Handle With Care: Personality Types

When I started my quest to find “My Purpose”, multiple people and books recommended I take the Enneagram test. It’s a personality test with over 100 questions along the lines of “I’ve typically been [x] or [y]”, “I tend to do [x] or [y]” etc. For example, “I tend to be a) focused and intense, or b) spontaneous and fun-loving”. It classifies people into nine personality types.

I took it twice, three years and a lot of personal development work apart. The second time, I remember being confused: Should I answer the question as the person I used to be or the person I was becoming? Is there some absolute definition of “me” that I’m stuck with as far as the test is concerned, or can I say I no longer have traits that didn’t serve me and I learned to manage? For example, if I was a perfectionist in the past, but learned to spot perfectionism creeping up and intentionally override it, am I still a perfectionist?

The first test told me I was between two types. The second, three years later, yielded two other types. Between the four options, I found the test useless. With so many people enamored with it, I wondered why I was the special snowflake the test didn’t work for—until I heard psychologist Dr. Benjamin Hardy say that personality tests encourage us to maintain a fixed mindset about ourselves. I wasn’t special, I just had a cognitive dissonance: I realized that these tests not only create a fixed mindset but are also based on the assumption that our personality is fixed—when I believe it’s not. As Daniel Gilbert said, “Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.”

Personality tests can be helpful as a snapshot of us in the moment, for example to understand differences in working styles, or to prioritize a list of professional options to experiment with. But we should be careful how we use them so we don’t fix our identity on something that we would be better served to grow out of, or narrow the areas we allow ourselves to explore in life to those we think we’re “good at” because of some fixed and limited idea of our skills.

If you think of yourself as a Myers-Briggs ENTJ or a type 5 Enneagram or [enter personality test you took in some leadership workshop], is it true? Would you like it to be true? Where are these labels boxing you in in a way that doesn’t serve you? 

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