E009: Personality Tests

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Hi. This is James and Jane. So here we are again, back again for another episode of The World of Work podcast as ever. You can get in touch with us on the WoW podcast.org or tweet us at the WoW podcast. That's good we're getting good about aren't we, so today, we're going to do the usual type of process, but we're going to focus on personality tests, or personality type testing, all things about nature. We're going to do a high level overview of the various tests and a little bit of reflection on what's in them. And we'll be doing it with our usual walkthrough. So definitions, first bit of research, Roundup, a list of a week. The list of a week for you is going to be roughly a five step process you can go through with your teams to make some use of some of the ideas from personality testing, stories from the keyboard, a few final thoughts and top tips, and then we'll check out and get out of your way for another week. So how you been, Jane, I've been really good. Thank you. I've had a really good week. I was kind of buzzing after our last podcast where we had our first guest. That was fun, wasn't it? Yeah, that was fun. It was great to chat to Laura, yeah, really, really good to chat, really interesting. And kind of got me thinking a little bit differently, and I have been very excited to research today's podcast good partially because, as you and I both know, we think it's about 10 podcasts worth of information as ever each time, and also because one of my secret foibles in life is when I'm a bit stressed at work and I'm not getting through enough work, I quite often go and do a personality test to make me feel better. Yeah, you need a little bit of navel gazing. Literally. No idea why it makes me feel better. Oh, yeah, I knew I was really bad at that and really good at this. And also, I'm not alone. I'm like all these other people. It's okay. Oh, I'm not alone the day, the day that you put your Myers Briggs Personality Type onto your Twitter profile, like I have, the day you know you're secretly looking for other people to go it's okay to be like that, at least, if not put it on the end of your LinkedIn. At least, I don't think you have. It's not no and it's not my CVI there delighted to know that's good. So that's what we'll be doing. Hopefully it's interesting for you guys as ever. If you've ever got questions or thoughts or ideas for new topics, get in touch with us and we'll see what we can do to help you out. So why don't we set the scene a little bit for today with some definitions. How's that sound? That sounds pretty good to me. So there's a couple that I want to start with. One is a little bit of a reminder. So personality testing all comes under the study of psychology. That's where it all comes from. And just a reminder that, according to psychologists, psychology is the scientific study of thought and behavior. I'm just gonna leave that there for a minute.

And just the scientific thought study of thought behavior, I don't know, maybe scientific. We'll come back to that, but so specific to personality testing. Useful definitions personality,

wadediction.com, would talk about it the sum total of the physical, mental, emotional and social characteristics of an individual. I've also got a different definition for you, which is the APA so the American Psychology Association, they refer to it as individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving, which I think is quite useful when we talk about behavior, which both of those definitions mention. It's about the aggregate of responses to internal and external stimuli. I'm having a right problem with a couple of words today, but effectively, your behavior is, you know, looking at how you respond to stuff that happens, whether it's internally or externally, two really important terms that we probably are going to mention a couple of times today. One is archetype, and the other is union archetype. So an archetype is defined as the original pattern or model from which all things are the same kind of copied, or on what they're based so it's like a model or a first form. It's prototype, yeah, basically, yeah. Whereas a union archetype, which comes up, and it's quite relevant to some of the stuff that we're gonna talk about today, it's quite it's quite a specific concept, and I'm gonna try and explain it best I can, but jump in if I don't do very well, it's the idea that we have a collectively inherited unconscious pattern of behavior or archetype or thought. So the idea is that effectively, we have taken something from the society that's gone before us. Yeah, as we grow up, we have developed it into an archetype. Yeah, yeah.

And so I think those two concepts quite important. Just two more, three more definitions. One is psychometrics. So most of these personality tests fall under the theme of psychometrics within psychology, which is a branch of clinical or Applied Psychology dealing with the use of an application of mental measurement. So it's the technique of measuring something that is in your mental behavior, psyche and metric? Yeah, when you break it down like that, it makes so much more sense. And then the last two to talk about are continuums and dichotomies. And the reason I've paired them together, ironically, is because they they basically are the two most common ways of trying to measure people's behaviors, personalities, etc. So a continuum is a continuous extent, series or a whole. So in other words, a continuum is where you have a scale and you're going to mark yourself somewhere along it, and you can basically be anywhere in a continuum, right? I mean, yeah, theoretically, mathematically, you could be infinitely kind of analog, isn't it? Yeah, you can be anywhere along it, whereas a dichotomy is division into two mutually exclusive, opposed or contradictory groups. So that's where you will quite often have opposing statements, yeah? So you might have, do you feel like this, more like this or like this? And you can only pick one of them. You can't mark yourself along that scale, yeah? And it's binary, right? It's ones or zeros. You're either a one or you're a zero, but you're not a point live. And it's, I think it's quite important to understand that both of those things are used because they are tools to try and force a measurement of someone's personality. So everything that we talk about today, it's just really important to remember that all remember that all of this has been developed in order to try and proxy measure what's actually going on your head, which is probably even though we've got loads more understanding as a race, a human race, about our brains, we still really don't know a lot about what's going on in there. So these concepts of using continuums or dichotomy of choices is a way for us to evaluate and try and, you know, figure out people's labels and groups. Yeah, and that's what it's all about, isn't it? It's about trying to put people into defined boxes and for a way to figure out how to put them in a box, just by either getting a way to assess them on a continuum or getting them to choose between. Why would you think that I was going to go there being labeled? I'm just going to preempt it. Yeah, no, absolutely. So I think we're both going to have to manage our chimps on this one, because, without question, it's really important that science does try and understand how people behave and try and loosely label people so that we can help support them and figure out things. But also there is a tendency, once you group and label groups of people, that it becomes a race for simplicity, which is the phrase you always use. And we just need to be careful about how and why these tools are being used anyway. So those are some definitions, which I hopefully will help. We've talked about a reminder of what psychology is just, you know, because it's scientific. And then psychometrics, personality and behavior archetype and Jungian archetype, and then this concept of continuum versus dichotomy. So I don't know if that's a good starting point. I know it's quite theoretical definitions today, so might be a good time to then move on to the research. Yeah, yeah, let's do that.

