as likely encounter other assignments that don't have any organization at all. A Contractor or Consultant with some Present-orientation in their personality has a remarkable role to play in the midst of such bedlam. Assuming the Contractor or Consultant still uses the Future dimension most of all, they can discover connections between events and circumstances that no one else can see. By gathering these pieces together and then using their Present tendencies to distill order from chaos, the consultant demonstrates a huge "value-add," that is, an ability to be worth far more than their client pays them. Do this, and watch your client tackle you at the door when you try to leave.
Ability to create order may frustrate you, because you can't organize everything and everyone. However, you will show value time and time again, which means your client will compensate you well (as long as you demand it).
In most of my assignments, I find this dimension crucial, and I believe it represents one of the greatest components that a Technical Communicator can bring to their client. Most of society, and corporations in microcosm, fall prey to what I call the "Wad o' Information Syndrome." Tremendous amounts of information exist in the world¾ almost anything you'd ever want to know. Corporations generally have most of the information they need written down somewhere. However, no routes exist to reach specific pieces in that wad of information, no organization exists to support its retrieval. The personality that uses the Present dimension can very naturally place the information in retrievable order, with page numbers, guide words, indexes and tables of contents. They can bring different, but highly effective, structure to online documentation as well. This capability brings untold value to any company with information dissemination problems. Have you discovered any companies that don't face this challenge?
The Contractor or Consultant who uses the Physical Reality dimension will probably be able to develop deliverables that have eye-appeal. Layout and page design (not necessarily document and information design) may come easily to this individual. The more influence this dimension has on the person, the less likely they will be able to sit in front of a computer and write for a long period of time. When they perform more visual tasks, such as page layout, they will be able to work longer.
If you possess a great deal of this component, most office environments will cause you stress. The stress comes from working with the written word, filing, paper-shuffling, abstract concepts, and little contact with more natural environments in the outdoors. This has nothing to do with intelligence, but more your natural tendencies and desires. You simply won't find much joy in office work. You can, of course, overcome these natural tendencies, but you will unnecessarily use a great deal of energy doing so. You will become exhausted easily, and end the day feeling totally "wiped out."
To make the office environment easier, you can translate more abstract efforts into concrete visual functions, such as in technical illustrating and page layout activities. A person who has this tendency and tries to sell abstract products and services has a much easier time organizing their presentations if they turn the ideas into visual presentation tools, such as blocks or puzzles that show how a product's components fit together.
Restating my hypothesis, I believe you'll enjoy consulting best if you like to use the Future dimension most. What kind of consulting you do most easily then becomes a function of what other forces influence you. If you don't have this orientation, can you still be a successful Contractor or Consultant? Of course. It will just take more energy on your part. You can even find long-term success, but you will have to find a niche that your personality supports.
The Future-oriented consultant will most easily demonstrate the value they add, discover opportunities, keep themselves marketed, and make the kind of connections that bring them continued success.
Use the following questions to give you an idea of your strengths. This is a strictly un-scientific inventory. If you disagree with its results based on the preceding theories, use your instinct and ignore the test! This is just a "pointer" to help you think about yourself. Answer the questions in each section yes (Y), no (N), or sometimes (S):
1.
| Question | Y | N | S |
| Over the last five years, have you found yourself driven to participate in outdoor or physical activities, more than just at vacation time or a camp-out once or twice a year. Activities might include working out, sports, gardening, biking, walking, running, camping, hiking, swimming, skiing (any kind), boating, piloting, needlepoint, cabinet making, model building, etc.? | |||
| Do you enjoy working with your hands? | |||
| When you're near a window, do you spend a lot of time looking outside? | |||
| Do windowless rooms "get to you" after an hour or two? | |||
| When you have to read something marginally interesting, do you have a lot of problems concentrating? | |||
| When learning, would you prefer to have someone show you how to do it, then allow you to "get your hands" on the task, repeating as needed? | |||
| Does it take longer for you to learn abstract concepts when they aren't explained in physical terms? | |||
| When you buy a physical item, such as a piece of furniture, clothing, camera, house, car, etc., would you rather pay more and receive quality than buy something that just "gets the job done"? | |||
| Do you take pride in creating something physical, such as a painting, a room layout, a building or a model? | |||
| Do you like to "fix things" in the physical realm, such as plumbing, furniture, cars, fences, garden tools, etc.? | |||
| Answer Totals |
2.
