How to Read Any Personality Accurately | ProfilerTraining.com

I think observing somebody's behavior is a terrible way to know what's actually going on inside their heart or mind. I think you actually have to do much more of a deep look into what's driving this person. Why are they making the choices they're making? Why is the behavior coming up the way it's coming up? Like why are they doing these things? Not just that they are doing these things. Working with personality type, we know, Antonia, that there's a lot of reasons why people do behaviors. Every single personality type has to cook food for themselves or eat, right? Every single personality type has to do outdoor activities and lock, move their body. Everybody has to do basic things in life. So just a behavior alone doesn't necessarily automatically lead us to a best fit personality type. We need more. We have to go deeper and read not just the behaviors, but also the subjective experience of that person too. What are the experiences inside, not just in the outside world? The challenge with behaviors is that, to your point, the same behaviors can come from multiple different places, multiple different motivations. I think that's one of the reasons why in profiling, the conversation is so crucial. So in a conversation, you're not just trying to unearth what a person's self-reported behavior sets are, even though that's what it sounds like you're asking. When you ask things like, "What do you love to do?" And what do you love to do so much? The only reason you stop is because you're exhausted. They're going to give you a bunch of behaviors. The key is to not stay with the answer. The key is to use that as a starting point to unearth why. What's going on underneath? Because the same behaviors come from multiple different motivation sets. The only way to know what the motivation is internally is to try to unearth it from inside of themselves to your point. Now they might not know what their motivation is. The key to being good at conversational profiling, which is what we teach in profiler training, is to learn the art of going in the side door. Asking the right questions that help unearth what the inner drive is for those specific behavior sets. Because sometimes the answer is, "That's just how I've always done it." Or, "That's how it was taught to me. I didn't know I could do it in any other way." Or, "I'm trying to show up or make somebody in my life proud." And it could be somebody who's long dead, weirdly enough. It's like, "And that's just got inside." Or it could be, "This is my passion and this is the thing that I can't stop doing." Trying to show up and impress or gain the approval of somebody in your life, maybe a caretaker from your childhood versus this is the thing I was born to do. Or two, totally different answers. But unless you go deeper, unless you ask the why underneath the behavioral sets, you wouldn't know that. You'd get the same answer for both of those people, and yet those are two completely different cognitive tracks. Yeah. We can't teach the entire personality profiling course here. I mean, it's an entire big course that goes through a lot of this depth to deep-read people and understand their cognition. But we could talk maybe about one aspect. If you're wanting to kind of get a sense of somebody's personality type, the first thing is that we really try to look at what we call the cognitive map. We look at the cognitive functions of personality underneath their personality type label. And that's really what we're trying to spot and look for. And we're almost watching for some of those energies at play in order to make the label from that. So that's one thing. The other thing is we're looking for where they're really more certain in their life and where they're uncertain. So less about behavior. So if you're kind of looking to spot people and deep-read them in your life, you can kind of notice to see, "Okay, which of these things that we talk about, maybe the cognitive functions, do they feel more certain when they're in that energy or that? The types of activities or behaviors that go around that cognition, where are they certain and where are they uncertain?" And usually through our certainty towards something, we can start to get a composite map of somebody's personality type. We can start to notice, "Okay, this person's really certain here. They feel comfortable in this place. This is probably a preferred cognitive function for them. This is a preference they have. If it's uncertain, maybe they're avoiding it a little bit more. Maybe they have all these rules when they go there and they have to obey. And you're watching for these things of how they show up, not their entire self, but parts of themselves. How are they engaging with reality with these different parts that they express and they move through the world? We know half of the Jungian functions are internal. They're introverted, meaning how are you going to observe a behavior that's tied to something internal? You're going to have to somehow figure this out with a person. So the other thing that we teach in pro-flare training is to do this through a conversational profiling framework, just like Carl Jung did with his clients over a hundred years ago. This is where all this came from. Carl Jung was doing these client sessions where he's talking to people. He's a psychoanalyst. He's helping them understand their dreams, all these things. He's starting to notice this pattern emerge of this cognition. These repeatable patterns of these different functions that people were bringing to these sessions. And in those conversations, he started to make a map of this. He wrote the book in 1921, the original, but the English translation 23, psychological types, chapter 10 talks about these cognitive functions from these sessions. So we go back to this original source. We look at Jung and we say, "All right, what can we learn from the way he set this up?" We set up our entire pro-flare training in that conversational style because then you can ask somebody, "Okay, that's the behavior. You love gardening. Great, Antonia. What about gardening? Is it the fact you like your hands in the dirt? You like the feeling of working with the organic material? Do you like