So in research, we're going to do a little bit of a history and a little bit of review of some of the models out there, just so you know what we're going to be talking about. Some of the models we're going to touch on are,

or I guess, include the Myers Briggs Type Indicator. So MBTI. We'll touch on something called the MER Reid model. We're going to touch a little bit on Discovery insights. We'll have a look at the Big Five personality traits, sometimes known as the ocean model, or, I think, canoe, that's the other one. It goes into. We'll touch on Berkman, we'll touch a little bit on the Enneagram, and we'll look a little bit at type A and type B personalities. But before we get into those, and it'll only be a high level review of those, by the way, just you know, before we get into those, we're going to do a little bit of a history of this type of work. So personality testing, like many of the topics we talk about, really has a founding father. And our founding father here is Carl Jung, and when we look at the beginning of things, he started his journey. When he started working in a psychiatric hospital. I think he was around Austria, somewhere like that. I can't remember exactly where he was in the early 1900s so someone like 1903 started working in psychiatric hospital. He did that for years and years. And then in 1921 he published, initially in German, a book called Psychological Types,

which introduced some of his thoughts around conscious function. And we talked earlier about dichotomies, and here he introduced something I'll shed a bit more light on in a bit, but several conscious function dichotomies. So he introduced the idea of perceiving as a dichotomy, saying that you can either be sensing so using your.

Senses to perceive things, or intuition, so intuiting and using some of your internal decision making structures as a way to perceive the world around you. And the other dichotomy he introduced here was around thinking or feeling, which is kind of similar. And he also had another dichotomy here, which was around whether you're inward or outwardly focused, so introversion or extroversion. So that sort of set of framework and languages came out in 1921 in 1926 Catherine Briggs published an article in the magazine The New Republic explaining Young's theories. And that was really the start of her involvement in this type of psychological assessment work. And obviously she went on to work with her daughter and built out the Myers Briggs model. In 1944

the Briggs Myers Type Indicator handbook was published, and that was what later became renamed as the Meyer. Let me try that again. It's not just you today, James, the Myers Briggs Type Indicator so and the MBTI manual was actually first published in 1961 as organizations started to get used to this, or interested in it, as they looked for advantages and and as you know, as we might suggest, some of the

some of the Mad Men and the advertisers started to think about how they could look at and categorize people and their decision making processes as well. And then, you know, those models were heavily related to Carl Jung's work. And then in 1981

a pair called Merrill and Reed published a paper called personality styles and effective performance. And that started to build out on, you know, young Jungian archetypes, and started to introduce colors as ways to categorize people. So they had a red, they had a yellow, all that kind of stuff to define different high level personality types. And that's a lot of a youngin progress. And then once we started to get to the 1980s there was a bit of a revival in some, some really earlier work around

the sort of continuum based capability type assessment. So these are things like the five factor model, which is the Big Five personality trait assessment. So that started to regain prominence in the academic world as something that's a bit more potentially quantifiable and measurable, and saying that how people have these skills helps shape their personalities. And a little bit later on, in 1993 we're going to call this one out, up in Dundee in Scotland, father and son team founded a company called discovery insights, and they also used a color based approach to some of the young Yin assessment and focused really on the business world, and that's grown quite a lot. And, you know, a lot of discovery insight stuff is done in the UK, and it's quite a good model for this. And then as we go forward, we started to see some things that I found a bit difficult, which is different uses for these. So, you know, in my opinion, a lot of personality assessment is useful for self development and self awareness, but it's kind of limited to that because of some of the, you know, repeatable nature of it and proof of what it means. So some people started using it in things like job interviews and even things like, you know, prison release assessments and things like that. People started doing that. And then, now here we are, you know, pushing into the third decade of the 21st century, and personality testing is a huge industry. I tried to get numbers on it. I don't have them, but it's in the billions from from the numbers I've seen, and individuals and organizations are spending huge amounts of money and actually time on these activities. And there's clearly benefit to individuals of doing this, but there's certainly also some challenge to the credibility of some of the actual tests themselves and what they really mean. And we'll reflect on that a little bit as we go through in a little bit more detail the other bits and pieces. So what do you think, Jane, any thoughts or comments on that little run through of history. But firstly, thank you for that, because I've always tried to work out what everything order, everything comes in. It's always a bit confusing. I guess I share your concerns.

Like everything that I'm learning in academia at the moment, while I'm studying, the answer, pretty much everything is well, it depends. And I feel like personality tasks have been taken and and run with. It doesn't depend. These are, these are measures, and they are measures, but they're, they're approximate measures. And I think it's really important they're approximations of what, because we don't have a way of measuring personality. So there are approximations of trying to understand a breakdown. And I think companies in the desperation to label people, group people make the best hires, sell the most products, sell the most services, get the best customer service scores, use them and probably get dragged down a path where they use them in the wrong way. Yeah, that's my nervousness. I also think it's you.

I'm, you know, thinking about another piece of here, of theory. I'm, I'm a massive, I'm a massive subscriber to the Maslow theory. And I think that the explosion of interest in, as you referred to it at the beginning, accurately, navel gazing

when it is it, you know, and it does help you. But I think that's a lot about as a western society, where we are, who's doing it, I would hazard a guess that if you segmented the people that are spending the most amount of time doing this off their own back, they are probably people who are not worrying about certain elements of that body travel. So they probably feel like they are achieving on some level. Yeah. So just they're looking for something, just for clarity on that. Maslow basically says you need to take care of your base needs before you take care of more esoteric needs. So you need food and housing before you think about other bits and pieces. And then you need love, and then you need to feel good about yourself, and then you need to start to understand yourself. And I think, I think that with to a certain extent, we're seeing people getting to a certain level in their life, chasing the rat race, and then suddenly going, hang on a minute, yeah. Who am I? What am I doing, and why do I find and I think the bit that I think a lot of people do, why do I find some things so much harder than others? Yeah, for me, certainly the bit of the research that I think really helps understand is this, this idea that people were going that they went back to a continuum because they couldn't quite figure out how people broke down. And I think the more we go back and try and understand what people are getting to and then keep testing, then the closer we'll get, because at the moment, it's just an approximation, they will love, yeah, yeah. Interesting. I love the idea of the rise of popularity of these types of models being a reflection on a societal shift where more people are ready to look for self actualization and whatever it happens to be. Well, let's face it, James, you and I are not ones to shy away from trying to draw on where society is taking us and therefore, why here we go. Yeah, but I do, and I think, I think as long as you hang on to what they're useful for and why you're using them and don't look for answers. Look for I think if you starting to look at personality tests for answers, yeah, rather than information to help you make answers, then I think that's where you can go wrong. Yeah, yeah, agreed.

