Going Beyond One Model: Embracing the Complexities of the Human Experience

Welcome back to another enlightening episode of Beyond Personality Types. Today, we're diving deep into the limitations and benefits of personality typology models. Hosts Olivier Caudron and Linda Berens explore why relying on just one model might limit your understanding of personality and how incorporating multiple lenses can offer richer insights. Linda shares her journey, influenced by notable figures like David Kersey and Carl Jung, to emphasize the importance of recognizing humans as complex living systems. We’ll uncover how cultural and family contexts shape our personalities and why embracing a holistic approach is crucial to truly understand human behavior. Whether you're a seasoned practitioner or a curious enthusiast, this episode is packed with wisdom to help you look beyond the basics. So, stay tuned and get ready for a journey towards a more nuanced understanding of the human experience.

Linda Berens  [00:00:00]:
Types are fascinating patterns that are best discovered holistically.

Olivier Caudron [00:00:08]:
Welcome to Beyond Personality Types, the original interest strengths podcast. Every week we provide you with the better ways to use and talk about personality theories. I am your host, Olivier Codron, a self discovery facilitator. With me is Doctor Linda Berens, internationally renowned for her innovative typology approach. Come with us beyond the indicator results to rethink what you know about personality types.

Linda Berens  [00:00:49]:
The thing is, on a very simple level, any typology model will not explain everything.

Olivier Caudron [00:00:59]:
Have you ever wondered if relying on just one personality typology model limits your capacity to identify someone's type preferences? Hello, and thank you for tuning in. Today, we will discuss the limitations of using just one personality typology model and the benefits of incorporating multiple typology lenses. By recognizing the complexity of human systems and the various influences at play we can enhance our understanding and gain deeper insights. Whether you're a a practitioner looking to improve your workshops or an enthusiast eager to broaden your knowledge this episode will provide valuable guidance for understanding personality beyond the basics and truly grasping the intricate patterns that shape us all. Stay with us as we guide you towards a more holistic approach to understanding personality. Linda, like an explorer, you push the boundaries of personality typology. You never settled on only one data. Actually, you have always looked beyond personality types.

Olivier Caudron [00:02:19]:
How would you explain this need to look further?

Linda Berens  [00:02:24]:
I hadn't thought about it really. I think in some ways it's because of my personality type preferences. One of the things I've learned from David Kersey was focus on systems. So we were studying family systems, for example, or school systems, the classroom system for school counselors and stuff. And it was really not much in detail, but it's just the idea that behavior changes in a system. The system influences the behavior. It's a lot of complexity. So it's this realization from almost fifty years ago that we're complex living systems.

Linda Berens  [00:03:03]:
As complex living systems, no one model can explain everything. Then anybody who's well trained in type will say type doesn't explain everything. However, they're still only using one model, one lens. It's a model, but it's also a lens because it's what we look through. By using that lens, we see different things. If we have the Jungian lens and then temperament theory, these patterns have been observed over and over again. To understand living systems, we have to look at patterns. This is from the work of Fritjof Capra.

Linda Berens  [00:03:40]:
We have these patterns, and the pattern is greater than the sum of the parts. The pattern conveys more information, so we can't just take the union functions and add them up.

Olivier Caudron [00:03:52]:
Linda mentioned three personalities. David Kersey, a psychologist known for the temperament Three, Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, psychoanalyst who founded the analytical psychology, and Fritjof Capra, an Austrian born American author, physicist, system theorists.

Linda Berens  [00:04:14]:
When I say beyond personality type, it's not necessarily beyond personality typologies. It's what most people mean these days when they say personality type. They are referencing the union basis, the Myers Briggs type code. And if it's something else, they call it something else. Like the Enneagram is a typology.

Olivier Caudron [00:04:38]:
Mhmm.

Linda Berens  [00:04:38]:
But it isn't referred to very often as personality types. Sometime it is, but not too often. Disc is not referred to generally in a generic way or social styles or any of the others. So most of the time, if you hear about personality type, people are referencing the type code from the Myers Briggs type Linda, and sometimes the eight functions. That's what I mean when we're talking about beyond personality type.

