Embracing Inner and Interpersonal Strengths for Personal Awareness and Growth: The Interstrength

In Episode 7 of Beyond Personality Types, hosts Olivier Caudron and Linda Berens dive into the concept of “InterStrength”—the blend of inner and interpersonal strengths vital for personal awareness and growth. Linda shares her journey as an INTP, revealing how understanding personality patterns, temperament theory, and frameworks like MBTI and Essential Motivators helped her embrace her authentic self and improve her relationships. Discover practical strategies for uncovering your core psychological needs, enhancing self-realization, cultivating empathy, and taking actionable steps for holistic development. Perfect for type practitioners and personality enthusiasts seeking to deepen their expertise beyond MBTI results.

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 interStrengths podcast. Every week we provide you with the better ways to use and talk about personality theories. I am your host, Olivier Caudron, 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. In this episode, we delve deep into the concept of inter-strength. Exploring how it encompasses both inner and interpersonal strengths for a holistic understanding of ourselves and those around us. Linda will take her personal type preference INTP as an example to explain how she came to understand her own inter strengths shedding light on the impact of personality type and interpersonal dynamics.

Olivier Caudron [00:01:26]:
By the end of this episode, you will gain practical takeaways on how to uncover and nurture your inner and interpersonal strengths paving the way for personal evolution and self realization. Without further ado, let's see how uncovering your inner strength will help you go beyond personality types. Knowing my personality type back in 2016 helped me recenter myself. In 2021, when I discovered my personality pattern or best fit, I became aware of my inter-strengths. Interstrengths? This word may sound familiar, but it is not in the dictionary. Innerstrength does exist, but it refers to psychological stamina. It doesn't produce that sensation of action and relation. Therefore, before we tackle the topic, Linda, could you define interstrength for us?

Linda Berens  [00:02:29]:
Okay. So here it goes. Vikki Joe Varner was one of my students, hopped up in some kind of a discussion that said, why don't you call it inner strength? So we did. And that was it. Then I thought about it. It's both inner strength, such like inner strength, like you'd found in the dictionary or what it referred to anyway, psychological phenomena and interpersonal strength because it's inter strength. So it's internal and interpersonal. We are often weakened in our interactions with others because we don't understand them.

Linda Berens  [00:03:03]:
The interpersonal strength comes from the deeper understanding you can get from understanding others as well as yourself. And the internal strength is fostered by our methodology by many people being able to reclaim their internal strength because they grew up with constraints or they may even just be in a job that doesn't fit them at the moment. It doesn't have to go all the way back to childhood, but they may be in a job that's very stressful and they're trying to be someone they're not. The internal strength comes from getting a deeper understanding of who you are so that you can recognize your core psychological needs and drives, take actions to get those met. When they're not getting met, take actions to at least be aware of the stressors and being stressed by those things not being met and having some ideas about how to do it. The inner strength is a methodology to both address individual differences and have a language to talk about interpersonal differences, at least to be able to understand where someone else is coming from.

Olivier Caudron [00:04:11]:
When did you realize your own inner strength?

Linda Berens  [00:04:15]:
Oh, me? When I was in my master's program, David Keirsey in a psychopathology class, he talked to four ways people can become dysfunctional and what they look like when they're functioning well. I think he called it normal. I don't like that.

Olivier Caudron [00:04:30]:
David Keirsey was Linda's teacher, but, also, he was an American psychologist known for his work on temperament theory, which identifies four basic temperaments in humankind, Artisan, Guardian, Idealist, and Rational. Each temperament has its own unique qualities, strengths, and challenges. Keirsey's work provides a framework for understanding human behavior based on communication and action dimensions. Each temperament is associated with distinct characteristics and tendencies shaping how individuals interact with the world and pursue their goals.

Linda Berens  [00:05:14]:
Then we took the Myers Briggs type indicator, read descriptions he had written about each of the 16 personality types. I read one and I said, this is me. My preferences were not necessarily encouraged growing up. My dad has the same preferences I have, but I'm not supposed to be like my father. I grew up in a small town in Kansas in the forties, fifties, and sixties. And then lo and behold, in the seventies, I'm out in the big world discovering that who I was didn't match expectations of me still. So I was a student. That was fine.

