My Take On and Interpretation of My Own Personality Profiles
I’ve heard it said that people feel like personality profiles are just a way of sticking people in boxes. While I definitely can see how some would appear that way, I personally think that personality profiles are a way to get a deeper understanding of yourself and your traits – and often your strengths and weaknesses. For me, personality profiles are a way to build greater awareness of how you interact with the world around you.
In this blog post, I want to dig into my personality profiles and reflect on how they show up in my own life. And further, how I’ve used the knowledge I’ve gleaned from them for personal growth and development. I should give a disclaimer here: because I really enjoy what I’ve learned from personality profiles and the knowledge I’ve learned from them has benefitted my life, I tend to be fascinated by them. And as such, I have taken many. So buckle up… 😉
Myers-Briggs Personality Test
ISTJ-A: The Responsible Realist
To my knowledge, Myers-Briggs is one of the more common personality tests and is often used in professional situations. I felt this one was pretty accurate on most fronts when I reviewed my results. My specific percentages in my results were Introverted – 64%, Observant – 74%, Thinking – 56%, Judging – 69%, and Assertive – 61%.
These particular test results have shown up in my life in a few ways. When I first started college, I opted to pursue a degree in accounting. I chose it because it felt safe and predictable. I did well in it up until I was bored after the first year or so. I opted to change degrees and try something that felt more creative – graphic design. As an ISTJ, I resonate with the idea that working with clear processes is appealing, but I have found that because I fall so close to the middle of the road in the thinking category, I do tend to bounce back and forth between thinking and feeling, which really explains my need to have a creative balance in whatever work I’m doing. A nice, healthy balance between predictability and creativity.
These results have really helped me further develop my creative side by learning how to balance my time between analytical, predictable tasks and creative tasks.
DISC assessment
Planner – Sc
The DiSC is another very common personality assessment used in professional industries. Employers often assign their employees to take the DiSC assessment. The way this assessment is structured is by evaluating your dominance, influence, steadiness, and compliance/structure. What’s the most interesting to me about my results from the DiSC is that it’s not that different from the Myers-Briggs.
Your response pattern shows that you are an excellent team player. This is a great strength to the organization as a whole. Others on the team know that you are ready, willing, and able to assist on any part of a project that requires your expertise and mindshare. Sometimes, those who score like you worry that they've said "Yes" to too many things, and may have overcommitted themselves. However, they work extra hard in order to meet the commitments they've made.
Once you've established a work routine or pattern, you have a remarkable ability to follow that pattern or procedure with enduring patience. This is a great strength. You tend to hone and polish a process until it is smooth and seamless in operation. This takes time, and you have invested the time and mindshare in establishing it as a best practice exemplar. However, sometimes those focused only on the "big picture" may miss nuances that you helped to craft. As a piece of coaching, we recommend sharing the what and whby of some of your processes with your superiors so that they are cognizant of the mindshare you have provided.
On the personal side, you score like those who prefer deeper connections with fewer people, rather than shallow relationships with a wide number of people. This is a testament to your loyalty and sincerity. Meaningful relationships, both on and off the job, are important to people who score like you. Such people tend not to foster shallow relationships just for the purpose of name-dropping.
You know when you read a profile summary that describes you, and this one was very accurate in a lot of ways.
This one in particular felt as though it gave me permission to keep my circle small. I struggled for a while with feeling like I needed to be connected with a substantial amount of people to be successful in life and in my career, but I found that to be untrue the more I leaned into keeping my circle smaller.
StrengthsFinder 2.0 – Top 5
- Responsibility
- Strategic
- Discipline
- Futuristic
- Focus
My results from the StrengthsFinder 2.0 impacted my life in bigger ways than any of the others, mainly because of how in-depth the write-up was and probably partly because this was taken around the time that I wanted to really discover how personality profiles could help me in my personal growth.
So, naturally, my focus was on using them for my benefit in some way.