Okie dokie, so a little bit more research for everyone. So, you know, we talked about the types, we talked a little bit about the history, and in that we talked about some of the types of models, and I'm going to run through a little bit more detail on three types of models now. So the first one is the Jungian dichotomy based model, so I'll shed a little bit more light on those and some of the models that have come out of Jung's work. And then I'm going to touch a little bit on the behavioral continuum models, just so you can see what's in there. And then we'll spend a couple minutes on some other models. Other models, just so people are informed of the types of models. That sounds great. Just a reminder dichotomies, forced choice between two continuums, marking yourself on a scale. So yeah, just a quick reminder for everyone listening, yeah, and nearly all of these are self assessed models, aren't they? I mean, this isn't somebody coming in and observing you. This is you sitting down, going through a questionnaire, answering a series of questions, and then that pushes you towards a certain box. And I think that that notion of

perceived anonymous, anonymity and privacy is part of the reason that people feel comfortable doing them. Yeah, that's true. Okay, so a Jungian models, I seem to have written here very youngian

dichotomies, but that's okay. We're going to talk about the Jungian dichotomies. So when young came up with his work, as I said earlier, he basically thought about these three different areas. So are you inwardly or outwardly focused?

How do you like to take information in? Do you like to use your senses and really try and get some sort of empirical type things, or do you want to use your intuition and have a bit more of an internal view on the information you receive, and then in terms of making your decisions? Do you really want to think about them? Or do you want to use your gut, sort of instinct and feeling? So we had these three dichotomies, and the maximum number of permutations of three takes you to eight. So that's how he ended up with eight different types. And essentially, the way the Jungian dichotomies work are you can be one of each side of a dichotomy for each one of those three categories. So you start by saying, you know, are you inward or outwardly focused? In other words, are you an extrovert or are you an introvert? If you're an extrovert, you talkative, outgoing, you get energy from other people. You probably like fast paced social environments. You like parties, social things like that. You kind of like some attention from other people. So that's your extrovert. And on the other side of that, you know, the other end of that dichotomy, or the other option about dichotomy, is introversion, where you're probably slightly more private, a bit more reserved. You like time alone to recharge and gain your energy back. You probably like to take time to reflect on things. You prefer smaller groups to larger groups, and you like to work things through on your own. So dichotomy, one from Young is, are you an extrovert or are you an introvert? And you're kind of one or the other, and that's part of an anchor for your personality type. The next.

Stephen's dichotomies was how you prefer to take information in. So this is your sensing versus your intuition. So if you're a sensor, you pay attention to facts and figures. You use your senses in the sort of biological, traditional sense. You use your eyes, you listen. You like to find practical ideas. You like to be specific. You're fairly literal. You're focused on reality. It's fairly empirical, whereas, if you're in the intuition side of that dichotomy, you like to focus on possibilities. You think about the big picture. You're interested in sort of ideas and concepts, even if they're not practical, and you're fairly figurative in the way that you take information in so again, that's another dichotomy. So you could be an extroverted person who likes to sense, or you could be an introverted person who uses your intuition. So again, that's a sort of set of outcomes from those dichotomies. And the third dichotomy that young came up with was around, how do you make decisions? So he said you could either be thinking or feeling. So thinkers, they use logic. They try and be dispassionate and fairly impersonal if they make decisions. So again, that's that logical type of view. You know, they want justice and fairness and sort of conformity to rules, and they like to find flaws and arguments. And the logical aspect of things like that, and reasonable and level headed is a lot of where they are, and the flip side of that dichotomy of how you make decisions is feeling. So here you can have people who base their decisions on maybe their gut sense or their personal set of values. They're more interested to some extent, on how their actions affect others than whether or not they're logically right. They probably tend more towards valuing harmony and sort of forgiveness,

empathetic and the impact on people, and looking for the best in people. So to some extent, they're looking for a different set of outcomes, with more focus on some of the relational aspects there. So that's the three Jungian dichotomies. Clear, yeah, sorry, listening to you just reminds me how many rows I've had about these dichotomies in my career and in my family. In fact, I think it's really there's a couple things I would mention. One is that these are about preferences. You won't be 100% of the other ever, and you shouldn't be, and that's quite unusual, although I am hilariously 90 odd percent. Yeah,

but important to understand its preference. And I also just a flag up that in in modern corporate culture, there is quite often a push that one of these is better than the other. In some of these, yeah, and it

is, yeah. Well, there used to be just a general push, particularly around thinking versus feeling, yeah, yeah, that you know, or sensing versus intuition, that you know, factual and all of this. And actually, that's not what the model is all about. The model is about understanding how you will naturally prefer to do things such that A you can offset it, but also you can learn where your skills are. And I just, I throw that in because people, like,

ironically, people of a certain type of personality will quite often look for whole cold, hard facts, yeah. And therefore they will look for this is what we need, rather than a person who is self aware and understands where their weaknesses and strengths are, is your best bet. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. So verse number three, Jungian dichotomies. And a little bit later on, Myers Briggs introduced a fourth one, which was around how you prefer to live your outer life. And this is judging and perceiving over two sides of the dichotomy. So So judging is people who prefer to have matter settled. They they like rules and deadlines. You value detail. They want sort of step by step instructions and the structure that comes with that. And they want to know what's coming up, you know, what's the future look like, and do we have a plan for it? So that's a bit of a judging side of that dichotomy. And the other side is perceiving in terms of living your outer life. And this is people who like to leave their options open. So, you know, they might consider rules and deadlines as flexible. They're not really hard and fast rules. They're just guidelines, really. They like to improvise a little bit as they go along. They want to be in these situations,

and they might act a little bit more spontaneously. Yeah. The best example I've ever had, I met a man or woman who work in a business together. They're brilliant, and she is one of those, and he is the other, yeah. And the way they describe it is they used to have Monday morning meetings, and she would lay out their entire week, and it would be meticulously detailed, and she'd come out of those meetings feeling fabulous, and everything was on top and she knew every minute of the day. And he used to refer to them as a cold, gray hand strangling him and leaving any flexibility, yeah. And they worked, they worked in HR and in this stuff. So they used it as an example. I just thought it was brilliant. I just how clearly that explains to different people and their different personality choices. And here I'm quite on the perceiving side. So I sometimes have meetings with judgment type people, judging type people, and every word they say saps myself.