Linda Berens  [00:05:57]:
I didn't have any trouble with that part of who I am. For a person who wants to learn and study and could easily become an academic, that worked for me all the way through school. Maybe it worked for me in parenting or whatever, because I would study what to do. That would get praised. But there were these messages that just said, you're not a typical woman. And I tried to be, but I never really felt fulfilled. I would go as a young married woman with children, take my son next door to play with the boy next door, sit in the woman's kitchen and not have anything to say. Of course, that didn't bother her too much because she liked to talk.

Linda Berens  [00:06:38]:
But, and so that moment of realizing this is who I am. This is what I am like naturally. And it's okay. And there is a place for me That released the inner strength that I needed to pay attention to getting my needs met, feeling okay about following these advanced degrees, finding my place in the world.

Olivier Caudron [00:07:03]:
Okay. That's for the inner strength. What about the interpersonal strength?

Linda Berens  [00:07:09]:
That was a big because my son, my husband and myself, all three have the same preferences. And then here was our daughter who's different. I began to really understand her and make space for her more than I would have otherwise. It was the awareness of other people being different from me and that being okay and that being needed in the world. I would say that I started to take great joy in those individual differences that people we have, not be as critical as I might've been before. And then sense of the work that we're doing is about interpersonal strength. I try to practice what I preach, which is to take other people's perspectives. So just recognizing these perspectives that they're there.

Linda Berens  [00:07:59]:
And I remember that. And then there's the taking that perspective that you just take it on. So you're just going to embody it. And then there's shifting the perspective so that you really shift into how the other person seeing the world. And some people seem to do that naturally. I didn't do it naturally. It was helpful to have a mental framework to do that. Other people do it through empathy that just came naturally.

Linda Berens  [00:08:23]:
They're talented like that. But for me, it helped to have that framework to really understand where they were coming from and how to speak to those things if I was talking with someone.

Olivier Caudron [00:08:35]:
You had to learn to be open to everybody or for more people?

Linda Berens  [00:08:40]:
The fact that I had to learn, yes, was related to my preferences. It didn't come naturally to me to pay attention to others, to feel what they were feeling. It wasn't just the awareness of personality differences that helped me. I was in a training program to become a school counselor and a school psychologist and then therapist. You can't do that if you can't take people's perspectives.

Olivier Caudron [00:09:05]:
So you said that one of the first, moment you had was when you took the Myers Briggs type indicators. What happened when you first read, the four temperaments?

Linda Berens  [00:09:20]:
Well, I didn't read them. He thought about them.

Olivier Caudron [00:09:23]:
Okay.

Linda Berens  [00:09:24]:
And of course, he was teaching the way they go bonkers. That's actually, there were just two patterns in the descriptions they had written up, the INTP and the INFP pattern that I related to. And I had a close score on the Myers Briggs with e t and f. So I related to both of them. Those descriptions were not the most refined descriptions in the world. By this time, David Keirsey hadn't written the Please Understand Me. So whether it was a much more thorough description. There wasn't anything written.

Olivier Caudron [00:10:00]:
David Keirsey authors the influential books, Please Understand Me and Please Understand Me II, which delve into his temperament theory. The first book published in 1978 introduced the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, a self assessment tool that categorizes individuals into one of four temperaments. The sequel, please understand me too, expands on this theory, offering in-depth descriptions of the four temperaments and their associated behaviors in various aspects of life, such as mating, parenting, and leadership. How did the moment when you said, okay, that's me. How did that moment influence your career?

Linda Berens  [00:10:53]:
The question about how did my awareness of my personality type help me along the way? I think I just felt freer to pursue avenues of inquiry, to become an expert, which was really what I wanted. I learned not only Keirsey's stuff. I studied a little bit about disc and social styles. I learned the Jungian approach and the eight function model was just coming on. I was part of the association for psychological type. I think the whole career path learns just following this constant desire to become an expert and to share knowledge, and that's what I do now. The most frustrating thing for me is as the knowledge expands and I can't be expert enough. So there's always more stuff now in its culture.

Linda Berens  [00:11:47]:
So I should probably learn about culture. Although at my age, I've decided that there are some people who know about it more than me, so I can just consult them.

Olivier Caudron [00:11:55]:
I'm sure you will end up studying cultures.

