130: Personality Assessment, Principles You

You’ve probably taken a personality assessment before. But this one is different. Learn about “Principles You,” a free online personality assessment worth trying!

Welcome to the Mindset for Life podcast. This is Bethanie, your coach from DrBCoach.com, Coaching with Power, Purpose and Practical Tools to help you show up with confidence.

 Hello there, welcome to the podcast. Today, we’re going to be talking about personality, and not just any personality typing, we’re going to be talking about the new assessment called Principles You.

I am a big fan of Principles You; and what this means for you is you have a coach right here who is certified in debriefing this personality assessment with people. And in these experiences I’ve had debriefing this survey with others, I have learned a lot about the value of personality information in our lives. Now you might find there are some people who just don’t get you or maybe there are areas in your life where you’d really like to perform a certain way or show up a certain way. And it’s just not working out.

When you understand the different traits and facets of your personality, it can explain all of that. It can help you figure out what strengths you do have that you can leverage to make things happen for yourself. And it can also help you to bridge the gap between where you are right now and where you want to be.

Today on the podcast, I’m going to talk about the Principles You assessment, going to give you a little bit of information. And I’ll probably talk a little bit about what I do in coaching.

I do a lot of coaching with high achieving leaders and educators. And most of them are going through all kinds of changes and transitions. In businesses right now, I’ve noticed a lot of my clients are experiencing change in their organizations. And that kind of change could be part of restructuring, rebranding, or it might even include a lot of reduction in force, which means we’re laying people off and letting people go.

In times like these, it can be especially helpful to know what sets you apart and what makes you distinct and different from other people. Let’s talk about this a little bit more.

What Sets You Apart?

One of the ways that knowing about your personality and your strengths helps your well being is that you can emphasize these things and bring them out in your daily work. You can also understand other people better when you understand yourself, after all, for some reason even in adulthood many of us go through life thinking that other people are just like we are.

We have expectations of other people, we make demands on other people. And we really hope other people will do what we think they should do. And the truth is, nobody’s going to do that.

We’re a little bit different ourselves, we have our own unique thoughts, personality traits, and strengths. And we also have our own blind spots and weaknesses. And when we think we know other people well, and we have expectations of them, and we put those unspoken expectations out there, it can bring us a lot of heartache, disappointment, unmet expectations.

And those tend to lead to frustration, and anger and all kinds of negative emotions we don’t need in our lives. While it’s okay to have negative emotions, we can significantly reduce the negative emotions we’re inviting in when we have a lot more understanding towards others. And again, that all comes down to knowing ourselves.

When I coach others, I talk a lot about strengths. And I also talk a lot about personality traits. And I help people bring these things out and understand how to use them better how to know themselves better.

Part of learning our own traits and strengths means that we’re also going to be able to see and understand our lesser strengths (Or, some people like to call these our weaknesses). And of course, we can’t be amazing at everything all at once, we just can’t.

If we can be open and honest and acknowledge our weaknesses, then we can accept them. And some of this is really going to help us to reduce pressuring ourselves too much to just do everything. And it can also help us cut back on overwhelm and overwork.

Acknowledging Weaknesses Can Help Us Reduce Overwhelm.

Maybe we can delegate to other people in our weaker areas, and take on more projects and more pathways that emphasize what we’re already good at. Now, this isn’t something out there to reduce challenges or growth. Not at all. I’m a big fan of continuing to grow and develop yourself as a person, and I think we should. I think that’s part of becoming happier.

But if we’re always pushed beyond our capacity, and we’re always falling short, and we’re always coming up short, it might be because some of the work we’re doing every day is really not in our comfort zone and not in our areas of strength.

Maybe we can redistribute that a little bit.

One of the things I specialize in is increasing confidence, purpose, and fulfillment in life and in relationships and in work by using personality traits and strengths. We also have to spend a little bit of time reducing resistance and tension in our lives. So while we’re bringing out who we really are, and those things we’re really great at, we also have to notice, where’s the rub?