Oh, it just does. It's like, really, you're destroying my future. So every word you're saying an opportunity. So when we get on stories to the keyboard, my story is one of my stories about JMP, yeah, at that fourth choice. And interestingly, it's not one. It's really important. It's not one of the original Jungian choices. They added it on from his work when they looked at other stuff. But I do think it's really interesting how you know, when we talked about values, yeah, and this feeling in your inner stomach, right, when things when I'm forced to behave in a way that is not my personality type, or what I believe my personality type is, I feel like I'm a bit strangled, yeah? Because, and I really have to work at it, yeah? And I thought so when that guy described it as like, and you just said, it feels like, well, the joy is being sucked out, yeah? And that's not because they're I want to be really clear on this. It's not. So I'm a p2 right? Extreme, quite, quite not extreme, but quite high in level. Yeah, it's not. I love Jays. I would like Jay to come and run my life, because it would be infinitely more organized, right? But it's just when we're doing stuff together, we have to manage that really carefully, because, you know, otherwise, we want to kill each other. Yeah, and what you were saying, there a little bit around it takes you effort to work in that way. I think there's something for us to do as an episode sometime around surface acting and deep acting and things like that, and emotional cost of behaving in ways that don't align to your underlying values, or, I guess, personality and why? What I do love about the Myers, Briggs and I know we're going to get onto some of the flaws around and all of that, but what I do love about it, if nothing else, as a very basic introduction to someone who's never thought about work behaviors before, it is a great, simple test to give people the confidence to talk about how they feel about their own and their teamwork. So if nothing else, I really like the four questions, because I think they cover, generally, most of the big things that crop up when you've got team interaction. Yeah, yeah. They're really useful as a as an overview of the way that we work together.

It's also the one that, like, you know, millions of people all over the world. It's a big thing. Yeah, okay, so in terms of models that come out of young and so we've got Myers Briggs Type Indicator, MBTI, we've got something called Merrill Reed, and the other one I want to touch on are discovery insights. So we had those four dichotomies that we talked about, so that gives us four paired options that we can choose between. And what that leads to is, you know, if you look at all the permutations within there, you end up with a total of 16 different personality two times two times two times two. There we go. And that gets us to the total number of personalities that the Myers, Briggs Type Indicator will spit out. So when you do the assessment, you'll fill in a whole series of questions. If you do, like a really simple version that somebody's put online, you'll maybe do 10 questions. I don't know if you do have a more detailed assessment, like the official one, I think it's like 80 to 100 questions that it's been a couple years since I've done it. Yeah. Interestingly, when I did it with a guy who had done it a lot, he said, Do it? Do two different tests. He sent me two links to two different tests. Said, do them both? Yeah, see what you come out with. He said, Then read the answers to all of them and see which one feels right, yeah? And he said, it's, it's got to be, even if you, if you read something, it's not feel right, don't trust the assessment. Trust you, yeah. You know you better than anyone, yeah, which I thought was really helpful, because at one point I was split between two, and then I read it, I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's, that's a good point, because you can game the tests, the frame of mind that you're in when you're doing the questions. A little bit about your audience is a huge amount about being careful how many times you do it, yeah? Because I know, I know what the questions you want to do, and then sometimes I think I really want to be more like that, yeah. And sometimes you know what your organization wants, or you know what your peer group wants, so you're drawn towards goals, and you can kind of interpret your way through. Yeah. Anyway, so Myers Briggs has got 16 different potential outcomes. And what I was going to do is just read out some of the pairing names, sorry, the pairing letters with the name of that personality type. So although these names, they've come from different places, they come from different places, and they're, you know, each one of the sort of four letter outcomes that appear in Myers, Briggs has a different name somewhere else. But this gives a base, give a bit of insight. So just really quickly, an ISTJ. So again, that's an introverted, sensing, thinking, judging person. ISTJ. They're sometimes known as a logistician or a duty Fulfiller. An ISFJ, so that's an introverted, sensing, feeling, judging. They might be known as a defender or nurturer. I'm not going to do all the letters in the future. I'm just going to do the letters in the name, as opposed to running back through what they are. But an ESTJ, sometimes known as an executive or guardian. An ESFJ is a console or a caregiver. ISTP would be a virtuoso, maybe a mechanic. ISFP is an adventurer or artist. ESTP is an entrepreneur or doer. ESFP is a entertainer or performer. INFJ, advocate, protector. INFP, mediator, idealist. ENF.

Campaigner, inspirer. ENFJ, protagonist or giver. INTJ is an architect or scientist. Intp is logician or thinker. ENTP is a debater or visionary, and ENTJ would be a commander or executive. So again, you know, these names just give a little bit of a sense of the flavor of what's under there. And, you know, people can do their own tests and see what they think. If you

firstly, do you subscribe to Myers Briggs? Do you like it? So I like it like you. I think it's a great way to open up conversations about personality and all that kind of stuff. And I kind of, I kind of like it, and I can see myself in there a little bit. Where are you? So I'm ENFP, yeah. So we're both ENFP people.

And the extreme that I was talking about is that I'm an extreme extrovert. Fine. And so the way people can't, although I talk a lot, people are always quite surprised when I say that, because they're like, but you like, you spend loads of time on your own. And I think it's really important to understand it for me, the way I think about it is my energy levels, the E in the eye. So if I don't see people for a few days, my energy dips, yeah, and I need to be reacting off people to get my partners and I, and is the complete opposite if we spent too much time in group settings. Yeah, yes, important. So I think it's, I think it's really important

that it's not, no one's everything, no one's all of anything. Yeah, and I'm much closer to the introvert side, but I'm still in the E, so I'm like, a quarter of a way into this binary thing. Okay, so, so that's Myers Briggs. That's one of the key build out on Young's work. Next one I want to touch on is someone called Merrill Reed. So this is from a book called Social Styles by David Merrill and Roger Reed. And they basically took the Jungian things and split them into four large personality types, and they started to introduce these sort of quadrants of personality and to bring colors to them. And I'm bringing this in because it feels like a bit of a stepping stone to discovery insights, which I'll talk about in a minute. So within social styles, they said that broadly, there were four main types of personalities. There's red, which is a driving personality, and they need results. They prefer action, and their weakness is listening, right? So at a high level, you can kind of tell the type of person that feels that they're in there. They like to tell more of an ask, and they like to control their emotion more than display it, basically. So that's a driver. Then they had blue for expressives, and they're telling, again, to their stylist to tell people, but their emotional stylist to display their emotion. They need approval. They prefer spontaneity and their weaknesses, kind of impulsiveness. And then we get sort of orange and yellow, which are amiable. So from an assertiveness perspective, they ask. From an emotional perspective, they display emotion, and their needs are to feel safe. They prefer relationships, and their weakness is taking action. And then the last of these quadrants with a an emotional style of controlling their emotion, but an assertiveness style of asking is known as analytical. This is green. Their needs are to be right. They prefer to think, and their weakness is pushing. So, you know, this was a 1981 model. Again, I believe it was questionnaire based, and people would end up in one of these boxes, and it would give a bit of an insight into who they are. Yeah, it's interesting, because I've read a very little bit about this, but one of the things that I think is

when I Well, when I was reading through it, I think that the idea so a lot of these models will pick out one or two things, yeah. So for example, in this case, they've picked out one one weakness in each area, yeah. But actually, I think the frustration is that the value in the models is when you delve in and understand a bit more about what the combination of weaknesses and in response to what situations the situation so, for example, that analytical piece, they talk a lot about uncertainty being a weakness in certain situations. Yeah, when you're not at your best, maybe your uncertainty, it's not going through that not so I really encourage, like, deep dive into this if you're interested, because it does help you understand how you might react in certain situations, which ultimately what you look yeah, yeah, that's right.