Olivier Caudron [00:05:08]:
The enneagram is a model of human psyche principally understood and taught as a typology of nine interconnected personality types. DiSC is a behavioral self assessment tool that aims to predict job performance by categorizing individuals into four personality traits. DISC is the acronym for dominance, influence, steadiness, and conscientiousness. The social styles model is based on behavioral psychology. It describes four patterns of behavior. In his book, psychological types, Carl Jung developed the concept that people tend to have preferences between two attitudes, introverted and extroverted. Then he explained that people view the world through four processes, thinking, feeling, sensing, and entreating. Each process has two orientations, extroverted focused on the external world and introverted focused on the inner world.

Olivier Caudron [00:06:21]:
Hence, there are eight functions in total. While Carl Jung was instrumental in developing the foundational concepts of the eight cognitive function model, it is today the results of further development and expansion by researchers and psychologists.

Linda Berens  [00:06:42]:
When we wanna talk about beyond personality types in general, that's the name of our podcast, it's that we will look at a lot of different ways to look at personality type through different typology lenses. Some of them line up. Enneagram doesn't line up. It just brings different information. Useful, helpful. I know enough to be dangerous with it, so I don't use it. There are many different typologies that can be used and some are very narrow in their focus, are broader. That's part of my nature is to take a look at, does it fit? Are there things that are such outliers in the comparison that they don't fit, or does it seem to bring information? Then the test would be of the validity and the usefulness of any one lens.

Linda Berens  [00:07:33]:
David each of the 16 types having that pattern, say four people, four types in that pattern, four type patterns in that pattern. Does it fit for them? When David Keirsey introduced temperament theory into the use of the Myers Briggs, it introduced this idea for patterns were easier to remember than 16. Some people liked that, and it got used a lot. That's one thing about going beyond personality types. It's about going beyond the limitations of only one lens and that we can use multiple lenses that line up. And if they don't line up, we can just do them separately. I have one student right now who's an expert in Enneagram and she's becoming expert in our methodology. She knows they don't cross over.

Linda Berens  [00:08:26]:
She's just learned to get the information and use it when it's appropriate. The thing is on a very simple level, any typology model will not explain everything. When people are passionate about a particular model, they tend to use it for everything. It's important to recognize certain other things that have to do with it. Even if you're using the three or four lenses that we use, we also need to take into account things like culture.

Olivier Caudron [00:08:54]:
What do you mean?

Linda Berens  [00:08:55]:
So there are people who study cultural dimensions. I'm not a master of those. I just know a few of the frameworks that people look Three, some kind of polarities when it's a collectivist culture, and then there's an individualist culture. Then we can look at countries, for example, and The United States has been identified as one of the most individualist cultures around yet within The United States. There are subcultures. There are subcultures from the immigrants that come from collectivist cultures. There's subcultures that are collectivist that are around a particular faith, religion of some Linda. And we can even talk about the culture in California.

Linda Berens  [00:09:40]:
People make jokes about how kind of liberal we are and not just politics, but how some of the rules don't follow. And yet on the East Coast, that seems to be a different kind of culture. So there are these different dimensions that we can look at in terms of cultures. And then there's the family culture.

Olivier Caudron [00:10:00]:
Family culture? How does that impact our personality?

Linda Berens  [00:10:06]:
We have this graphic we use. It's a core self at the middle of the concentric circles and out from that, the developed Selves and then the contextual cell. And because we are adaptable, we have a certain amount of free will and we are adaptable living organisms. We have a contextual self where we're responding to the needs of the moment that may be lined up with what's at the Carl, or it may not. Depends on what the situation's demanding and how adaptable we're being. This middle circle, which is the developed Selves, that takes into account the different aspects of you that may be variations on the theme of the core, for example, or it may be even different, completely different because you wound up living in a context that demanded that you do certain things or you have a job where you learn certain skills. In a way, that's really who you are because we're programmed to grow and develop, and we do develop. That's an important piece.

Linda Berens  [00:11:05]:
When we're working at getting at the core self, we're looking at just these patterns that have been there from the beginning. Culture gets laid down very closely around that core self because culture starts with all of the unwritten messages around how to be in the world, how to engage with people. How's the mother supposed to act? How's the father supposed to act? How's the child supposed to act? All of these kind of unwritten rules that get enculturated early. Sometimes we can't separate culture from what's at the core.

