May is Mental Health Awareness Month and I will be publishing content that focuses on mental health topics. To read past posts, click on the Mental Health tab under the Dimensions of Wellness Menu.
Mental Health content tends to be super serious. Truthfully, my content runs more towards that side as I try to combat some of the crazy stuff out there in wellness land. Today, though, I thought I’d be a bit irreverent.
I make no secret about the fact that I believe therapy is a valuable practice that most people should employ at some point during their lives. Therapy, when there isn’t a diagnosable issue, serves as a great tool to learn about yourself. How and why you think the way you do and how it affects your choices and actions.
Another fun, and even silly, way to do this is to use psychology tools readily available in popular culture. While most of these assessment tools have not been statistically proven to be accurate, they can sometimes provide insight.
Personality by Letters
Most of us are familiar with this one because we know someone (maybe ourselves) that we would describe as a Type A personality. This assessment model was actually put forth by a pair of cardiologists after they noticed that many of their patients exhibited similar patterns. For years, these were labelled as Type A and Type B. Then it diverged a bit. One version into more of a continuum. The other is a framework that recognizes four main types (A, B, C, and D) with a fifth that indicates the equal influence of more than one type. Here’s a super deep dive if you are interested.
Depending on which of the diverging theories you ascribe to, most tests of personality under this school of thought are looking for Type A tendencies. Or the tendencies to be easily upset, be hard driving and externally motivated, and to hide emotions other than anger. Here is the quiz.
I know my husband might be surprised to learn than I only scored a 28% on the irritability scale. Our partners always get the worst of us, right? Poor guy. I’d probably have to categorize myself as a Type D, if going by the four types. I like to think that I am dependable and constant. I certainly work in a care based field (to say nothing of when I worked with cardiac rehab patients) and my chosen work also involves a lot of observation.
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is one of the most popular personality assessments out there. The questionnaire was developed by a mother-daughter team based on Carl Jung’s theories. The test looks at responses across four different spectrums: introversion-extraversion (I/E), sensing-intuition (S/N), thinking-feeling (T/F), and judging-perceiving (J/P). This results in 16 personality types defined by a set of four letters. Here’s a deeper dive.
When I first started working as a trainer, I was in a small corporate wellness center and the owner of the company had all full time employees take this assessment. Your Myers-Briggs Type was posted on the door to your office or on your cubicle. The thought was, knowing other’s types could help with conflict mediation and motivation.
At the time, I tested as an ENFJ. But I’ve tested myself a few more times over the years and I’ve shifted to INFJ, each time the introversion marker becomes a bit stronger. I think this is interesting because it shows that personality isn’t stagnant, it can change with time. I have the rarest of the personality types and check out this list of famous INFJs. Wanna impress your friends with alphabet soup, take the quiz here!
Enneagram
The Enneagram is similar to the Myers-Briggs in that it is a self-report questionnaire and describes how people interpret the world and manage emotions. The Enneagram, though, assumes that each type has an underlying core belief about how the world works. The Enneagram describes nine different personality types and graphs them to also show how they interact.
In the Enneagram Type, each of us has a core personality type, but can be influenced by others. Specifically, the personality types on either side on the diagram, called wings, usually exert strong influences. Additionally, the lines that connect the numbers through the interior of the circle describe how we may react under pressure or when we strive for better. Here’s the deeper dive.
I test as an Enneagram One, but I identify with the softer traits of both Nines and Twos. Here’s the quiz. And here’s the description link of my Enneagram type with a list of famous people (if you pay attention, you’ll notice a good amount of overlap with the Myers-Briggs list).
So, I guess this is my super long winded way to telling you that I am a perfectionist, rule-abiding, super organized, caring, sensitive, and fairly quiet person. Anyhow, click a link, answer some questions and learn something about yourself!
