The Promise and Pitfalls of Typology as a Self-Development Method

In this episode of Beyond Personality Types, host Olivier Caudron and expert Linda Berens explore the true promise and potential pitfalls of using typology and personality type frameworks for self-development. Discover the difference between efficiency and effectiveness in type work, why best-fit matters more than labels, and how to apply personality theories ethically and holistically. Perfect for coaches, practitioners, and enthusiasts looking to deepen their approach to the MBTI, Interstrength, and other type systems—while supporting real, sustainable growth and self-awareness.

💬 Keywords

personality types, typology, efficiency, effectiveness, self development, ethical use, personality assessments, MBTI, InnerStrength approach, type theories, coaching, self discovery, patterns, personal growth, career fit, best fit, labeling, identity, self awareness, psychological needs, skills, preferences, facilitator, language of type, personal satisfaction, energy management, ethical practice, labels and stereotypes, type development, self reflection

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 InterStrength 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 Dr. Linda Berens, internationally renowned for her innovative typology approach. Come with us beyond the indicator results to rethink what you know about personality types. Is your use of personality type approaches truly efficient or just effective? And what's the difference between the two when it comes to fostering real growth? Hello and thank you for tuning in. In this episode of Beyond Personality Types, we dive into the heart of a crucial debate for type enthusiasts and what does it take for a typology approach to be genuinely efficient, not just effective? With the guidance of Dr.

Olivier Caudron [00:01:27]:
Linda Berens, we'll unpack how efficiency requires more than quick results demanding accuracy, ethical application and genuine personal fit. While distinguishing it from mere effectiveness. You'll come away with greater clarity on how to evaluate and improve your own use of type theories, ensuring you offer clients and yourself the most impactful and responsible support on the journey of development. Let's see how efficiency will help us go beyond personality types.

Olivier Caudron [00:02:07]:
Typology is a classification, especially in archaeology, psychology or the social sciences. The success of those approaches to identify a personality proves a need for many people to know their preferences. There are also plenty of information that one could use as a map to enjoy life better. Linda, what do you think about that statement? Typology is an efficient self development tool?

Linda Berens [00:02:39]:
Well, it depends on what you mean by efficiency. When you talk to me about having this topic, I went to my favorite website, Dictionary.com efficient means generally that things are functioning in the best possible manner is one of the definitions you have least waste of resources or effort. Efficient is something that does whatever it's supposed to do with not a lot of effort. There's another definition that says producing an effect as a cause and it's causative. Personality type or awareness of our personality patterns can be causative and it can actually be efficient. The process itself can be very inefficient because shortcuts are taken. Like if you take a personality test, you get a result that says okay, I'm an istj and it tells me some stuff about what that means. And I say, oh yeah, I do that, I do that.

Linda Berens [00:03:51]:
Okay, all right, so I think I'll go get a job as an accountant. Believe me, you do not want me to have a job as an accountant. That doesn't mean I couldn't do it. It's not efficient because it would take a lot of energy for me to master that craft and sustain that over time and be rewarded by it. There might be some other things in my job that would make it more satisfying for me. It doesn't mean that it was a big failure, but it would not be efficient because it might not get right at it. So it might not cause the result. You're trying to get efficient and effective kind of go along together.

Linda Berens [00:04:32]:
Then I wondered, well, somebody might say, well, Linda, your way, or the inner strength approach isn't very efficient because it takes a little longer. And I would say, but it's effective. And if I want it to be causative to get the results that we're trying to get, then it's worth it. Because if you take a personality test or if somebody gives you one and they're a practitioner, but they only interpret E versus I, S versus N, T versus F, J versus P. Part of it, there's this margin of error. So it might not be accurate or it might not be very effective in the long run, it's not efficient. The issue around efficiency for me is is it actually getting the results that you want to get? If something is efficient, we often think it gets something done more quickly. But you can't have good efficiency without effectiveness.

Linda Berens [00:05:30]:
If it's done quickly and it looks efficient because, oh, I got some results here, then it has to be redone. It's like buying a cheap brand of paint with not very good paintbrush. You paint the wood around your deck. It's not a good brand and it feels off. It was efficient to get the house painted, but it wasn't a really effective paint. Back to your main point though.

Olivier Caudron [00:05:58]:
Yeah.