| Question | Y | N | S |
| Do you enjoy reading? | |||
| Do you enjoy writing? | |||
| Do you enjoy researching through reading? | |||
| When you argue, do you enumerate things that have occurred to prove your point? | |||
| Do you often want to learn why? | |||
| Do you enjoy learning historical facts in any particular subject area? | |||
| Do you like to prove or disprove theories and ideas? | |||
| Do you enjoy learning a foreign language? | |||
| Do you feel you have a better understanding of your language and its parts of speech than most people? | |||
| When you complete a non-fiction document (book, manual, etc.) do you see the final product as a source of pride? | |||
| Answer Totals |
3.
| Question | Y | N | S |
| When involved with a group of people trying to accomplish a task, do you prefer to have a plan? | |||
| Do you enjoy meetings with set agendas as opposed to meetings with free-form discussion? | |||
| Do you often organize meetings or events successfully? | |||
| Does it give you a sense of pride when an event that you organized comes off "without a hitch"? | |||
| When you produce a document, is the organization of the information, (table of contents, index, referenceability) important to you? | |||
| When sitting down to a meeting, formal dinner, etc., would you prefer to control where everyone sits? | |||
| Most of the time, would you rather have a schedule that tells you what's going to happen to you and when, as opposed to totally unstructured time. | |||
| Do you prefer to stay late and finish a project, rather than stopping in the middle and going home? | |||
| Does it bother you to be interrupted while working on something? | |||
| Does it bother you to perform tasks out of sequence? | |||
| Answer Totals |
4.
| Question | Y | N | S |
| Do you usually have too much to do? | |||
| Do you have a hard time saying "no"? | |||
| Do you typically have a lot of ideas (maybe more than you can execute)? | |||
| Does the future excite you rather than scare you? | |||
| Do you often have ideas (not necessarily the same ideas) about how you want your life to be? | |||
| Are you often a little late to appointments or meetings? | |||
| Does a schedule bother you? | |||
| Do you often look at situations and see possibilities? | |||
| Do you enjoy speculating? | |||
| When you were growing up, did you have lots of ideas (new bike, toy, etc.) that you had to "sell" your parents on? | |||
| Answer Totals |
Combine the totals of "Yes" and "Sometimes" answers for each group of questions.
| Yes and Sometimes answers for 1. (Physical Reality) | |
| Yes and Sometimes answers for 2. (Past) | |
| Yes and Sometimes answers for 3. (Present) | |
| Yes and Sometimes answers for 4. (Future) |
Look at the relationships between the numbers. Where are you higher? Where are you lower? The higher your score for a given dimension, the more influence your perception of that dimension has on your personality.
Think about the characteristics of each dimensional orientation. Does this begin to describe you? If not, where do you disagree with the assessment. Re-read the descriptions of the dimensions and their supported tasks earlier in this chapter. Think about which dimensions (and their supported activities) sound most inviting or intriguing. Think in terms of what you'd "like" to do, as opposed to what you "should" do.
By now, whether the test "pegged" you just right or not, you're probably getting a feeling of whether or not you could be a Contractor or Consultant, and what direction you might take your Contractor or Consultant career.
When water flows down a mountainside, it follows the path of least resistance. It will follow that path for millions of years, unless something physically changes that path of least resistance to another path of least resistance. You may decide to change the path of this stream with a structure, such as a dam. When you do, however, you interrupt the path of least resistance. This creates stress, which you will have to pay attention to in order to be certain the dam continues to hold. Relatively speaking, you could ignore the damn for a very short period of time (probably a few years) and find that without constant management, the dam will break and the stream will return to its previous natural path. Obviously, a structure under the extreme pressure and stress of a dam requires constant attention and management.
Our personality functions in a similar way. We can choose to work in a manner that follows the path of least resistance, or we can fight our own preferences constantly, which creates stress.
Why do some people love Contracting and Consulting, while others can't stand it? Because some people can figure out ways to match their personality traits to the Contracting and Consulting world, and others cannot.
