Having said all that may lead you to believe that I’m against profiling… quite the opposite! The foundation of all my training for over 15 years has been personality profiling. I believe that, if used correctly and maturely, such tools can be of enormous benefit to people. I have personally tested thousands of people in many countries and have learned a great deal about how personality traits impact our everyday lives. Understanding your personality traits helps you understand many other things about your life like:

• Why people react to you the way they do
• Why you “get along” with some people easily and judge others harshly before they’ve even had a conversation with you
• Why you sometimes feel like you have a “split” personality and seem to want contradictory things
• Why you married someone that seems entirely opposite to you (and probably is)
• Why you have that particular response to things over and over again
• Why you are drawn to a particular career choice

And the list goes on…

Understanding these things is an enormous catalyst for healing relationships, working in teams, making intelligent career choices and making peace with yourself, among other things.

When assessing your personality it is important to use a tested and accurate tool with a knowledgeable and wise facilitator. Don’t believe the results of all the free quizzes and horoscopes you find on the web or in magazines – this will have a negative effect on your life and leave you confused about who you really are.

I use the four-quadrant system that was originally conceived by Hippocrates over 2000 years ago and has been refined and perfected ever since. The “D.I.S.C.” test is a remake of the same system and is currently doing the rounds in corporate companies around the world quite successfully. Another system I have great respect for is the Myers Briggs profile which effectively determines which side of the scale you tend to fall on four scales: Extroversion/Introversion; Sensing/Intuition; Thinking/Feeling and Judgement/Perception. My critique of that particular system is that there are too many potential results. It then becomes too easy to score differently each time you do the test and therefore diminishes the validity of the results, (although mine has always been constant).

I take a simpler approach. Rather than doing a test and getting a very particular profile “set in stone” on a piece of paper, my test produces a graph with a “pattern”. The pattern indicates which traits you demonstrate more than others, and then we have some fun conversations and activities around the results. My test looks at three scales being: Introversion vs. Extroversion; Thinking vs. Emotion and Tasks vs. People. The point of the exercise is not to tell you that you can’t change or be whatever you want to be, but rather to help you realize how you’ve got to where you are and what natural strengths you have and what potential blind spots you need to be aware of in the future.

Here is a very simple list of the four “Styles” and some of their key traits. You will find things you can relate to in all four quadrants but will more than likely realize that most of your behavioural traits lie in one or two of the styles.