Then the last of the young ones I wanted to touch on is discovery insights, of course, Scottish based out of Dundee, which is exciting.

Plug Scotland. Go Scotland as you don't remember, we're based in we live in Scotland. So there we go. And they're actually, you know, they're big in the UK. I don't know how big they are overseas, but I think they're certainly, I think I saw like, 20 countries they work out of now, yeah. And they're definitely the preference in nonprofit in Britain. Yeah, we see it a lot, yeah. And in the large corporates I've been in, it's a big, big thing here as well. And I think it's kind of a simplicity that's helpful anyway. Again, this is a questionnaire based approach self disclosure. You answer a series of questions, and they they put you into, I think ultimately there's like 72 different boxes you can be in. But fundamentally, they work off what they call someone like personality energies. I can't remember where there's some kind of energies. I think it's personality energies.

And they think that there are four main personality energies that align quite well with the Merrill Reed model. But also, you know, it all comes out of Young's work. So they have four colors. They've got fiery red, Sunshine Yellow, earth, green and cool blue. So again, fiery red. People are competitive, demanding, determined, strong, willed and purposeful. They're kind of like, you know, driving things forward. Sunshine. Yellow people are sociable, dynamic, demonstrative, enthusiastic and persuasive. Earth, green people are caring, encouraging, sharing, patient and relaxed and cool. Blue people, or cool blue energy, is cautious, precise, deliberate, questioning and formal. And the point here is that people have all of these energies in them, and you've got a mixture of all these sort of personality energies, but you probably have a dominant one, or at least a dominant two and and that frames kind of a way that you like to work and the way that you like to work with others, and all those types of things that are better helpful. And that's how I get to 72 so 72 is just a pattern of those four Absolutely. So do you have? So for example, I'm I have almost none of two of them, and then I have a higher one and a medium one. Some people have three. They usually and very rarely. Does someone have sort of all low four? Yeah, they'll usually have either one or two stronger ones, and then majors and minors. They also have a really interesting part of their module model, which I really like, which is conscious and unconscious, yeah? So I was gonna say, okay, sorry, no, no, go for it. So I just, I love the one of the things I love about submarine sites, and I'm not, I'm not always a massive fan of it, in some ways, that the language comes across, but one of the things I really love is that they measure self conscious and unconscious, yeah? And the idea is that it really helps with people who

not put on a persona at work, but will dial we used to dial up, dial down, so we'll dial down certain behaviors and dial up certain other behaviors at work or in a more formal setting, and they're keeping a sense themselves private, yeah. And actually, I used to refer to it as the fifth quadrant, yeah, how much you are, in some levels, keeping some of your unconscious behaviors behind closed doors, so to speak, or dialing them up. I think it's really important. So like, for example, with fiery red, you could present as they give you feedback in sort of bar charts so you can see what sort of percentage. So you could be presenting fiery red as, say, 75% and that would be really dominant thing, yeah. But your unconscious could be, say, 50% priority. Read, so that's an implication that you're acting a little bit more in a certain way in the environment, yeah? And I suspect, I suspect you might see that earlier in people's new jobs and things like that. So, and it's probably no evidence dependent on culture as well, I think a little bit, yeah, certain amounts on culture, certain amount. I also think there's an element of it on values, the level at which you want to behave. And we talked, I think we talked last week, we talked about authentic leadership. But everything's an effort, yeah, and it should be a little bit of an effort. And I think to a certain extent, really, particularly in very senior levels, where you're looking after a lot of people, there is an element of needing to be aware that there might be stuff that you have to dial up or dial up or dial down to that situation. Yeah, and to work with people, right? Okay, well, that's a bit of an insight into discovery insights. Hopefully that gives you it's funny, right? Hopefully it gives you guys a background in these sort of young game based models. And there are other ones out there. These are just ones that we chose to speak about. Next, we're going to quickly run through some behavioral continuum models. And again, these don't build out of the work that young did, and instead, they look at, I guess, competencies or sort of preferred behavioral traits. So

it's a different thing that they're not binary, so they're not based on dichotomies. They ask a series of questions and give people kind of scaler continuum based assessments against a certain set of personality criteria. And in some ways, or some people think that they're maybe a little bit more accurate or more scientific, I guess.

But you know, I think all of this stuff is yet really to be proven. So we're going to touch on two sets here. So the first thing I want to touch on is the Big Five personality traits, sometimes known as the Big Five personality test, when you're using it as a test. It's also known as the ocean model, because the first letter of a different characteristics each spells out ocean, sometimes canoe, because those are anagrams of each other, I believe, or I certainly hope otherwise, I've misled you. So what are the big five personality traits then that are assessed in a big five personality model? Well, the first one is openness. And this is sort of scalar. You can be really, really open, or you can not be open at all.

So openness reflects curiosity, kind of creativity, seeking novelty, as opposed to routine. Open people tend to appreciate art and adventure and unusual ideas, and they probably take some more risks. But on the other side of that, they might lack focus or might be a bit unpredictable. They tend.

Who you know, probably like careers in the arts, are drawn to self actualization. And at the other end, people who are less open tend to find fulfillment more through perseverance, as opposed to self actualization. They're often pragmatic, maybe more data driven

at a negative side of things, they might be considered a little bit dogmatic. So that's your sort of openness scale. You've got lots of it, or you don't have much of it. So that's openness,

which is the O promotion, the C for motion is conscientiousness. So if you're really conscientious, you tend to be dependable, dutiful, self disciplined. You tend to be structured, and like having a plan, you generally work towards goals in a focused way,

slightly negatively. You might be perceived as stubborn because you're so you know, determined and goal focused. If you've got low levels of conscientiousness, then you're probably a bit more flexible, a bit more spontaneous, but you can come across as sloppy and unreliable,

but E is around extroversion again. So you know, extrovert is high levels of extroversion, and introverts low levels of extroversion. So extroverts, as we've said before, they kind of seek stimulation and derive energy from others. They're often fairly energetic and talkative themselves, sociable. They might be assertive

at a sort of more negative level. They could be considered as attention seeking or sometimes domineering

at low levels of extroversion. So for introverts, they're reflective and reserved. They probably seek time alone to recharge, and might be less dominant in social settings. The downside of that is they might be considered aloof or distant or self absorbed, if, if, if if, if people are looking for negative words to associate with them, the A from ocean is agreeable. So

these are individuals who tend to value other people. Value being around people. They like cooperation. They're fairly compassionate. They tend to naturally trust others. They tend to see the best in other people. They like to help people, and they're generally quite good tempered and good natured.