Learning that responsibility was my number one strength helped to explain a lot of conflicts in my personal life and helped me recognize why I often feel like an overachiever. It helped me recognize that it’s what I value and that it’s very important to me. It gave me permission to not fight against it. I’m free to pursue whatever level of excellence I desire. This, in turn, is what drove me to pursue graduating Summa Cum Laude (which as of writing this post, I am on track to do). I should disclaim that I hold no hard feelings toward those who, while I was growing up, often told me “not to push myself too hard or have too high of expectations”, but those statements did often make me feel like it was a bad thing to be an overachiever or to put forth your best effort to achieve a goal. And for many years, it kept me from really going after goals I wanted to achieve because I felt that they were “too big”. So to say the StrengthsFinder (combined with years of therapy) changed my life is accurate.
And in the case of this list, it’s very accurate. I pursue everything with a strategy and I’m often told I have extreme discipline and focus. I plan and follow my plan of action all the way to completion – in nearly everything I do!
PyMetrics Profile – most unique Top 3
- Generosity
- Decision Making
- Focus
This personality profile is the most recent one I have taken as of the time of writing, and it was also the most fun to take. I took it as part of a job application I was submitting. It was a series of interesting games that were designed to gauge your propensity against others who had taken the test to fit into a total of nine different categories. The ones that you are most unique from the general population are your top three.
I was not surprised by my results at all.
GENEROSITY: You tend to trust the good intentions of others. You may find that you’re able to easily balance your interests with the needs of others.
DECISION MAKING: You tend to make decisions based on gut-instinct. You may also prefer taking a fast and intuitive approach, rather than planning out your work methodically.
FOCUS: You tend to apply a focused and consistent approach to your work. You are likely able to concentrate on a single task even in the presence of distracting information.
I’d have to say that overall, this is probably one of the more accurate profiles I have seen according to how I show up in my life. I am very giving of my time and talents. I have learned to be very self-aware when making decisions. And I certainly am pretty focused. This is much the same as my StrengthsFinder results.
Enneagram
Type One
I’ll give a disclaimer to the Enneagram test. I know that you have a primary type and a secondary type - called a “wing”. But I have not done nearly enough studying or reading about it to tell you what my “wing” would be. This is one that I know is extremely popular, and people love it, but it’s one that I have not done a lot of reading into - which is partially why I left it for later in this post.
Generally, Ones are conscientious, sensible, responsible, idealistic, ethical, serious, self-disciplined, orderly, and feel personally obligated to improve themselves and their world.
Ones get into conflicts by being opinionated, impatient, irritable, rigid, perfectionistic, critical (and self-critical), sarcastic, and judgmental.
At their best, Ones are tolerant, accepting, discerning, wise, humane, prudent, principled, fair, and able to delay rewards for a higher good.
When I read the summary of a One, I don’t resonate as deeply as with some other profiles. Some things feel applicable, while others are things I know I need to work on. For example, being able to delay rewards for a higher good. I’m not always the most patient, but it’s something I’m actively working on.
Sparketype
Essentialist / Maven
This personality profile is one of the less common ones, but I discovered it at a time when I really was moving forward from some challenging things in my life. I found it to be a catalyst for starting some passion projects that I grew a lot from. I really resonated with a lot of what it described me as being.
As an Essentialist, distilling, organizing and simplifying is your call. It doesn't matter where you go, whether at work or home or on vacation (or a restaurant, store, experience, etc), you see chaos, mess, complexity and it triggers a near-primal urge to create order and simplicity.
Your Shadow Sparketype is The Maven, which means you latch onto a topic, field or industry and devour everything you can know about it. Staying "surface level" just isn't an option for you. It's no fun. You are driven to learn, to discover, to ferret out information, wisdom and knowledge.
These two brief segments of the results are so true for me. I saved this one for last because this insight into my life was a huge part of the reason I returned to school and discovered my degree program. I felt called to the world of UI/UX because at its very core, it is a process of creating order and simplicity out of chaos. It’s about taking things that seem ambiguous and making sense of them and organizing them into something that is “user friendly”. And the more I have leaned into this concept in my life, the more I have embraced that I always feel the need to simplify. It shows up in so many ways for me from the way I pursue my education and goals as a minimalist and the way I keep my home organized. It fascinates me to observe how the psychology of personality profiling impacts our lives and the human experience as a whole.
I hope this little trip through my personality profiles has been interesting and perhaps insightful in some way! I’ve enjoyed learning things about myself and using these results as a catalyst to make positive changes in my life. I believe that personality tests like this should be used as insightful and not to “box people in” to a certain way of being. And if they are used in that way, they can be tremendously impactful in people’s lives!
