Everyone loves a good personality assessment. Whether they’re silly memes — like “which Golden Girls character are you?” — or more serious, like the Myers Briggs or DISC assessment, it feeds into our human nature to want to learn more about ourselves.
What most people get wrong when doing these evaluations or assessments is they are trying to figure out what type they are.
It makes sense: by assigning us into a “type” these assessments and frameworks implicitly reinforce to us that we are not alone.
If you fall into a category, by definition there must be others like you.
That said, approaching any personality or behavior assessment asking what type you are is asking the wrong question.
Frameworks Are Archetypal
These frameworks are based on archetypes, and you have all archetypes within you.
It reminds me of the quote from Alan Watts:
Lao-Tzu said, “The five colors make a man blind. The five tones make a man deaf.”
Because if you can only see five colors, you’re blind. And if you can only hear five tones in music, you’re deaf…. The world of color is infinite, as is the world of sound. — Alan Watts
When we look at ourselves through the lens of a fixed type, we are committing the error Watts describes: we blind ourselves to the infinite spectrum of behavior, traits, and potential that exists within us.
As an example, think of a color like maroon. In a sea of red, maroon might look more red. Or, you might see it as more brown in contrast to all the red. In a sea of brown, it might look more brown. Or maybe you see it in contrast, and it looks more red. And in sea of purple you might see it as more purple.
It matters less whether you see it as reflecting its context or contrasting with its context.
The point is that how you see it depends on its context.
That’s the same principle that applies with personality types, or even behavior traits.
You Have Every Type, Trait, and Tendency Within You
Each of us has every trait and tendency within us. We can even think of these different traits are skills that we are capable of learning.
The potential is there, it’s just latent.
What determines whether — and how thoroughly — you develop skills like optimism, curiosity, conscientiousness, or any other trait is a mix of factors including your early conditioning and the people who influenced you.
Which types and behaviors you default to are dependent on your environment, your conditioning, your nervous system state, how regulated you are, and a bunch of other environmental and contextual factors.
The real work is not to identify what “type” you are, but rather to identify the circumstances under which you exhibit a given archetypal behavior, personality trait, or tendency.
Love it? Hate it? What do you think? Don't hold back...