What Type of Person Are You?
I love a good personality assessment.
Over the years, I've taken the Enneagram, StrengthsFinder (multiple times), the Myers-Briggs workshop, had an employer offer Insights Discovery as part of a growth and development initiative, and probably a handful of others I'm forgetting. There's something about being handed a framework for understanding myself — a set of categories that promise to explain why I do what I do — that I find genuinely appealing. Maybe it's the "Input" strength that StrengthsFinder says I have in my Top 5. Maybe it's the "Thinking" part of my Myers-Briggs "ISTP" type. Maybe I'm just a nerd who really likes to gather and process information. 
If you're not familiar with them, some of the most popular personality assessments and inventories include:
Myers-Briggs. One of the most famous personality inventories which evaluate you on four pairs of opposite traits (Extroversion vs. Introversion, Sensing vs. Intuition, Thinking vs. Feeling, and Judging vs. Perceiving) to create one of sixteen different personality types.
Enneagram. Evaluates and sorts you into one of nine personality archetypes (The Improver, The Giver, The Protector, The Mediator, etc.) that help contextualize the fears and needs that inform the choices you make.
StrengthsFinder. Provides your top-five strengths from a list of 34 (Analytical, Empathy, Harmony, Activator, Maximizer, Arranger, Focus, etc.) to identify strong skills that are worth leaning into an developing.
Insights Discovery. A popular corporate leadership assessment that sorts you into colors (red, yellow, green, and blue) which correspond to where you derive your energy and how you like to communicate.
Generally speaking, I don't take these tests ironically or reluctantly when they're offered. I like them and find them of limited usefulness. So this isn't a piece about how personality assessments are silly or a waste of time; it's a piece about what happens when a genuinely useful tool starts being given undue weight or influence.
It's worth asking why these assessments have become so popular, particularly within spiritual and church communities. Part of it is simple curiosity; we want language for who we are and a way of relating to or understanding one another. But part of it, I think, is that self-understanding feels like a prerequisite for spiritual growth. If you're trying to become a better version of yourself, or align your life more closely with what you believe, it helps to know what you're actually working with. What are your instinctive strengths? What are your blind spots? Where do you default under stress, and why?
The Enneagram, in particular, has deep roots in exactly that kind of spiritual self-examination. Though its exact origins are debated, it was popularized in contemplative Christian circles in the latter half of the twentieth century, largely through the work of teachers like Richard Rohr, as a tool for spiritual direction rather than corporate team-building. Unlike a lot of personality frameworks that focus mainly on behavior (i.e.,how you act, how you communicate, how you make decisions), the Enneagram digs into motivation and fear. It doesn't just assess what you do. It asks why you do what you do, and what you're afraid of if you stop doing it.
That's a useful line of inquiry for a spiritual life. Knowing that your particular type tends to seek control, or approval, or avoidance of conflict, or achievement, gives you something to actually work with in prayer, in self-examination, in the ongoing project of trying to become less ruled by your own fear responses.
StrengthsFinder, which a lot of churches have adopted for identifying where people might serve well in ministry, works from a related but different premise: rather than focusing on fear and motivation, it identifies your top areas of natural aptitude — the things you're instinctively good at — on the theory that people flourish more by leaning into strengths they have than by grinding away at tasks that highlight their areas of weakness. It's a more practical, less introspective tool than the Enneagram, but it scratches a similar itch: give me a framework, and I'll use it to understand myself and where I fit.
Here's where it gets complicated.
I've had more than one conversation with someone deeply into the Enneagram where a comment gets made like, "Well, you're a Nine, so you probably think X," or "That figures, you're such a Two." And I understand the impulse; once you have a framework, it's tempting to use it as a shortcut for understanding other people, or even yourself. But a personality type is not a complete account of a human being. It's a lens, and lenses can distort as much as they clarify. Even the most comprehensive and thorough personality inventory can't encapsulate all of who you are, and people sometimes make illogical, unpredictable, or just plain bizarre decisions depending on a variety of factors. It's awfully reductive to try and box people into a specific type of person, although we all do it.
I've also noticed something else. When I've retaken some of these assessments months or years apart, the results don't always match. My top StrengthsFinder themes have moved, sometimes in a different priority order and sometimes not even the same five scores come up. That's not necessarily a flaw in the tools (and the folks at Clifton cite the fact that the order is subject to change... and have an entire business model built around taking the assessment multiple times and paying extra to reveal the full list instead of your Top 5).
People do change, and a good assessment should reflect that; but it does undercut the idea that these are fixed, objective qualities of who you fundamentally are. If the results can shift depending on when you take the test, then treating your type as a rigid identity to organize your whole personality around is probably assigning more weight on the tool than it deserves. And it probably means its limitations in informing your understanding of the nature of other people are even more pronounced.
That's the reductive risk. A framework meant to open up self-understanding gets used instead to close it down: "I'm just an INTJ, that's how I am and there's no point in doing extroverted things or listening to my feelings" becomes an excuse rather than a starting point. Or worse, it becomes something other people use on you: a way to explain your behavior, dismiss your feedback, or decide they already know how you'll respond before you've said anything.
I think the healthiest way to utilize these tools is the same way you'd utilize any tool: useful for a specific purpose, rather than something that deserves constant deference. A hammer is great for driving a nail and useless for turning a screw. The Enneagram is great for surfacing a pattern of fear or motivation you hadn't named before, and much less useful as a comprehensive account of your soul. StrengthsFinder is great for noticing where you have natural aptitude, and much less useful as a ceiling on what you're capable of growing into.
Self-knowledge that comes from a ninety-question assessment is a starting point for reflection, not a verdict. It's a conversation opener with yourself, not the final word. It's an initial invitation into understanding how other people think and where they're coming from, but it should always be an entry point to further conversation about the nuances of the situation.
I still enjoy taking these assessments, and I'll probably take a few more whenever they're offered or I'm feeling like I want to gain a better understanding of where I'm at in my life. There's real value in having an understanding of your own patterns, especially in the context of a spiritual life genuinely interested in growth and self-examination. But the goal, I think, isn't to arrive at your type and stop there (or hear someone else's type and assume you understand their entire personality). It's to use whatever the framework reveals as an invitation to keep looking: at yourself, at others, and at the complexity that no test (however well-designed) could ever fully capture.
Until next time,
Jeff  
 
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Spiritual: July 08, 2026 Issue [#13833]
