S2Ep4: Are We Our Personalities?

I get to see again, from a new perspective, the breadth and depth of what life really has to offer and all the opportunities to live it – that’s how assessments like these become empowering.

We all love a Personality Quiz, right?

You get to see yourself through a lens you may never have considered looking through, and discover things about yourself you never thought about before, and who doesn’t love an excuse to think and to talk about themselves for a few minutes?

There has been a boom of Personality Quizzes and Typology Assessments over the last 10 years, and even more so since the pandemic.

And it makes sense why.

In particularly chaotic and challenging times, we tend to look for something, anything, to help us make sense of things, to make sense of ourselves, and to reassure us that not only are we equipped to survive this chaos, but that we are able to thrive beyond it.

As we’re digging into the questions of who or what can tell us who we are, and the limitations of any person or tool that attempts to do that, I’m thinking about typologies.

Our interest in them, our reliance on them, and what that means–what we’re making that mean–about ourselves and about each other.

RESOURCES

Free Online Typology Assessments

Popular Myers-Briggs Knock-Off | 16Personalities
The Enneagram | Take the Free Enneagram Personality Test
Love Language | 7 Love Styles Test
Several Typology Assessments (Including those mentioned above and more) | Truit

IN THIS EPISODE

The two fundamental problems with typology tests
The long history of typologies, from Hippocrates to Myers-Briggs
How employers began using typology tests and the consequences of relying on them
How we could move beyond the existing limitations of typologies, and why we would want to