to garden because you want the flowers in front of your house? It looks nice to the neighborhood and you feel good about displaying that. Do you just need to leave relief stress and you go outside and it's just a way for you to think and you can do this as mindless activity. So it's that. What's the reason your cognition likes gardening? Your behavior's gardening but the why is how you deep read somebody and really know what's going on for them. Yeah, what part of them is getting satisfied? Yeah. Just to be clear, Jung was not looking for people's Myers-Briggs type? No, no, no. I don't mean that. No, no, no, no. But to your point, just understanding of all these archetypes that were in that book, he used them later on in analysis. So he was looking for what he called one-sidedness. And so we try to honor that point of origin to use what you could call a psyche to psyche experience. Yeah. To understand what's going on inside of person and to his point not to just diagnose a personality type, but to really understand, like you said, a cognitive map of what the person is experiencing and dealing with. And so a conversation doesn't just help you understand what their best fit type preferences are, which is another way of saying their personality type. But it also helps you understand the person as an individual. And as you collect these individual expressions of the personality types, you start to get a really both broad and deep understanding of what makes that type tip, because not everybody with the same type preferences is going to show up the same way. That's right. And that's what actually what makes it difficult. That's what makes observing behaviors from a distance, a very unreliable way of understanding somebody's best fit type. Again, the behaviors can come from a lot of different places. And two people of the same type can actually look really different from each other in behaviors, right? One got trained, maybe you got two people who have say, INTJ preferences, one got trained to be more dominant and to show up in a more assertive way. And maybe it's quite talkative. And the other one got trained to be very quiet and a little bit more lean back. And you go, well, those people are at the same type, but on a cognitive map they are, they're just using their type preferences a little differently. Understanding the nucleus of each of these functions, really understanding what it means, understanding the timeline of development. One of the most important questions that I ask in a profiling session is when they give me an answer as to how they show up in whatever context or situation, one of the most important questions is, and has it always been that way for you? Because type development is also a big key in understanding a person's preferences and their best fit type. So conversations, there's really no substitute for it. The conversation is the fastest way to unearth a bunch of really important and juicy information about what's going on for them. But I also think that one of the reasons why profiled training specifically is so powerful is because we've included meta models that make it a little easier to understand what's actually going on, not just with these specific functions, but in their specific position. You just mentioned certainty. Are they very confident in this part of themselves or are they deeply uncertain? Yes. And you might not know that if they just say, oh, I do this thing. And if you just go, oh, you do that. Okay, well, then those behaviors are related to this function. So you must have these preferences. But if you dig a little further and you go, and then what's your relationship to that? And they go, and every time I do, I feel deeply uncertain. And I hope nobody notices that I'm just making it up as I go, et cetera, et cetera. Now you're going to reevaluate where that function lives inside of their map, inside of the car model. And so those conversations are really important. But so are those meta models? Another meta model that we address is what John Beebe calls the axis of relating to self and others is this a function that is used for me for myself or is this a relational function that I'm using for other people. Yes. So the axis of relating to self and others is really important. What the person's likelihood of being dysregulated in this part of themselves, so it's also a map of self-regulation and dysregulation. That's also very key. When we talk about conversational profiling, we're not just trying to match behaviors to functions. Yes. We're trying to understand them as a complex person that has a certain dynamic of the relationship to themselves, the relationship to other people, how they deal with regulation and dysregulation, where is their area of confidence, where is their area of uncertainty, how is that going to make them show up? I'm so glad you settled this. When you said these meta models, because I was going to say, well, why does this matter to be able to do this? You just basically demonstrated. Because imagine being able to deep read somebody, even your family or a friend of yours or a partner, I mean, anybody that's important in your life, let alone a client, you're able to see what's going on in the cognition, deep read what's happening. I mean, can you imagine the information if you know how your partner gets dysregulated? Yes. Where they're going to be dysregulated first and how you could help guide them to being self-regulated with this map, this cognitive map. Because I know my dysregulation patterns because of this, you do your, you're, you're as well in Tonya, that's just one application from this. And it's, it's the subjective conversation. And we train this in profloat training that the conversational dynamic allows you to unpack this. And so at the end of the conversation, when you come down on a best fit type through this methodology that we teach, not only will have their best fit type before they're coded in the cognitive map, but you're going to know how they are that best fit type, meaning all those things you talked about, where the more certain parts are, where you where they tend to get dysregulated because it's, it is a pattern of type, but it's not always the same for every type. Sometimes it mixes and matches depending