Linda Berens  [00:11:58]:
Maybe. Oh, I one other thing. In 2017, I switched to doing online courses. So I'm studying those things. And with COVID, there were more products. So I'm constantly wanting to learn more products and make things better. That's another aspect of my personality. People with my preferences and some others want to always improve whatever it is.

Olivier Caudron [00:12:20]:
Linda identified the core psychological needs of the pattern: Individuals unconsciously and consciously seek every avenue to have these needs met. For some of us, the core needs are for finding a unique identity and meaning that comes from having a sense of purpose and working towards a greater good. For others, their core needs are for having a place to contribute belonging and security. For others, the core needs are for mastery of concepts, knowledge, and competence. For others, their core needs are to have the freedom to act without hindrance and to see a marked results from action. We can resonate with all those needs, but those that are at our core will energize us when met and we feel stressed when they aren't.

Linda Berens  [00:13:21]:
It's just, I don't know, satisfaction that comes from feeling on track, even though there's the dissatisfaction of never knowing enough.

Olivier Caudron [00:13:31]:
In the introduction, I was sharing my own experience with my first MBTI results that helped me to feel more confident. It is when I started studying with you that I really recognized myself and recognize my strengths. How did you manage to gather all those different tools in order to help people to reach their interest strength?

Linda Berens  [00:13:57]:
It's because I started with Keirsey's temperament theory with war patterns. And then there was a conflict with what I would call the Myers Briggs community, where it's extroversion introversion, sensing, intuiting, thinking, feeling, judging, perceiving. Coming from this other perspective, I started to see some holes in the practices. I wanted to do it better. And DISC came out and was popular, and I started to see those connections.

Olivier Caudron [00:14:26]:
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.

Linda Berens  [00:14:46]:
This is interesting. Part of it was an art class that I had to take in my undergrad to get a bachelor's degree, and it was also a prereq to a class I had to take for an elementary teaching credential in art. In this first art class, our first assignment was to come back with 20 objects that were different shades of white. So what we learned was white is not just white, and there are many shades. There was something fundamental about the art class. I learned different views. We would produce pictures, and we had to map them. The the blank stuff that goes around the picture to create a space between it and the frame This is a very simple thing I've learned.

Linda Berens  [00:15:28]:
You're gonna need to measure three times if you want that to be equal. If you only measure two inches up here and two inches partway down, the line's gonna be crooked. And surveyors take multiple data points. It's just something that you have to do if you wanna be accurate. I learned about triangulation. So the process that emerged out of these studies came rather natural to me, knowing temperament, essential motivators, interaction styles, and the yogi based type gives you a different view, so you'll be more accurate. The more I had to explain this multiple model approach, the more I started talking about the three data points and each lens brings a different kind of information. Now that's different than the mat where it's two inches all the way down, But having these different perspectives give you different information.

Olivier Caudron [00:16:25]:
Yeah. And that's why you were explaining that there is not only one white. It's the mix of the different whites.

Linda Berens  [00:16:32]:
Right.

Olivier Caudron [00:16:32]:
That's the idea, the mix of the three data points and being open to different shades of white.

Linda Berens  [00:16:40]:
There are different shades of any color. I may see something yellow and they'll say, no, it's green. And that'll be right because it's a subjective thing. So I developed my measurement eye, I developed my color eye and I developed other parts of my brain to sort of naturally look for other perspectives.

Olivier Caudron [00:17:00]:
Now I am wondering if we are not missing one strength. We have the inner strength, the interpersonal strength. So we have what is going on in the head. We have what's going on around us and how we manage it. You were talking of three data points. This is why I say we are missing one data point for the strengths. The third strength I would identify is the physical strength. I'm referring to the essential motivators, how we have the strengths, the courage to do what we want to do and how we are doing it.

Olivier Caudron [00:17:39]:
And listening to you, sharing your story in Kansas and being someone who Linda developed the essential motivators model based on David Keirsey's temperament theory, offering a refined framework to identify core motivations and talents. This model integrates with the 16 Jungian based personality type, enhancing understanding of individual differences and fostering personal growth. This model extends Curtis' work, providing deeper insights into human behavior and motivations and demonstrating the adaptability of temperament theory in modern psychology. A girl who wanted to study it and have to make your voice heard to overcome those challenges. If I am thinking about myself too, I know that it's not only how I thought about things. It's not only how I was interacting with others, but also how I was able to manage situations and feel them in my gut. So that's really the physical relation. What do you think about?

