Beyond Personality Assessments – Crafting a Dynamic Framework for Self-Understanding
- Brainz Magazine
- 7 hours ago
- 7 min read
Written by Dan Williamson, Coach, Mentor, and Founder
Dan is a qualified coach and mentor with 20+ years of experience helping people unlock their potential by challenging perspectives and enhancing self-awareness. He founded Teach Lead Transform, an online platform for self-discovery, learning, and language growth.
In these AI-driven times, human personality has been compartmentalised into neat boxes, static labels, and lists of categories. Traditional personality assessments promise to reveal "who you really are" through fixed categories, such as introvert or extrovert, thinking or feeling, judging or perceiving. But what if this binary approach is fundamentally limiting our understanding of ourselves?
The truth is, human personality is far more fluid, contextual, and dynamic than these assessments suggest. We are not fixed entities trapped within predetermined categories, but rather evolving beings who express different aspects of ourselves across various situations, relationships, and life stages.
A more nuanced, growth-oriented framework for self-understanding is a better way of understanding ourselves in all the glorious ways we are different.
The limitations of static personality models
Traditional personality assessments, while valuable in certain contexts, often fall into the trap of oversimplification. They suggest that once you receive your results, whether you're an INFJ, type A, lead with blue or red energy, or fall into any other category, you've unlocked the key to understanding yourself.
This approach creates several problems:
Fixed identity: When we identify too strongly with personality labels, we can inadvertently limit ourselves. "I'm an introvert, so I can't be a good public speaker," or "I'm not creative because I'm analytical," become self-fulfilling prophecies that prevent growth and exploration.
Context is everything: Personality tests and models often ignore the profound impact of environment, relationships, and circumstances on our behaviour. You might be highly extroverted with close friends but more reserved in professional settings, and both characteristics are authentically you.
Stagnation: By suggesting our personalities are fixed, these models can discourage the very growth and development that make us human. They fail to account for our capacity to develop new skills, adapt to circumstances, and evolve throughout our lives, characteristics of a growth mindset.
Introducing the authenticity spectrum: A fluid approach
Rather than forcing ourselves into rigid categories, we can embrace what author Susan Cain calls the "authenticity spectrum." This approach recognises that we all exhibit traits and behaviours traditionally associated with different personality types, often within the same day or even the same conversation.
The authenticity spectrum acknowledges that you might be:
Reflective in the morning and sociable in the evening
Analytical at work and creative at home
Assertive in familiar environments and more cautious in new situations
Risk-taking in some areas of life while being risk-averse in others
This fluidity doesn't mean you lack consistency or core traits. Instead, it recognises that authenticity involves accessing different aspects of yourself as situations require, rather than forcing yourself into a predetermined mould.
Building your dynamic self-understanding framework
A dynamic approach to authenticity requires moving beyond simple categorisation toward a more comprehensive framework based on several key principles:
1. Values-based foundation
Start with your core values instead of personality types. Values represent the fundamental principles that guide your decisions and behaviour across all contexts. Unlike personality traits, which can vary by situation, values tend to remain more stable while allowing for flexible expression.
The values in action (VIA) strengths survey, developed from Martin Seligman's research, identifies 24 character strengths that reflect our authentic core selves. These strengths, including creativity, courage, wisdom, justice, and gratitude, provide a more nuanced foundation for self-understanding than traditional personality categories.
By identifying your top character strengths, you create a values-based identity that's both stable and adaptable. You might express your strength of "love of learning" through formal education, casual reading, travelling, or engaging in deep conversations. The expression varies, but the core value remains constant.
2. Contextual awareness
Develop awareness of how different contexts bring out different aspects of your personality. This involves:
Energy auditing: Track which activities energise you versus those that drain you across different settings. You might find that leading meetings energises you in small groups but exhausts you in large audiences, or that creative work energises you in the morning but feels draining in the afternoon.
Situational mapping: Notice how your behaviour changes across various contexts, such as family gatherings, work meetings, social events, and solitary activities. Recognising these differences will lead to greater understanding of who you are and align with energy auditing to identify the situations where you feel most authentic.
Relationship dynamics: Pay attention to how different relationships bring out different aspects of your personality. The "you" that emerges with your best friend might be quite different from the "you" in professional settings. Both are authentic expressions of who you are.
3. Utilise a growth mindset
The growth mindset principle, that our capabilities and traits can be developed over time, is essential for recognising and understanding our potential. This means:
Think about the stories you tell yourself, as these can very easily become self-fulfilling prophecies with a favourable or negative outcome, depending on how situations and challenges are viewed.
