Knowing your personality type is not the ending. It’s the beginning. Finding your personality type is not being put in a box. It’s being set free from a cage. Let’s unpack two misguided perspectives on personality type and their antidotes.
The social media sound bites and snippets, the Buzzfeed online quizzes, and the water cooler conversations (do businesses still use water coolers and do people congregate around them?) do not represent what it means to dig into your personality type. Now, don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a little giggle now and then. Thinking about which enneagram Gandalf is, or which MBTI type best fits Yoda can entertain me for quite awhile.
Why You Want To Watch Out for Misguide Perspectives on Personality Type
However, I said in an earlier post, the goal of understanding personality is not just information. It’s transformation. I study personality type, and think about my type and the others, not because it explains the world to me. Rather, it opens the world to me. By knowing how I’m wired, by looking at my tendencies, I can see the contour of my own perspective, and I can appreciate the perspective of others.
I often see people closing down their perspective and moving on with their settled new explanatory framework for understanding themselves and others. That stunts the fruit of reflection. It limits lifelong personal growth.
Below I describe briefly two misguided perspectives on personality type along with an antidote to maximize personal transformation through personality reflection. See if you’ve had one or both of these perspectives at some point.
Misguided Perspective #1: Typing Myself Is the End of My Exploration
Often people experience poorly facilitated personality type programs. Perhaps they take an online questionnaire with no one to interpret it. Or, maybe no one provides action items and follow ups to help them wisely unpack and chew on what they learned. Most times no one coaches them.
I mean, how do you digest a bunch of information about yourself in 3-4 glossy pages and even begin to know where to begin? I know people often experience personalty type sessions at work for a half day, only to discover their organization never talks about it again. Isn’t that similar to other professional development workshops or experiences? In these sessions finding out your type amounts to nothing more than a chapter open and close at the same time. It feels more like an ending than a beginning.
Transformative Antidote #1: Personality Reflection Is Learning to Love
The true power of understanding your type provides new beginnings. Perhaps I realize I am someone who is always pushing conversation to the big idea, or maybe I always analyze a statement for its logical accuracy. My partner keeps saying, “Can you please just acknowledge what I’m feeling?” I can say, ‘Well, that’s just me. I’m logical.” Or I can begin to ask, “What can I learn about what my partner needs in this situation?” And even, “Why is what they are asking for hard for me to give?”
The antidote to a misguided perspective that views personality as only information, is to ask “Why am I like this?” Or, “Why is this important to me?” The goal is NOT information, but the goal is transformation. Good personality reflection should open up avenues to discovering what we truly care about, and what others around us truly care about. In other words, it’s the beginning of empathy. Empathy is really just the beginning of learning to love. No, I don’t believe this is cliche: Love is the only force that can really change the world.
Misguided Perspective #2: Personality Type Just Locks Me Into a Box
I’ve done enough personality workshops with people to know there are those who say “I don’t want to be put in a box.” Fair enough. Usually that person has someone look at them and say, “Oh you must be a 6” with a kind of insider-trading look of higher knowledge. That’s alienating to be typed that way. I know, because I’ve both done it and it’s been done to me. As a practitioner I’m always conscious about whether people in the room know what personality system I’m referring too. People feel locked into a box because the system tends to generalize about people. This one works in lockstep with the first misguided perspective and makes people feel not just put in a box, but told to stay there.
Transformative Antidote #2: Personality Awareness Is a Step to Personal Freedom
No one wants to feel caged, or placed in a box, or described by a single paragraph. The reality is that our personalities are the product of our family of origin as well as the particular challenges, struggles and joys that we have experienced in life. Whether you are on the side of humans as a “tabula rasa” or blank slate, or whether you are on the side of innate personality — it doesn’t really matter. Our personalities get expressed through the unique circumstances of our lives, and so an enneagram 5 like me will look dramatically different than my other enneagram 5 friends.
However, people find enormous strength in realizing “there are people like me!” It gives freedom to know that I’m not some whacko but others actually see the world in similar fashion. If you feel somehow “at home in the world” by seeing things in a similar way to another, you will often feel more brave and willing to explore. When I discovered the uniqueness of my perspective but a similarity with others, I stopped trying to compare myself. I stopped the incessant limiting of my beliefs about what I could or could not do. Instead, I started saying, “how would I do this with my personality preference?” That’s not a cage, but that’s like the door opening to explore more of my space in this world.
Misguided perspectives on personality types are out there, but so too are the antidotes. When you use personality type reflection in the right way for the right reasons, you will find that you become more open to transformation and experiencing the freedom of being the best version of yourself. That’s pretty exciting. Look for signs in yourself today that your reflection about who you are is opening up new horizons of growth.
Question: Do you have a misperception about personality type that is limiting the transformation available to you through personal reflection?
Leave a note in the comments or send me a message if you found this helpful or want to add to the conversation! As always, let me know if I can help you on the path to your best self.
With joy in the journey,
Jeff
I have taken “A LOT” of personality tests both in federal law enforcement and in the military. Every time I took on a new trainee as a LEO I had to take a personality test so they could take my results and my trainee’s results and show me where our potential areas of concern may or may not be. In the military, it was just to see if you were cuckoo for cocoa puffs.
At least on the LEO side of things, for the most part the personality tests were accurate but there were always things that the tests could not explain. One trainee the Psychologist administering the test and classroom instruction said I should expect massive problems out of. Apparently, our tests indicated we could not be any further apart on our personalities and he anticipated major issues. Skip ahead 16 years and to date, this person is by far my best trainee. He exceeded every expectation I ever had and even exceeded me in rank, which I am very proud of and there is no one I trust more in my agency then this person. He is 3RD from the highest rank in our agency now, is loyal to a fault to me, trusts me with information that he would not trust anyone else with and without question would take a bullet for me. I am the same way towards him as well but the science says we should not get along and there are without a doubt obvious differences between us, big differences, I do not doubt that at all… I guess in a way we did not allow the personality tests limit our ability to transform the professional and personal relationship to go where we wanted it to go despite what “science” told us or the tests told us.
The funny thing is even when people get to know us and find out how close we are, they are surprised because of how polar opposite we are in our personalities. I am an extreme extrovert and he is an extreme introvert. As far as investigations I am very in the moment go with live intel and he is extremely OCD, plan everything out and account for every little detail. I am all for undercover work and he does not like undercover work at all but we were partners for years and had a great time…and for the record, everyone knows Yoda is a INFJ lol