Contracting and Consulting usually requires a speculative nature. If you don't enjoy the activity of recognizing and developing opportunities (Future-orientation), you will resist one of the most important components of long term success in the field. Working against your personality in this way can cause an intolerable stress and outright fear. The future is positively pregnant with possibilities (all right...spoken like the Future-oriented person that I am). If you don't perceive it that way, you'll be thinking:
·
Oh my God, where is my next assignment coming from?·
Will I ever get another assignment?·
I had better charge a low rate to ensure that I can find an assignment.·
Maybe I should go back to captive employment.You can only avert this recipe for disaster by using a combination of creativity, speculation, hope, and faith that you're good enough and everything will be all right. If you do not have these qualities, you will almost certainly want to take only long term assignments (two years and up) or stay out of the field, because each assignment change will be painful.
Understanding which situations you handle easily and which represent an uphill battle can help you reduce stress. If you don't handle certain components that a Contracting or Consulting assignment requires, get help or don't accept the assignment. This applies to running your business, as well. The following table suggests some ways to mitigate stress, vis á vis a number of Contracting and Consulting issues:
| If your personality does not support: | Then: |
| Past-oriented tasks/issues · Deep research· Editing/proofing· Business record keeping· Factual analysis |
Team with or hire people who research, edit, and analyze
facts well. Use an editor and take their input constructively. Use a grammar checker as a
front-line defense (but don't rely on it). or Refrain from taking on assignments that require a lot of these functions. |
| Present-oriented tasks/issues · Project organization/management· Document organization, indexing, etc.· Tax preparation· Applying for loans· Trend analysis· Scheduling· Solution marketing· Financial planning |
Team with or hire people who can organize your project,
organize your information, perform trend analysis, and/or provide you with schedule
management. Don't perform any organizational tasks on days when you must fill out loan
application information (you'll have little patience for this, and it will run out
quickly). Hire out tax preparation and financial planning duties¾
very important! Use a Contract or Consulting company to market your skills (you may want
to do this, even if you have these skills). or Choose assignments where the client does not value organizational or trend analysis skills. You'll still have to worry about the business skills, so hire out what you can. |
| Future-oriented tasks/issues · Marketing· Expanding existing assignments· Discovering possibilities· Connecting "unrelated" events/facts· People interaction· Public speaking, meeting facilitation |
Team with people who have a vision, an idea of how to market
you or put together projects that you can participate in. Try to stay in a team
environment, and accept direction from the leader. You may not make top-dollar, but you
can probably stay working with help from a Consulting or Contracting company to market
your services. Try to avoid surprises by listening to others around you who have a sense
for when assignments are "souring" or about to end. Act on these situations by
alerting those that market your services for you. Avoid assignments that require innovation and flamboyance to make it work. |
| Physical Reality-oriented tasks/issues · Page layout· Physical document packaging· Visual design |
Hire or team with page-layout artists, commercial artists,
and visual design experts in both hardcopy and electronic media. or Avoid assignments that require mostly page layout and design work. |
Following some of these suggestions, along with what you learn from others in the field (and your own experiences), you will be able to lower stress by living within your most effective dimensions. You might even be able to manage a less-than-optimum Contracting or Consulting personality into performing relatively well, though I would caution against it.
It really comes down to what's best for you. I hope that phrase sounds less empty, now that you've started to explore your own personal preferences.
Don't be swayed by people who do well in Contracting and Consulting, unless the challenge really speaks to you. Yes, some of us will call captive employees names like "tree-huggers" and "scardy-cats," but that's because the challenges of captive employment don't speak to us.
Whatever path you choose, please realize that, for most industries, the "permanent" job disappeared in the 1990s. We don't know when it will return. Corporate American has mis-let us, and it will continue to manipulate us. Companies will serve their best interest. Don't be bitter about that. Simply remain aware of the fact and use it for your benefit.
As corporations reduce their "permanent" head-count, they generally hire Contractors or Consultants to get the job done. We get paid more to work in this way, but we also have to take more responsibility for our future, our career, and our retirement. It's a slippery slope that requires constant "dancing," "juggling," and knowing how to "look good" all at the same time. If you love to "dance," can "juggle" well, and can help others recognize the best of what you have to offer, welcome aboard. You're in for the ride of your life.