Embrace the power of "yet": Instead of saying "I'm not good at networking," try "I'm not comfortable with networking yet." This simple word shift keeps the door open for growth and development.
Reframe challenges: View personality-based challenges as opportunities for growth rather than fixed limitations. If traditional assessments suggest you're "not naturally creative," use this as motivation to explore and develop your creative capacities.
Continuous evolution: Recognise that who you are today is not who you were five years ago, nor who you'll be five years from now. Your personality can and should evolve as you gain new experiences, skills, and perspectives.
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus summarised it perfectly. “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”
The only constant in life is change, so embrace the opportunities it offers!
4. Positive psychology
Ground your self-understanding activities in positive psychology's PERMA model, which focuses on five key areas of well-being:
Positive emotion: Cultivate awareness of what genuinely brings you joy and satisfaction across different contexts, rather than assuming certain activities are inherently "right" or "wrong" for your personality type.
Engagement: Identify activities that create "flow states," those moments when you lose track of time because you're fully immersed and engaged. These flow activities often reveal aspects of your authentic self that transcend traditional personality categories.
Relationships: Focus on building authentic connections where you can express different facets of yourself rather than conforming to stereotypical traits or personality-based expectations.
Meaning: Connect the various layers of your personality to your deeper sense of purpose and meaning, creating flexibility and comfort across different contexts.
Accomplishment: Recognise achievements that come from different aspects of your personality, celebrating both your analytical successes and your creative endeavours.
Practical implementation: Daily authenticity practice
To implement this dynamic framework, develop a daily authenticity practice that includes:
Morning check-in: Begin each day by identifying which of your core values you want to honour and express, rather than asking which personality "mode" you should be in.
Contextual awareness: Throughout the day, notice which situations bring out different aspects of yourself without judgment. Simply observe, appreciate, and seek to understand with an open mind.
Energy tracking: Note which activities and interactions energise you versus those that drain you, building awareness of your authentic preferences.
Evening reflection: End each day by reflecting on moments when you felt most authentic, when your values, context, and actions aligned most naturally. If possible, journal these moments, and they will start to build up patterns and a catalogue of the authentic and inauthentic moments you experience.
Growth opportunities: Identify one area where you can challenge personality-based assumptions about yourself and experiment with growth.
The neuroscience of fluid identity
Recent neuroscientific research supports this fluid approach to personality. Our brains are far more plastic than previously believed, capable of forming new neural pathways throughout our lives. When we practise positive self-talk and embrace growth-oriented thinking, we literally rewire our brains for success and authenticity.
Dr. Caroline Leaf's research shows that "what you think about the most grows," meaning our self-concept becomes self-fulfilling. By adopting a dynamic, growth-oriented view of personality, we create neural pathways that support continuous development and authenticity.
Moving forward: Your authentic evolution
The goal of moving beyond static personality assessments isn't to abandon all structure or self-knowledge. Instead, it's to create a more sophisticated, nuanced understanding of yourself that honours both your core essence and your capacity for growth and adaptation.
This dynamic framework recognises that you are not a fixed entity to be categorised, but a complex, evolving human being capable of authentic expression across various contexts.
By grounding yourself in values, embracing growth, and applying positive psychology principles, you create space for your full authentic self to emerge.
Your personality is not a box to fit into, it's a palette of colours to express across the canvas of your life. The question isn't "What type am I?" but rather "How can I authentically express my values and strengths?"
The journey of self-understanding is ongoing, and that's precisely what makes it so rich and rewarding. Embrace the complexity, celebrate the fluidity, and allow yourself to be authentically, dynamically, wonderfully you.
This is just one of many themes covered in Teach Lead Transform’s five-week coaching programme Your Authentic Voice, a journey of self-discovery with weekly activities to aid self-understanding and develop tools and strategies to live life authentically.
Read more from Dan Williamson
Dan Williamson, Coach, Mentor, and Founder
Dan is passionate about continuous growth to positively impact others. As a qualified coach and mentor, he empowers people to deepen their self-awareness, strengthen their personal identity, and unlock their true potential. Using his own self-discovery experiences as a foundation, he helps individuals develop bespoke strategies to enable them to live as their authentic selves.
Through his writing on Teach, Lead, Transform, his online learning, language and self-discovery platform, his aim is to stimulate thinking and awareness to empower self-directed personal growth.
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