Olivier Caudron [00:11:38]:
The three Selves theory is one of the basis of the inter strength approach. You can find a copy of the three Selves graphic in the show notes or on the website beyondpersonalitytypes.com. Back to our topic, Linda. Berens the culture and the family culture, I know you take into account other elements or aspects.

Linda Berens  [00:12:06]:
The roles that we take, for example, were in certain contexts that require different behavior and it becomes habitual. And so we have to go beyond personality type to ask Three questions that might tease that out or be patient and let people try on several descriptions. And as a practitioner facilitating a team workshop, we have to be careful that we've given everyone permission to say, I don't know yet. I'm still sorting. In those contexts, beyond personality types to me means what are some of the external factors that we need to pay attention to when we're doing work with these models or sharing them and recognize that some people may be going along with the group to fit in. And I think that might happen a lot in the teen years when fitting in is so important or in highly collectivist cultures where fitting in is important.

Olivier Caudron [00:13:07]:
Yeah. I can totally relate to that. During my teen years at school, I worked hard to fit in the group, although I ended up always feeling better alone or with just a few friends. Also, as a Belgian, my culture is already more collectivist than The US culture. Several times, I witnessed how the relation to the group is different in our two cultures and how I may look gregarious because of it. For cultures based on collectivism, I can understand how challenging it can be. Someone trying to identify a type can go completely wrong if they don't take those factors into account.

Linda Berens  [00:13:56]:
Yeah. And even if you know somebody really well, it could be type development. Could be the development of different mental functions or different skill sets from the other lenses. It could be a time of life, for example. I didn't like to talk about Selves. But in my later years, it seems like the introverted sensing, which is my Poerapuella archetype, forever child archetype, in Beebe's model, it seems like once I tap into an experience, I give you all of the details from that experience, whether you want them or not. Once my husband David, when I was giving the contractor all this information, he said, he doesn't need to know that. But I don't know where it came from, but I just am tapping into this chain of connected information that I just wanna cover.

Linda Berens  [00:14:49]:
It's partly why you have so much editing to do with the podcast. So I've given you way more than we have time for. So if you just saw that and I reference the past all the time, you might say, oh, well, you're a stabilizer. Well, it has to do with age. It has to do with experiences. It It has to do with type development. It has to do with a lot of other things that it has to do with.

Olivier Caudron [00:15:15]:
Linda refers to the John Beebe's model. John Beebe is an American psychiatrist and Jung analyst. He created the eight function archetype model of psychological types, which further expanded on Jung's original concept.

Linda Berens  [00:15:35]:
David occur to me though that the first drafts of these workbooks that we wrote, the understanding yourself in other series, it was just Three essential motivators or the four interaction styles. And then we realized, well, sometimes people can't identify just from that. So we put in little snapshots of the four variations of them. Each of those patterns, the interaction style patterns, or the essential motivator pattern looks different in the context of the whole pattern. We've tried to capture that.

Olivier Caudron [00:16:10]:
Each pattern is alive in each one of us. That's the beauty of it. It's not rigid.

Linda Berens  [00:16:16]:
It's just for the practitioner or anyone helping out somebody else. Don't just give them an answer. This is your type. Don't give them even two to say this is the one of these two is probably your type. This give them resources and things to think about so that they can explore. You will be seen as the expert, so it's important that you not tell them this is who you are, that you let them decide.

Olivier Caudron [00:16:42]:
That takes more time. We have to be honest. It's accepting to explore, accepting to go shopping, and accepting to try several sizes, several colors, and that's worth it. Because at the end, there is not an award, but a celebration.

Linda Berens  [00:16:59]:
Yeah. Because you found a fit. But when we get feedback from others, that's often how we know about ourselves as well, by the way. Yeah. Feedback well given is some of it's nonverbal. You just get it by listening. But feedback well given is, it looks like this to me. I don't know what fits you, but this is what I think might fit or try this on.

Linda Berens  [00:17:21]:
It's nothing like, well, you can't have this pattern because blah blah blah. Yeah.

Olivier Caudron [00:17:27]:
Again, we are not blaming an indicator. Honestly, I think that the results of an indicator is an indicator that can give already one information. What we are talking here, it's that it's also essential to have more than one data.