on sort of, you know, you're going to have to be circumstances, how they were raised, all of these factors. And so working with that in real time in a dynamic way, man, that is such a powerful skill that we teach that I think I wish more people had. - I mean, I do too, because I think it would make the world go round a little better. But I would say that the major skills that are taken for pro-flyer training is first communication. It makes a person a very good communicator, particularly if you have any sort of social shyness, like people who are shy, people who struggle to talk about a subject that they're passionate about, particularly personality types. It makes them much better, more fluent, and talking about type. It makes it so that when you have these moments of clarity around what's going on for somebody else, you can communicate it in a way that they can receive and understand it. As a practitioner, so for me in coaching, it's my number one tool. I have other tools that I use. I have other models I use, but this is my go-to, because it gives me so much information on the person. Just that conversation gives me so much valuable information. And it's not just theory, it's a practical, I am observing it applied to them as a human being. So as a practitioner, it's incredibly powerful. I think it also helps us with note-taking, right? It makes us good at note-taking, it makes us a good interviewer, it makes us a good listener, it helps us develop not just what I call energetic rapport, which is like the ability to stay in a vibe with somebody, but also data rapport, the ability to understand what somebody's saying, and then communicate in a way that they can understand you. It's hard to list all the skills that come along with pro-flyer training. And I think that's why it's such a powerful program. On the surface, it's let's talk about type, but underneath that, it's actually, let's become better representatives of an incredibly powerful model that helps people legitimately improve their lives. - Absolutely. So I would love to encourage you, if you're kind of listening to this, test out in a conversation next time, when you ask somebody about something they love or what they do, you just say, "Hey, what do you love? What do you love to do?" And as they tell you about it, go a layer deeper. I think that's the first step here. It's just go a layer deeper, and just unpack that a little bit more. So what about that do you love? What's your relationship to it? What context would you not like doing that? Ask it from a bunch of different questions, and what you're really doing there is you're drilling down into more of the cognition. And you're getting more to the heart of maybe why they're doing what they're doing, and all the nuance around it. You're starting to build a little bit of a composite map. I think that'd be a really great exercise. Maybe you're on a date, you're out with friends, whatever it could be in a conversation with a coworker. Test this out in the real world, and I'd love to see you start to develop this. - Totally. And my recommendation is don't just ask what they love because that puts people, they feel that they're kind of put on the spot, but ask it specifically in this way. What you love to do so much, the only reason you stop is because you're exhausted. Otherwise you go on indefinitely. That puts some parameters around it. It makes it a little easier to answer. - We call this the flow question. - We call it the flow question. - It's a pro-fellow training. - That's right, it's one of the very first questions that we train you to ask in a profiling session. And then once they give you what they love, some people go, "I love listening to music," or you mentioned gardening. I was surprising number of people say gardening. I would never say gardening, but a lot of people say gardening. Playing with my kids, being with my partner or whatever, follow it up with, what about that do you love doing? What is it about that? And that's actually the real meat. So that's what you're looking for. And people love to talk about themselves. They'll open up, you'll learn so much about them. And then you'll also learn a little bit more about how they're cognitively wired. - Yeah, if you'd like to go deeper, I think you could head over to profilertraining.com. We have a free method and career guide there. So basically it just kind of unpacks maybe how you could apply this in a career way. But also it goes through the method because we've got four steps to this method, four protocols, you work through it. It actually details those out. You can follow that guide. You can actually practice some of this on your own. And we've got some other materials and other things to read at that website. So I recommend head over to profilertraining.com and download your method and career guide around profiler training. I'd love to see what you make of it. And then leave a comment below this and tell me what tell us what comes out of these conversations. - And for like a fraction of the tuition, you can also get a program that we put together called a Taste of Profiling. So for like a very, very reasonable amount. - Just to taste it and see if it's over. And see if this is something that you wanted to present. - Oh, that's fantastic because it gives you some actual practice sessions to look at. Like the new video and it walks you through some journal prompts, a ways to like look and observe 'cause they're profiling sessions you did in Tony from the main stage at our live events. There's like four of them in there right now. And then it also says the debrief afterward. So it shows you the profiling session and then our take on what you were doing to understand their best type. So you go through all your notes. I forgot about them, I thank you for mentioning that 'cause I think it's really important. You go through all your notes and you show what you were watching for and how you interpreted all the different answers and you showed how you took the notes, which I think is a really good one. So head over to profilertraining.com, Joel Mark Whit. - Antonio Dodge. - And we'll talk with you on the next Persona on Hacker Video. And maybe we'll see you inside of the next profiler training. - I hope so. - Program.