The rub could be that we’re resisting activities that really are way outside our comfort zone and our strengths. If we have something at the bottom of our list, it’s our lowest capacity, and if that’s a huge chunk of the work we do every day, that’s going to bring a lot of resistance. It’s going to slow us down. We’re going to feel bad about the work we do.

We’re not going to get it done very quickly. It’ll take a lot more time and effort and motivation. And tension comes from that whole cycle.

Learning About Personality Can Help Us Understand Others.

That can also come from relationships where we don’t understand that we have certain abilities other people don’t have. I’ll give you an example of this.

One of my family members is amazing at thinking of nice things to do for other people. She’s thoughtful, she gives gifts. She will think of Christmas presents for you all year long, and she’ll literally go out there and buy those things, even if it’s just June or July. She’ll save them up.

And then when Christmas comes, you’ll get these amazingly personalized and thoughtful things for Christmas.

Well, if she were to think that all of us should behave in that exact same manner, when we don’t typically think in personalized, detailed ways, she’s going to be pretty disappointed. It doesn’t come naturally. And as much as we might make an effort to be thoughtful to individualize our gift giving, it’s never going to quite be the same as the way she does it.

Because that’s a gift she has.

One of the people I was coaching about a year and a half or two years ago, was a man who had this gift for seeing all the things that were going on in his workplace in a systems perspective. He would see what the influences were, what the potential results would be, how everything was connected. What he didn’t realize was that nobody else was thinking that way. This was a unique gift that he had.

So he would go into these meetings and introduce his ideas without really building up to them or giving any kind of introductory setup. And the people there would feel just blindsided by his comments. They would believe that these comments were just from some random thought. They had no idea where they were coming from. And it was very difficult for them to trust his wisdom and his insight without the schema that went with his ideas.

Once he realized that this was one of his gifts and his abilities, he learned how to build up to the argument. How to trace his thought process to where he was going to help other people get on board and hear his message and support him. So learning about the way you think, and what your personality is like, can be an amazing way to support yourself in your work and help yourself connect better with other people by bridging where your brain is, and helping them understand your way of thinking.

Now, it doesn’t mean that other people are challenged or just can’t measure up to you. No, not at all.

But we all think differently. Right? So some people think in terms of people in relationships. And some people think in terms of processes, sequences, and some people think of things in webs like this whole systems approach.

Principles You Offers Some New Insights.

Whatever your method of thinking and engaging with other humans and getting your work done, you’re going to have a lot of insight when you take a look at the Principles You assessment. Now if you go on to their website, it’s just Principles You .Com, it’s free.

You can go in there, you can take the assessment, and you’re gonna get all of your personality traits broken down into these smaller pieces we call facets.

It’s amazing to see this. For example, creativity. It has three different facets underneath it that makeup creativity. And you might not realize that different traits like that are really broken down into separate things.

When we do something like the 16 personalities website or the MBTI personalities assessment, these things don’t really spell out for you all the nuances that you’re going to get through the Principles You assessment. Once you have all of your traits measured and you’ve put in your information, it’s going to group the facets of your personality into what we call an archetype.

And there are 28 archetypes that come out of this assessment. Now, some of those things that are a lot like the MBTI personality survey, those will just boil down to 16 personality types. So 28, that’s a little more diverse, right?

And there’s a nice little visual on the homepage of PrinciplesYou.Com, where you can see how are some of these similar. For example, in the group of givers, we’ve got the helper, the problem solver and the peacekeeper. All three of these are caring, reliable people, reliable personality types that really touch other humans well, and serve others well.

On the extreme opposite side, you’ve got the seekers, these are more information based conceptual people. And you’ve got the Explorer, the thinker, and the growth seeker all on that one island there.

And in the middle, you have some things that kind of go around the extroverted and leadership space like the entertainer, promoter and impresario.

And in the advocate Island, we’ve got the Inspirer, coach and campaigner. Then there are producers, there are architects, leaders, fighters, creators, and the last little island all by itself, the individualist and that’s really for people with unique personality combinations that don’t fit one of these archetypes.