Linda Berens  [00:17:45]:
It's interesting too because some people fit the descriptions a %. It's like they may take an instrument or they read something Linda. It's like, oh my gosh. This is me. Somebody's been following me around. It's almost as if those people are the people that the descriptions were taken from. Other people will find, yeah. Well, that's true for me.

Linda Berens  [00:18:10]:
Other people have such a wider range of life experiences that they aren't stereotypic. Sometimes it's just not as quick an answer. My concern with the instruments is that if people get an answer and they say, oh, yeah. That's me because they think it's the right answer. I mean, there's a reason Isabel Myers called it the Myers Briggs type indicator. An indicator is something that points the weather predictors. They can predict what's likely to happen. And of course, with more and more information, they can predict how fast a storm is traveling, what the velocity of the winds are now, and how the winds will be later.

Linda Berens  [00:18:56]:
I'm thinking about the hurricane situation, especially for tornadoes. They can't predict with complete certainty. The more information they have about the influences, the better the prediction will be. Back in the day, there was always this joke about how inaccurate weather Three reports were. These days, there's so much more data from different places, different kinds of data that the meteorologist can tell and pretty well predict something. It's the maturity of the field of typology. We're no longer in the dark ages of just looking at e and I and s and n and t and f and j and p and just taking the instrument results. And then there's how things are set up and the frame of mind when you take it and your level of maturity when you take it.

Linda Berens  [00:19:44]:
So I always had trouble choosing between t and f on the Myers Briggs or any other instrument that asked me to do that. Well, now that I know a whole lot more about my personality and my my upbringing and my purpose in life, that makes sense.

Olivier Caudron [00:20:00]:
Could you explain how a practitioner or, type enthusiast could use all you have said to go beyond the personality types in their practice or in their activity.

Linda Berens  [00:20:16]:
Looking beyond personality types means to me that we go beyond a limited one model view. We take into multiple other models that align. We may also decide to use other models that don't really align and may have some seductive look alike, especially as practitioners or type enthusiasts. We are constantly aware. Hopefully we're aware of the influences that may make us look different than what's at the core that maybe don't have anything to do with any of the models. And yet some of them do. And so it's just important that we look beyond the patterns themselves to try to understand a particular behavior. Going beyond personality types is about looking at other influences, other lenses, as well as the other things that impact us, the context we're in, the stage of life, all those life experiences that people have, the profession we have, the kind of cultural influences.

Linda Berens  [00:21:18]:
That's one reason why actually getting to best fit is sometimes a little bit well, it's often very challenging.

Olivier Caudron [00:21:25]:
Oh, yes. Indeed. It is challenging.

Linda Berens  [00:21:28]:
And I'm doing that when I do one on one interviews to help people clarify. I'm listening for the patterns in my head. What pattern does this fit, what they're saying? And I'll say, well, that could be this and that could be that. And I'm also asking people questions to learn about what was their family culture like, paying attention to where they grew up and say, okay. So was it like this where you grew up? It's the practitioner, especially because we're supposed to be experts that is very important, but Three type enthusiasts Selves just to be aware that there are cultural differences and to not assume that a particular characteristic is going to apply across the board all the time. So there's so many variables with being human that we have to go beyond personality types.

Olivier Caudron [00:22:17]:
And that wraps up our journey through today's episode of Beyond Personality Types. First, no single model can capture the full complexity of human behavior by integrating multiple frameworks like Jungian connective functions, essential motivators, and interaction styles models, we gain a richer, more nuanced understanding of the person's preferences. Second, consider cultural context and personal experiences. Culture deeply influences our developed Selves. Recognizing this can enhance our assessments and reveal the type at the person's core. Third, approach typology with patience and open mindedness encourage exploration and self discovery rather than rushing to label someone's type Fourth, account for external factors such as roles and life stages. These elements can shape how personality traits are expressed and understood. We hope these insights enrich your practice and personal growth.

Olivier Caudron [00:23:33]:
Visit interstrings.org to learn more about all the models Linda mentioned. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. If you enjoyed this discussion, we'd really appreciate it if you could leave a rating and review to help others find the show. Remember to subscribe if you don't want to miss next week's episode. You can also follow us on Facebook and Instagram at beyond personality times. Thanks again for tuning in. We are Olivier Caudron and Linda Berens. Stay curious and eager to learn until we meet again in our next episode.