If people are really highly agreeable, they might be gullible, overly trusting. They might be naive. They might be a bit submissive. On the other side, though, individuals with really low levels of agreeableness might be argumentative or untrustworthy, certainly untrusting. They might be antagonistic, they could be suspicious of others, and they're more likely to be challenging of others and competitive as well. So that's the A that's agreeable, and then the n is neurotic. So people with high levels of neuroticism tend towards stress and worry and anxiety, maybe even things like anger and depression.

You know, they're less perhaps emotionally stable than some others, whereas, on the other side, low neuroticism results in emotional stability control. But you know, the extremes people who have really low levels of neuroticism might come across as unempathetic or uninspiring, undynamic, or maybe even boring, because they're not providing that sort of life spark of emotional energy that some people look for. High

levels of neuroticism can create, you know, excitable, exciting people, but it also really does lead to worse psychological health. So the correlations there, so that's for big five traits, or ocean. So again, O, C, E, A, N, that's openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. So ocean model is a big common model that's used now, and one thing that I really like about it is a lot of the stuff on it is open source now. So you can find open source places to do big five personality tests. And I'd say, if you're doing those, people will probably often ask you if they can use your results for continued testing. And I'd say yes, because we need to understand a bit more about the impacts of these things. Well, given that I'm currently back in academic life, yes, please do share it, because it really helps. There's a probably a shout out worth mentioning is open psychometrics.org who pull together all of these sorts of free resources in return for asking politely if they can show your data. And we are aware, and we're very conscious that there's been big issues around sharing data in the past, so we probably won't shout out anyone else, but I would say if you have a look at you can get, you can understand a little bit more open. Psychometrics are very open about what they do with it and how they use it. Yeah. So that's good. I mean, I like that. I've done a quick test on there. I've not done any sort of formal, long things, but it feels fairly accurate to me. As much as these things are, I think the thing I most like about this one is

bringing in these terms, particularly, I think openness and agreeableness and conscientiousness and spitting them out, yeah, helps. I found even having that terminology helps people to understand where they are versus where other people are and where they might want to be, yeah. So yeah, it certainly helps with a common language, right? And that's what a lot of the benefit of this stuff is, is around helping.

People explore their preferences and how to express their preferences to others and reflect on others. So we've got one more behavioral continuum model. This is the Berkman model. And the Berkman model holds itself out as being fairly empirically based, but again, focusing on sort of behavioral traits that people exhibit, and the outputs that it provides are quite good, and it's very work focused, so the others tend to be useful in all works of life, but Berkman really is about work focused, and it's very targeted to that all I'm going to do here is run through some of the high level things that Berkman feeds back. They actually provide six types of feedback back to people. I'm only going to reflect on four of them. So they provide you feedback on your usual style of working. They provide you feedback on your motivational needs, they provide feedback on your stress behaviors, and they provide feedback on your preferred activities. The other ones, I think it's like the job clusters that are right for you. And then there's another thing, I can't remember what it is. There's a sixth thing they give feedback from. But the reason I picked up these four is that, again, they use colors for these so for your usual styles, there are four different usual styles. Again, it's red, yellow, green or blue, and they all mean something slightly different that I do have. I do have a plea to psychological researchers and psychometrics developers, please. Can you stop using red, yellow, green? Yeah, don't match, and it's all really confusing. It is, it is. So I'm definitely different here. So I'm just going to run through what they provide back here, and then we'll jump quickly on some other models and then move on. So under Berkman usual styles, there are four different colors of usual styles. So red is friendly, decisive, energetic, Frank and logical. Yellow is orderly, focused, cautious and insistent. Green is competitive, assertive, flexible, enthusiastic about new things. And blue is insightful, selectively, sociable, thoughtful, reflective and optimistic. So you can see they cross over a little bit with some of the words from some of the other areas, but the colors are a little bit different, sorry, from crossover words used by some of the other tests. They're just grouped slightly differently in terms of motivational needs assessed, again, red, yellow, green, blue. Red is motivational, need for group interaction, clear cut situations, busyness, direct, logical working yellow is organized a desire to concentrate on tasks, trusting environments, consistency. Green is a competitive environment to be assertive, flexibility, novelty and variety. Blue is individual interaction, supporting environments, an opportunity to express feelings and time for reflection. Then pardon me, stress behaviors we've got red being you know, it's hard to give support to others. You can be impatient. You can make yourself busy, or you can dismiss others feelings. Yellow people might be insistent on rules. They might resist change. They might be reluctant to undertake confrontation where needed, and they might be gullible. Green people might be distracted easily. They might distrust others. Might become domineering, might fail to follow a plan, and blue might ignore social convention, be indecisive, find it hard to act, or start to see the worst in people. So those are stress behaviors and then preferred activities, you know, red is, you know, driven by implementing, by finishing things, by solving problems, by working through others. Yellow is around a desire to schedule things, to work on detail, to have close contact with work, to maybe work in a numbers based environment, working with systems. Green is about selling, persuading, motivating, counseling, teaching, generally, working with people and communicating, and then blue is about planning and abstraction and finding new ideas and ways of working and approaches innovating and generally working with ideas. So roughly, that's what Berkman provides, and it also tells you which job families in the world are good fits for you and things like that. So very work focused. Have you ever done anything with Brookline or yeah, I've never come across it. And what I would say looking at it is it leads me very neatly to a warning about all of this stuff. Yeah, if you look hard enough, you'll find yourself in everything, yeah. And because I'm really to go, oh, well, I know which one I am, oh, but I could also be that one, yeah. And I think

the more, the older I get, I sound like such an old lady. The older I get, the more I become aware that I have different behaviors and different situations that don't always fit any one group, and the most important thing is to understand and recognize those behaviors and then manage my behavior accordingly. Yeah, but I'm totally green,

so easy, isn't it, right? Yeah. You know, for me, it's always the negative. So it's always wherever they say, stress behaviors, yeah, things do and you leave them, you go, that'd be me, yeah, that'd be me failing miserably. It's funny, isn't it? Okay? So those are our sort of behavioral continuum type models. We have the big five personality test in there, the ocean model.