Now, once you go into this platform, and you take your assessment, there’s a lot of information there to guide you through it, you’ll learn a lot about how you think. And it suggests that because we’re all different, that when you come across people who think very differently, this will be a distinguishing feature of your personality, it might be something that stands out in your relationships. And it might even be a point of frustration for you. Or maybe you’re very proud of this facet of yourself.

And you really think it’s what makes you stand out. Either way, you’re going to learn some unique things.

A Trained Coach Can Take it Deeper.

And then you have the opportunity to choose a coach to debrief this with you. And that’s a paid opportunity. So you will sign up and you get a one time 60 minute debrief. I do those debriefs also, I am a principals use certified coach. So I just want to let you know that I would be happy to connect with you. If you’re interested in one of those debriefs on the homepage of my website, DrBcoach.com, I now have a panel there where you can sign up for the debrief through the principles you website, select a time where we’re going to get together. And we can walk through your archetypes, your traits that come up and create some strategy on how you want to leverage these parts of your life. And also, what you might want to do to apply those in your relationships and in your work.

It is a fantastic opportunity, I highly recommend it. I think what’s in it for you is that you can schedule it at the time you want to do it, you can get a personalized conversation that’s an hour long, just about you, all of your traits, your gifts, your abilities and your blind spots. And you can talk with me just about you and your interests and what you would like to do with your learning there. And then you can launch from that forward into either whatever goals you have

Or you could partner with a coach, like me, to keep working together and help build on that new knowledge. Personalities are only one area of life, of course, and personality archetypes and typing are not everything. In fact, they’re really not an exact science at all. But there’s so much insight to be gained. I think that the fact that it is malleable a bit and could be slightly different should you take this test on several different occasions. I think that chance is pretty minimal. So that’s a gift learning about your personality.

Again, the assessment itself is free, you can take it on principles u.com I highly recommend it.

Keep Growing by Learning about your VIA Character Strengths.

In the future. I’ll be talking again about VIA character strengths. That’s another assessment I like to use with my coach clients. I really love helping people learn about themselves, their strengths, their personality, their attributes, and what makes them unique. We go through life with these wonderful gifts and talents and abilities. And over time we get this maladaptive way of using them many times will hide our strengths or the best parts of our personality, just because of what people in our family or our childhood, or the school we went to, or whatever, just because of the way other people talked about it. Or how they responded to our strengths.

Every strength can be overused or underused. But I’m all about helping you figure out what are your abilities.

What is unique about you?

And how can we maximize that?

It’s a lot easier to take a strength and make it even better than it is to develop a strength, where we really are super low. There’s a lot of satisfaction in building on your strengths. And I think it can bring that sense of uniqueness that helps you let go of competing with other people. So that’s a beautiful thing too. And pretty soon once you learn about yourself, your strengths, your personality, and those things that make you unique, then you can assess yourself.

You won’t need as much feedback from everybody else all the time at work. Or if you’re giving a presentation or teaching something, you can assess your own capacity because you know what you’re looking for. And you’re uniquely qualified to bring out your best attributes and kind of coach yourself there. So I’d love to help you with that. If you’re looking for a coach in the future, please stop by my website, DrBcoach.com. I’m passionate about helping you find confidence, purpose and fulfillment by applying your personality, your traits and your strengths, while at the same time reducing resistance and tension in your lives, relationships, and work, whatever you do out there to make a difference in this world.

Thanks for being here with me at the mindset for life podcast. This is Bethanie Hansen and I’ll talk to you again soon.

This season’s theme song is “Training Day,” by Infraction. Used with Permission.

Like what you read here? In this podcast, I’m sharing some core principles I’ve learned in coaching that have completely changed my life. These ideas restore personal power and bring the confidence to grow in our unique traits, strengths, and attributes, and go forward to create good in the world. Right here, you have the gems to take one small step. And with a personal coach, you can make it a lasting part of your life. You can change how you see things and feel your true purpose every day.