Linda Berens [00:05:59]:
I've had people say, if I had only known this about myself years ago, I wouldn't have made those mistakes. I wouldn't have been so down on myself because I wasn't matching what society seemed to want of me. If only I'd known this, I never would have married my husband. Well, that's not effective at all. Okay, so it has to do with what are the appropriate uses and the ethical uses of personality type information, what kind of results you get and what it can do to contribute to having a better life and having people feel more productive, effective, feel good about themselves.

Olivier Caudron [00:06:39]:
Maybe it's not an efficient self development tool, but could be an efficient therapeutic tool. With your example, if I'm alone reading my results or, or thinking about my type I might choose the path of disappointment, thinking I shouldn't have married my husband or my wife. That's not very constructive or effective. Now, if we talk about a therapeutic tool, a professional can help you efficiently to feel better, make better decisions. Even though I keep thinking that it's a good self development tool, we can talk about it later. As a coach myself, I know that when I'm using typology or the interstrength approach, it gives clues about efficient ways to deal with an issue or to make a decision. Rather than looking backward, it's looking forward here and now.

Linda Berens [00:07:47]:
And looking forward, there are several things. One is it used to be that the Myers Briggs, for example, you had to be a psychologist to purchase it. Maybe you could be a school counselor. My training was a master's in counseling. I was educationally qualified because I had one class in tests and measures. I had a license that would allow me to purchase it. Then there was a realization that this information could be shared appropriately if the person facilitating it had ethical principles to follow and they were trained in both the theory and the ethical practice. Then MBTI qualifying programs started up.

Linda Berens [00:08:33]:
And in those programs which I taught for a number of years, I had to teach a component on ethics which covered how you interpret this, the fact that you don't use the instrument for a selection, hence you wouldn't use it to select a husband or a spouse. What it does is it highlights potential points of conflict, potential synergies. It's not even predictive of those points of conflict. It's never used for selection because there's no research that supports that. The things that make you good at your job, for example, aren't always your personality preferences. They have to do with the skills that you have. Granted that certain people with certain preferences, like me with INTP preferences, the attention to detail and logistics involved in accounting, I could do that. I could get the skill to do that.

Linda Berens [00:09:32]:
I could do it very well, but it wouldn't necessarily line up with what my personality patterns are. I might take a job if I needed a job and did it, and maybe I got a degree in that because that's what my father did, I might find it taking a little extra energy. Okay, so now I go look for another job and I can translate that skills. Having come from a bit of career counseling field in my day, I learned how to reinterpret skills into something else that is more aligned with what I'm inclined to do. Now there are many other things besides personality preferences that have to do with what you're well suited to do. Some of those things have only come into popularity and use recently. And that has to do with what is your purpose. There's the whole idea that we have a purpose in life.

Linda Berens [00:10:25]:
We're born to do certain things. It turns out that for my preferences, you wouldn't predict that I would become a counselor. I got trained in the skills that are required. Now I have my own little twist on it, and I probably am better with some clients than others. But I got trained in what does the counselor do? What are the skills that are required? And I learned to execute all of these different kinds of tools. Having that as a language is helpful regardless of whether you're aligned with the career. You can understand what your talents might be, and then you can be drawn and choose to follow those. But if your purpose doesn't match, and you often tell your purpose by what you're naturally drawn to do, I often ask people, what did you want to be when you grew up? And sometimes that's a purpose that comes on board very early.

Linda Berens [00:11:23]:
I don't know how I got into mine. Teacher. Oh, there are jobs for counselors. So I get a counseling master's degree, get a job in the school. Well, there weren't jobs there. So I go away to Belgium to live for a while while my husband worked there, come back, get a PhD and become a school psychologist and get my doctorate. How I am. I'm teaching about personality type and doing coaching.

Linda Berens [00:11:51]:
My husband has the same pattern. He has no desire whatsoever to do the same things. It's always pretty complex how it works, but sometimes people are looking for answers from the personality type. Like, tell me what the answer is. It's only efficient if you get people to their best fit. It's not efficient because people get a label.

Olivier Caudron [00:12:14]:
Explain that a little bit more. What difference do you do between getting a best fit and being labeled?

