I have a confession to make. I’m kind of obsessed with personality profiles. It’s a bit of a problem. I was aware of various personality typing tests and systems throughout my life, but I really got interested in them when the world started shutting down in 2020.
My Early Days of Personality Profiles
I took my first (and only official) Myers-Briggs test way back at the end of the 90s while working in my college’s career center. All of us student workers took the test. I got INTJ, but that’s a tale for another day.
Fast forward to my first “real job” and reading StrengthsFinder with the rest of my IT department, along with the assessment to get our top five strengths.
In my next job, I got plenty of opportunities for new profile types. Not long after I started working there, the whole staff (there weren’t that many of us) took the DiSC profile assessment. I pored over that 79-page document and noticed many similarities between it and my top five strengths.
After a lot of turnover and a new consultant, I found myself taking the FourSight Thinking Profile assessment to better collaborate and communicate on our team. Once again, there were no surprises and a lot of overlap with the other assessments.
Enter the Enneagram
Things got real when I discovered the Enneagram. Sure, I had taken a couple of free online Enneagram tests for fun over the years (I got 1 on all of them, but that’s another story for later). But in 2020, I was binge-listening to a podcast, and they were discussing The Wisdom of the Enneagram. I was fascinated by what I was hearing. That was when I started down a rabbit hole of reading—books, websites, articles, you name it. If it was about the Enneagram, I wanted to look at it.
My husband had to listen to me talk about it constantly. I discovered that a coworker was also really interested in it, so we started having long, in-depth discussions. We’d talk about our types, other people’s types, insights we were having, and questions the other might have answers to. I was out of control!
So, Why Are You Telling Me This?
Discovering the Enneagram and getting so into it made me revisit other personality systems. This included a bit of astrology. My profiles all said similar things, so I wondered if there might be correlations between results for other people, too. That brings us to why we’re here today. If I’m that curious about it, maybe I’m not the only one.
Sharing Personality Profiles in the Personality Palette Survey
I’ve decided to dive deeper into the world of personality profiles with my research project, the Personality Palette Survey. This project is all about exploring the connections between different personality assessments. I’ll be gathering data from people who’ve taken tests like Myers-Briggs, StrengthsFinder, DiSC, Enneagram, and others. The aim is to find patterns and common traits across these assessments. For example, do people who score as INTJ on Myers-Briggs often have specific Enneagram types or DiSC profiles? Are there certain combinations of traits that show up frequently across different systems?
To make this exploration fun and interactive, I’m creating a dashboard. This dashboard will let users see their results from various tests and spot the correlations between them. It will include charts, graphs, and filters to make comparing profiles easy and enjoyable. The goal is to give people a cool way to understand their personality traits and see how they show up in different assessments. In the end, I hope this project helps us all get a better handle on how these different personality systems connect and gives everyone a fuller picture of who they are.