And then we talked a little bit about Berkeley. Going to spend a really short amount of time on some other models, just to chuck them out there, just to reflect on them a little bit. The first one I want to check out is something called the Enneagram that's e, double N, E, A, G, R, A M. Now I looked at things like internet search volumes, and there's actually a huge amount of search volume on this one, but I'm not going to spend much time on it. It's fairly sort of spiritual, and it's in its background. It doesn't,

intrinsically, to me, lend itself to business content as much as some of the others, but people are looking to bring it into business. So you might come across it, essentially, it calls out nine different personality or role types that they define, and there's a lot of crossover with the other models. So there's, you know, a role as a reformer and a perfectionist, a helper, giver, an achiever, performer, an individualist, romantic, an investigator, observer, a loyalist and loyal skeptic, an enthusiast and Epicure, a challenger and protector and a peacemaker, mediator. So that's all I really want to say on that. I mean, have a look at it if you want. It seems like it's fairly popular, but it's probably the least tested and least empirical of the models, which, yeah, maybe you're saying, I'm just, I'm just going to throw it out there. Yeah, they use some of their terminology and some of its roots, is heavily twinned with religion, and, as you mentioned, spirituality. So they do have concepts like the holy idea and the temptation, rather than your weaknesses. So just when you go in, be prepared for that. Yeah, okay. Don't be like, Why are you saying this? It's an interesting model. It comes from a very different place. But if the goal is self awareness, then, you know, use whatever tools you think that's right, yeah, yeah. So, so that's it on that one. Another thing I want to touch on is an idea called type A and type B personalities. So this one, I think is really interesting and

interesting for probably all the wrong reasons, if I'm honest. So there was some work coming out of heart surgery, of all places, and I can't remember when it was, like the 60s or 70s or something like that. And a pair of surgeons started to identify correlation between certain personality types and the propensity, or, I guess, the likelihood, of coronary failure and heart disease. And they went on to say, Oh, well, this is interesting. You know, with this correlation, why don't we spend a bit more time and look at it and work out some of the detailed specifics. And they ended up with two types of personalities. They had, type A and type A. People are highly strong or more highly strong than type B. They're competitive, self critical, intense, maybe likely to overreact. They're in a rush and patient, frustrated by inefficiency. They try and make the most of their time multitasking, work really hard, all that kind of stuff, right? I'm more likely to become angry than type B, and then type B is, you know, slightly more chilled out, right? Hanging out. They're calmer, more relaxed,

not in so much of a constant rush, less of a sense of need to compete, and they don't need to achieve is highly even more patient, more tolerant, generally, see the good side of events and people, and don't become frustrated or angry and all that kind of stuff. So they decided that, yeah, there are these two personality types, and there's a high propensity for heart failure with type a people. Wow, I wonder what that clarity? Um, so that's out there, and there's some real problems with it. And one of the real problems is a lot of this study was actually, well, it wasn't replicable, really, but also a lot of it was tobacco funded, and it's really interesting. So the tobacco lobbying groups and funding bodies were looking to identify other causes for heart failure, apart from snacking. So they tried to invest in this and say that actually personality types had specific predispositions to heart failure. So it obviously, you know, smoking isn't the cause, it's personality type. So some some real difficulty there. And the correlations do exist, it turns out, but it seems like one of the only things that really affects this is anger. And you know, if people are angry, people that leads to an increased risk of heart failure, basically. So I would imagine is that they can't, they can't adequately control their response to external stimuli. Something that makes total sense. So I think it's really important that you mentioned that, because I mentioned at the beginning about this whole idea that psychology is and psychomotors about scientific testing. Yeah.

So I sit in classroom virtually on a regular basis and have HR managers and managers saying, why do we need to learn about research methods? Why do we need to learn about how this stuff was founded? If it's good tools, let's use them. Yeah, and I think it's really important that people look back. And I know it's a pain in the neck, but just do a bit. I mean, it doesn't take long to bit of googling try and find out where things have come from. Use Google Scholar, use whatever you can to try and find whether a science considers this good stuff. Is easiest way, because what you're looking for is, you're looking for a proxy measure to say, Yeah, I've got, I've got a reason to believe in this stuff, and use it. And also.

Caveat everything. When you work with people, just say, You know what, there's no proof, because proof doesn't really exist in psychology. Really, what there is is there's a decent evidence base that something is or isn't useful. Yeah, I think that's I think that's right. And, you know, I think in later episodes, one thing I'd like to do is to look through some of the famous experiments or famous ideas and models that have worked their way into HR, and try and say, we just need to prod these a little bit, because I think a lot of them are bogus. Well, it's astonishing that Myers Briggs comes up about every other week at uni, and every other week there's the lecturers are like that. You just we're just trying to make you aware that the evidence base underneath it has got some shaky ground. Doesn't mean it shouldn't be a useful tool. Doesn't mean that people don't love it. People don't love it and have taken it to their hearts. It just means you need to understand what it is and isn't valuable for Yeah. So just, I guess, before we go on to our list of a week, which is quick this week, what do you think the benefits and uses are of personality tests? How would you describe it, and what aren't they, I guess, as well. Okay, so don't hire people based on personality tests. Please, do understand what the traits are, so that you can understand what traits you might be looking for in someone and their natural preferences, so that when you interview them, you've got a thought about that that's sometimes helpful. And understand the balance your team mostly, though, I use them for increasing self awareness so people understand and start to look at themselves a I use them, particularly when I think they will be more receptive to it from a computer in the privacy of their own home than they will be from me telling them what I think they are. And I also think they are brilliant at mediation between team members. So I have used them. I have toured two team members on a regular basis about one of the models, so that they can understand that they have natural opposing preferences, and therefore helping them to understand it's not that they're good. One of the because you develop this, I'm good and you're bad, yeah, it's not that you're different. And let's talk about how we work together. So that's why I use them. Yeah, I'd echo that exactly. I'd say self awareness, other awareness, but nothing more than that, not for decision making. Oh, and total procrastination tools, right? Yeah, yeah. So much fun. It's fun. They are fun, right? If you want to indulge in reflecting on yourself a little bit there. Yeah, it was really fun. When I got my mom to do it, my mom came out furious, yeah.