Linda Berens [00:12:22]:
Personality assessment looks like a test, smells like a test. So people think it's a test. And tests have right and wrong answers. There's a tendency to take those for accuracy. And you're giving some descriptions by people who don't know the 16 types that well. What's their expertise? What's their credibility? Then you take that on as your identity and what you do. That's what many people tend to do. I had somebody who was working for me who was helping clean the house.

Linda Berens [00:12:51]:
He took this personality test and he came back and he was all excited. It didn't match what I saw in him. We chat along the way and I always ask People what they're doing and what do you want to be when you grow up and things like that. And it did not match at all. So I suggested that he look at something else. And he found something in the booklets that we had written that fit better, that then freed him up to be more energized. The downside is if you get a label that doesn't fit, you may constantly feel like you're not measuring up to that because, oh, that's what I am. If I were that, I'd really be able to do this better.

Olivier Caudron [00:13:34]:
Yeah, But Linda, he was enthusiastic about the label he got, so that was.

Linda Berens [00:13:43]:
Helpful for him to some degree.

Olivier Caudron [00:13:45]:
To some degree.

Linda Berens [00:13:47]:
But it didn't nail him. I don't like that term didn't nail him, but it wasn't as freeing as something that is accurate can be.

Olivier Caudron [00:13:57]:
Okay, I love your example because it underlines something. I am suspecting the label he got was freeing him. Maybe that was answering some questions, but not all questions. The work he did with you was to widen his personality to reach a pattern and a preference.

Linda Berens [00:14:23]:
Yeah, there was enough of it. There was enough element of truth in it that fit him better. But did it get to his core psychological needs? Probably not. Would it be a good thing for him to pursue careers related to that? Well, maybe you really can't know about the careers. Like I said, you can have skill and do a career well, even though the typology doesn't match what the usual skill set is. So a misidentification becomes the story we tell, tell ourselves about who we are and with some limits of what we might do that sort of is inspired there. One of our students shared with me that she had taken the Myers Briggs and she came out with a type pattern that said intp. She read the description they had and enough of it fit her that it was okay.

Linda Berens [00:15:17]:
But because she already knew our lenses when she looked at essential motivators, she knew that she didn't have INTP preferences, that she has ISTP preferences. Part of it was because theorist was not. She likes theories, but that's not her behavior. So it was more the improviser pattern. So you have a lot of people who take those instruments or read about them in the newspaper and the magazines about, oh, the Myers Briggs isn't any good, et cetera. And I took it once and I came out INFP and another time I took it out INTJ and yada, yada, yada. Well, there are all these different conditions and you're looking at an instrument that is really just a likely fit, not always the best fit. Having some process, at a minimum, of suggesting more than one pattern for people to read, even if their scores are extreme.

Linda Berens [00:16:13]:
For example, having a map to look at about who you are and perhaps even if you get the map that includes what we call type development can open your mind to exploring things that you might just reject out of hand. Before, in my case, I wound up in this master's in counseling because there were jobs. I happened to have David Kersey as the architect of the program. And we Learned at least 16 different therapeutic techniques or practices to use with clients. They had different purposes, different outcomes, and then we had to practice that. It was a six unit class. It had no class meetings, it went over two semesters. All we had to do was practice the techniques, write up something, or make a video, or submit an audio of us doing the practice.

Linda Berens [00:17:08]:
So we learned the skill of all of those practices. And when I get out in the field, I don't use most of them. I have them to call on if I find somebody who seems to need a certain kind of thing. Anybody can do that if they have enough capacity to learn those things and they do enough practice. I wasn't drawn to that because of my personality type. I was drawn to it because there were jobs. I. I always wanted to be a teacher.

Linda Berens [00:17:36]:
Growing up in Kansas, in a small town, we had school counselors. They gave us personality tests. They didn't really do any counseling. And that was only my senior year. I didn't even know what that was until much later. I just wound up in this field because of the job. And then when I stayed with it because my job went away, school budgets cut, school counselors went away. I was already into the material and fascinated by it.

Linda Berens [00:18:12]:
So that became my passion to do something. I've always been a change agent.

Olivier Caudron [00:18:20]:
The typology approach will not explain everything. And yet, listening to you, it is also a part of your personality that helped you to fit better in that area that maybe was not yours at the beginning. Back to the statement. The typology approach is an efficient self development tool.

