My Favorite Free Tools for Greater Self Understanding

Caveats About Assessments

Before we get into the fun part, it’s important to keep in mind the common problems with popular assessments and why we need to take what we’re given with many grains of salt. In particular, assessments focused on figuring out what your ‘type’ is, with various numbers of available categories. These kinds of systems are extremely limited, since most human traits fall on a spectrum. For example, if you had a trait that was scored from 1 to 100 on a scale and people scoring under 50 were put in one bucket and above 50 in a different bucket, moving from 49 to 51 would give you a completely different result. But a person scoring 49 might have a lot more in common with a person scoring 51 than they would with someone scoring 5, even though a 5 and 49 fall into the same category. Most scientific research into personality allows for much more nuance, and assessments used by personality researchers generally rate people on a series of scales rather than assigning them categorical types. Many popular assessments, like the MBTI for example, also have reliability problems, where the same person taking the same test with only a few weeks between tests can end up with completely different results, which limits what conclusions you can draw. Not to mention that people can display different personality traits situationally.

That’s not to say it can’t be helpful to engage with less scientific kinds of assessments, but it’s important to look out for these kinds of issues and to limit using them as a basis for significant conclusions on their own. Often I find unscientific assessments or categorizations of people most useful as narrative frames to push my reflective thinking up against to see if new ideas and insights can emerge, but I wouldn’t want to use an assessment result to contribute to, say, a hiring decision, or internalize as part of my personal narrative that as a ______ type, I’m intrinsically bad at _______ skill or locked into _______ behavior. I’ve definitely gotten some new insights by engaging with systems like the Enneagram, or Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies, and there are so many more, but for the most part I tend to recommend more open ended tools.

The Tools I’ve Found Most Helpful

Here are the tools I recommend the most frequently to people looking for increased self knowledge and interpersonal insights.

Personality: Big 5 Personality Test

The Big 5 (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism) are the personality traits most commonly tested in personality research, and there are lots of studies out there correlating where people fall on these trait scales with different outcomes or behaviors. If you like to geek out about the science of personality, this can be an interesting tool. You can find these assessments in lots of different iterations, but I like this website, because it not only includes a free test but also a lot of interesting reading about personality research: https://personality-project.org/

Strengths: VIA Survey

This assessment gives a personalized ranking of their 24 ‘character strengths’, which can be a useful frame for thinking about aligning what we care about and our best personal qualities with things like where we spend our time or what our aspirations are. I appreciate that it is strengths focused, which also helps us to focus on where we shine rather than our perceived deficiencies. You can find that assessment here: https://www.viacharacter.org/

Another assessment I like, CliftonStrengths, is also strengths focused - but it is not available for free, and is also focused more on determining in what situations we perform at our best rather than our character strengths.

Values Exercise

Coming up with a list of personal core values can be a helpful touchstone whenever we feel stuck or running up against a sense of inner unease about how we’re spending our time, or to what causes or relationships we’re contributing our energy. There are lots of lists out there of options, and a common exercise is to start by going through the whole list and circling any words that are resonant, then narrowing down to a top ten, then a top five. Here’s one list, and but there are many others.

Culture Map

One of the most impactful team building exercises I ever participated in involved us each placing ourselves on a series of spectrums of cultural norms - things like our relationship with time, or how much directness in communication was most comfortable to us. We then had discussions about how those preferences played out in our individual experiences and then how we could find norms as a team given where we were each individually coming from. Reflecting on each of these preferences and explicitly naming them as preferences rather than assuming that our own preferences are the default has remained very helpful when engaging in all kinds of relationships. The list I’ve used was based on Erin Meyer’s Culture Map. A free introductory quiz can be found embedded in this article - Another layer of helpful context can come in by engaging with this idea in the framework of white supremacy culture.

Career Exploration: ONet

For those thinking about a career shift, I often hear people talking about what industry they would like to work in or what job they can imagine themselves holding, but one aspect that is often undervalued is thinking about the typical day to day tasks and whether those sets of tasks seem like they’d be a good fit for a person to spend their days doing. This assessment isn’t perfect, but often provides good food for thought along those lines. You can find it here: https://www.mynextmove.org/explore/ip

Do you have a tool or assessment you love that wasn’t mentioned here? Please let me know! Send me an email.