Well, interestingly, if you read up on ENFPs, I think it says you can do anything you want in the whole wide world, because you're very special, at least, that's what I took from reading it. I don't know if reading it. I don't know if you did as well, but no, what is, ironically, what I take for it every single time is,

maybe this is just my next I look at it and go, you can help anyone do anything, but you probably won't get it done yourself. Well, that's true. Yeah.

All right, so that's research roundup then, right? And I know there's a lot of stuff in that this week, but hopefully

it gives people an overview of all things personality testing, or at least enough of a baseline that people can go off and make some of their own decisions and look at absolutely look at things. So I think over to list of a week. I think it's quite a brief one this week, short list of the week. Five Steps to having a go. Step one, get everyone to do it on your own. So pick a test, and this is for a team, right? If it's like running, yeah? So if you're going to try and bring it into your team, or if you're going to try and do it within a team that you're part of, find a cheap, free test. We've already mentioned a place that you can find it on, but there's others. Get everyone to do it. Don't they? Make them do it work. Let them do it in the privacy. Let them read the report in the privacy and ask them to put some time aside. So step one, get them to do it. Step two, get them to put some time aside, to read it and to identify the surprises, identify the things that resonated and the things they didn't feel resonated, and get them to identify what they're comfortable sharing. That's all step two. So step three, right? Take all their tests of what their share they're happy to share with, and plot them on either a compass diagram or in a matrix or something like that, so that people can see how people are spread out. And

then bring them all together in a group and ask them to group themselves roughly into quadrants or into the groups of personality tests they are. So maybe all your, if it's discovery, all your yellows. And

if they're not sure, let them choose. Don't start you know. If they say, I'm not sure, yellow, blue, which ones you want? Yeah, don't get hung up on what it is. And get that group to think about how they like to be communicated with. Set them a series questions like, how do you guys communicate? What are your skills? We used to talk about superpowers. Superpower is, what is the situation where yellow you're gonna go charging into the office and go, Oh my God, you, you and you, I need backlight. You know, we talk about that

a lot about superpowers, and also try and identify where you might need a bit of extra help, and then ask that as a group to come back to the team, the one couple of warnings if you're bringing people back together into a group, make sure you know if there's going to be someone sitting on their own. So I did this once, and because of the way it was scheduled, I ended up doing it with the entire accounting and finance team and the IT team, and they.

All over, in blue and a little bit red, and there was me on my solitary feeling like and it's not, it's not a problem, because, ironically, yellow is probably okay with that, but it does mean that I end up talking on behalf of all yellows, which was very wrong. So do try, when you're scheduling and across bigger teams, do try and make sure that you've got a bit of a mix, or try and make sure you can bring someone else, or can you act as it as a facilitator?

We did this once. And actually, when we split people into groups, we gave them an exercise and said, Okay, why don't you pretend that you're going to be arranging a really, really big party in the future as a celebration? Go and do that. And then people fed back on how they went about that. Yeah, and you know, where they start and what they focus on, was one of the really interesting things about that, is starting to use action based testing on that. And actually an interesting part of psychometrics that's coming is action based so there's a company that's started doing personality testing based on setting new tasks and then observing you or your feedback on how you did the task. So I think that's, that's where we're going. I think that's where psychometric testing is going. Is much more around a combination of your thoughts, but also your actions. Because the reality is that, as we talked about the beginning, all of these things can be gamified. It's about where you are, what you are, you know, what you think, and you you filter, right? You filter your behavior unconsciously all the time.

So I think that's really, really helpful. I think the most important thing I would say about if you're going to do it in a group, be really clear at the beginning. People only have to share what they want, yeah. And also make yourself open to people talking about it afterwards, if they're concerned about what it means, yeah. Cool stories from a keyboard. Yeah, should I Okay, tell me all about yours. So there are lots from different things I've done, but the one thing that I want to call out is, you know, a story, but it's a bit of a word of warning as well. When people do this, particularly for the first time, if they identify with a category, it can be almost a sort of true believer, like moment, they can think, wow, I suddenly belong. Here I am. This is clearly me. And that's great, right? But one of the negative sides of that is that people can suddenly say, Well, this is me. I can abdicate responsibility for things that don't fit with my personality, so I'm a yellow I can never do detail or whatever it happens to be, and that can be a really negative thing. So watch out for that, and you might see it happen. So whenever you're introducing these things, make sure you explain that everybody has all of these things, and it's just a bit of guidance. And it's not about excuses, you know, it's not absolutes, yeah, it's a preference. It's a still have, you know, I have a preference to talk all day. I have to shut up sometimes, yeah, I will lose my voice. Yes, yes,

any stories of that? Yeah, so positive one from me. I have a very close friend of mine now, but who used to work for me in the early days, and we were really struggling with our working relationship, and she was incredibly effective, and I was relatively effective, but we just couldn't get it together, and we had some help with some coaching from my coach, who's a lovely lady who introduced, I already knew a little bit about Myers Briggs, but this other person didn't, and Rachel, very effectively, helped us, gave us visuals, and she drew on a during a wall, A set of stairs, effectively, if you imagine a zigzag, and then drew a curve with a big bump in the middle, and then a low line and then a big bump at the end. And she was trying to explain that I'm a extreme piece. I get really excited beginning to do less work. Forget what about it for six weeks, and then I am amazing at the end, versus this other person who is amazing at breaking things down into really equal steps and moving things forward. Yeah. And what was happening was that this person was waiting on me constantly to do things were errors, and at the very end, I'd want to do it all at the end and be like, come alive today. Yeah. And they'd be like, Well, I've done all mine, and so we hold up the process. And you know, it didn't it

is astonishing the impact that had on our relationship. Absolutely astonishing the ability for that other person to understand that I wasn't deliberately out to, like, make their life misery, yeah, yeah. And that this was just my preference, and that actually between us, we could come up with a schedule where we would divide up the work and come up with really practical stuff, like every email used to have. I'm gonna from them. I'm gonna do this, unless you let me know by Friday you want me to do something different, right? And I'd be like, that's fine, brilliant, because that's given me the option. And if I if I'm not gonna get engaged with it, then you can just crack on. Yeah? But also, actually, on a very real level, it brought us much closer together, yeah? And it actually meant that we have a relationship way beyond work now, yeah, because we've been able to support each other in some of the challenges that we face when our natural preference is so different, yeah? So it can be really helpful. Yeah, it can. It can. I mean, I still question the science under it, but it's that thing, isn't it, the science can be terrible, but if it's actually useful, right? Yeah. So any final thoughts or top tips, then based on that, no, I.