Linda Berens [00:18:46]:
I was thinking about something you mentioned in the note you sent me about the topic today. It's a need for people to know their preferences. And in that way, if we have a language to understand our preferences, which is what we're naturally inclined to do, then that may mean we're going with the flow of the river as opposed to going upstream against the river. That can be very helpful when it becomes an absolute kind of Thing, oh, I'm a this, therefore I don't. And when the descriptions provided to someone have a fair amount of bias in them so that that type is described negatively, then people don't want to be like that. Then it's oh well, it's worthless. There's a whole lot that goes into what makes it effective and what makes it efficient. It's efficient at least the inner strength approach.

Linda Berens [00:19:42]:
And there are other people doing good work with self discovery. But our particular approach uses different lenses that are easy to hang on to. Four patterns with names, four skill sets. So those give people a language that they can identify and use and put to use right away that is also efficient. And it's efficient in that by using multiple lenses and the different kind of information they provide gives us a broader view than just a personality type code. And that looks at two preference set of four preferences, for example. If also more efficient that way because we have different tools to apply to different situations instead of trying to apply a hammer in every situation.

Olivier Caudron [00:20:35]:
Yeah.

Linda Berens [00:20:36]:
You know, my husband hung the curtains this weekend. I, I think it would have been helpful if he had used a drill but we'd already gotten into it and it would take too much trouble to get the drill out. So it just took more energy to do. He managed to get it done. Efficiency has a lot to do with how much energy. And if he had a whole lot of drapes to have, he would probably get out the drill. But it wasn't worth it for six screws. The hammer worked well by the way.

Olivier Caudron [00:21:06]:
The framework that the interstrength approach gives to someone is energy efficient because you get support through the book, through the information. It's not like having to read a very big book and try to understand it. You can more easily stop and reflect. It's less energy than going to the therapist, talking to the therapist, feeling about it. I'm not saying that going to the therapist is not a good thing. Not at all. I keep going to the therapist. I'm just talking about having self development tools that I can use by myself to live a happy life.

Linda Berens [00:21:50]:
A happy life or a satisfying life.

Olivier Caudron [00:21:54]:
A satisfying life, yeah.

Linda Berens [00:21:56]:
In some ways the right tool for the job. If you want to look at these different models as tools. A process where I own the process, I'm in control of the process. I get to say what fits me and what doesn't. The facilitator doesn't or the book doesn't, or the test doesn't. It's really about facilitating increased self awareness which is very important skill these days, and maybe this is why there's such a passion for personality type on the web. It is important for us to have an individual identity and to know what that identity is. It can help us know about different aspects of that identity.

Linda Berens [00:22:38]:
As long as it's not labeling or putting in a box, it can be an efficient self development tool.

Olivier Caudron [00:22:47]:
As we wrap up today's episode of Beyond Personality Types, let's reflect on the key lessons we've explored around using typology as a tool for self development. Linda reminded us that while personality type frameworks can be both efficient and effective in fostering self awareness, their true value emerges when we move beyond simple labels. Efficiency isn't about rushing to a quick answer. It's about truly helping ourselves and others discover best fit patterns that unlock growth, satisfaction, and clear path forward in life and work. For those deeply engaged in type work, the takeaway is the way we use those tools matters. Simply handing someone a four letter code or a label isn't enough. Instead, our role is to facilitate a process where individuals gain a richer, more nuanced understanding of themselves. We must approach type with ethical care, avoid boxing people in, and remember that preferences are not prescriptions.

Olivier Caudron [00:24:05]:
Encouraging others to explore, question and refine their understanding ensures that the journey is both effective and energizing rather than draining or limiting. Linda's example reminded us that type, when used intentionally, provides a flexible language for understanding patterns, preferences, and potential, not a set of rules about who we must become as practitioners, educators, or lifelong learners. In the world of personality types, let's not settle for shortcuts and superficial answers. Let's embrace the beautiful complexity of human nature and offer tools and insights to help people lead more satisfying, empowered life. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. If you enjoyed this discussion, we'd really.

Olivier Caudron [00:25:12]:
Appreciate it if you could leave a.

Olivier Caudron [00:25:14]:
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 @BeyondPersonalitytypes. Thanks again for tuning in. We are Olivier Caudron and Linda Berens. Stay curious and eager to to learn until we meet again in our next episode.