While BuzzFeed quizzes may come to mind when I say the phrase “personality assessment,” these assessments have much more value than just telling you which Disney princess you are. These assessments can help you to understand your personality and strengths, but you need to be able to understand the results in a granular way for them to be useful.
When we review assessment results on our own, without the benefit of context and knowledge about the assessment itself and the data underlying how it is interpreting your results, it’s a bit like reading a CliffNotes on a fantastic novel before reading the novel itself. When we have an expert interpret our assessment results to us, it gives us the context we need to interpret the results in the context of our personal and professional lives – like reading that fantastic novel with the beautiful prose that lies at the essence of the novel itself.
What are personality assessments?
Personality assessments allow you to understand your traits and characteristics, which help to answer questions about your everyday life. Think of a personality test as a snapshot of you in the exact moment you take the test– they’re reflections of your personality in an instant. When the insights from these assessments are interpreted for us in the right way, we can understand them in the context of our habits and behaviors to make the necessary changes to evolve our behaviors and personalities. If you want to change aspects of yourself, you understand what needs to change. The changes you make will reflect in different results on future assessments.
Two personality assessments we believe are best in class – because of the wealth of data underlying them – are Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and CliftonStrengths. The MBTI assessment “builds an understanding of strengths and blind spots,” and “helps people understand how they might differ from one another.” The CliftonStrengths assessment, on the other hand, is meant to help you “discover what you naturally do best, learn how to develop your greatest talents into strengths, [and] use your personalized results and reports to maximize your potential.”
What do these assessments tell me?
The MBTI assesses personality on four different dimensions:
- Extraversion or Introversion – E or I
- Sensing or Intuition – S or N
- Thinking or Feeling – T or F
- Judging or Perceiving – J or P
Pulling from each of these criteria, the assessment assigns you a four-letter acronym that is representative of your overall personality.
MBTI Wikipedia
The CliftonStrengths assessment offers results using 34 themes split across 4 domains.
After taking the assessment, these themes are placed into two categories– Strengthen and Navigate– based on the themes that the assessment indicates you need to develop. Any themes that are already strong enough are left out of your results report. 
Victor Seet
Understanding the Results
As you can see from the charts and images of the possible results, there’s a lot of information that can be harvested from these assessments. Results from these assessments are incredibly detailed, and while they can tell us what we need to work on to adapt and overcome challenges, they certainly don’t outline how to do so. They also don’t tell us how to take the results and apply them to our own behaviors and habits. Without this granular understanding of how the assessments are categorizing our habits and behaviors relative to our peers, it’s difficult to understand how we need to change and evolve.
This is where a coach comes in. Working with a coach to understand these results is one thing, but being able to devise a customized action plan is incredibly valuable, and makes these assessments worth it. Ultimately, taking these assessments is the first step to becoming the best version of yourself,
The Value of Taking These Assessments
These assessments are eye-opening exercises that will help you to understand who you truly are. They allow you to zoom out and look at yourself from a bird’s eye view, with no bias, judgment, or preconceived notions. What they reveal about you are also aspects of your personality that friends, family and others closest to you might not observe or encounter, or be biased about. The assessments are a foundational tool to developing a better understanding of ourselves. Coaching helps us contextualize the insights and transform them into a practical, actionable roadmap for us to effect change and achieve our better selves.