Linda Berens  [00:18:54]:
What you're talking about is embodiment, right? Yeah. There's a story about people in my pattern. Some woman, very similar, not exactly the same type, but same essential motivator pattern who said that her body was just something to carry her head around. The way that works for me is to realize that there's more to me than my head, but we analyze it constantly. And knowing that I can, force myself to exercise consciously learning more about my body by recognizing not just that my way is not the only way and there are other ways to be that are all needed. So then I can allow myself open up and develop more. And then I can let you be you instead of trying to make you over and other people be them.

Olivier Caudron [00:19:47]:
So what do you suggest for our listeners wondering how they could reveal their inner strength?

Linda Berens  [00:19:55]:
Find an interStrength practitioner to facilitate self discovery. We have some workbooks designed for self discovery. There's a lot on our website, so it's really looking at the patterns and trying them on like shoes.

Olivier Caudron [00:20:10]:
Yeah. The whole shoe.

Linda Berens  [00:20:12]:
You don't want to just try on the sole because it might rub your heels.

Olivier Caudron [00:20:15]:
And not necessarily always the same shoe. We know people who are happy with one kind of sneakers, and they are buying every time the same sneakers. Revealing the interest strengths, we might need sometimes to try a boot rather than a sneaker. Or if you have ice cream flavors, I know people who always choose chocolate. The interstrengths approach, it's about daring to try something different. Open our mind to another lens or another ice cream flavor that could be vanilla, but that could be also strawberry. And then realizing that, oh, yeah. Even though I love chocolate, I love also to have chocolate and strawberry.

Olivier Caudron [00:21:01]:
That makes me feel more w h o l e. My personality, it's not only defined by the MBTI results. The results gave me information, but the more I am exploring with specific lenses, the more I have a better understanding of myself.

Linda Berens  [00:21:22]:
Yeah. I think it's not only the lenses. Some of it's around self development. My capacities for attending to people's needs have increased greatly, not only for my training as a therapist, but just for my awareness that got increased by understanding other people's differences and learning to notice what's needed in the situation, as opposed to what I'm most inclined to do. The other piece, when you talked about the shoes, I remember this phrase, walk a mile in someone's shoes. That's what we're trying to do to help with the interpersonal piece. You know, part of that's making space for others. That's perspective taking and perspective shifting that we've talked about.

Linda Berens  [00:22:05]:
Coming from a particular perspective, recognizing that perspective and speaking to it can be very helpful to that person to show that you understand them, not to be used to manipulate them because they'll pick that up and that'll cause harm. But just to meet them at their view of the world, by experiencing other people, we start to have more capacity to fill into people who are different from us. And then in times of difficulties, have more interpersonal skill. Even though my husband and myself have the same patterns, I really still need to see that he's different from me in more ways than gender. And his perspectives are uncertain things. We're really at odds. Then I need to think about, oh, okay. I wonder what he's worried about with this, whereas I'm not worried about it.

Linda Berens  [00:22:58]:
Hopefully, that will transfer if we do this enough, and we'll have world peace.

Olivier Caudron [00:23:05]:
At the beginning of the episode, I promised you some practical insights. Here you go. The inter strength allows you to understand yourself and others more deeply, leading to improved personal growth and fulfillment and enhanced relationships with others. The development of your interest strength is facilitated through self discovery and the understanding of personality differences. This process involves recognizing your core psychological needs and drives, taking actions to meet these needs, and being aware of stressors that arise when these needs are unmet. Additionally, we emphasized the importance of embracing different perspectives and practicing perspective taking and shifting. Remember to walk the mile in someone's shoes before using your old good ways to react. Doing so will enhance interpersonal skills and empathy, improving your relationships.

Olivier Caudron [00:24:15]:
Working with an inter strengths practitioner to facilitate self discovery will help you develop and strengthen your psychological and interpersonal strengths. To learn more about the Interstrengths approach or to find an Interstrengths practitioner, visit interstrengths.org. 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 beyondpersonalitytypes. Thanks again for tuning in. We are Olivier Caudron and Linda Berens.

Olivier Caudron [00:25:15]:
Stay curious and eager to learn until we meet again in our next episode.