Linda Berens on Creating and Validating the Interaction Styles Framework

Discover the origins and validation of the Interaction Styles framework in this debut episode of Beyond Personality Types. Hosts Dr. Linda Berens and Olivier Caudron explore how interaction styles evolved from models like DISC and social styles, discuss the importance of holistic pattern recognition, and share how this lens transforms type practice beyond MBTI codes. Learn practical insights for self-discovery, team dynamics, and professional growth as Linda reveals her process of creating, testing, and refining the interaction styles approach. Perfect for personality type practitioners ready to deepen their understanding and embrace flexible, people-centered models.

💬 Keywords

personality types, interaction styles, MBTI, DISC model, social styles, Linda Berens, Olivier Caudron, Interstrength Institute, type practitioner, typology, Jungian theory, personality assessment, self-discovery, team dynamics, behavior patterns, In Charge, Get Things Going, Chart the Course, Behind the Scenes, type code, pattern recognition, self-identification, group facilitation, type workshops, personality theory, body language, communication styles, energy patterns, training resources, practical insights, adaptability

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 Interstrings 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. Why do some people thrive on taking charge while others excel at quietly orchestrating from behind the scenes? And what does this really tell us about personality type? Hello and thank you for tuning in. Welcome to the very first episode of our special series on interaction styles here at Beyond Personality Types.

Olivier Caudron [00:01:22]:
If you're a type practitioner or enthusiast ready to go deeper than MBTI codes and and familiar frameworks, this series is designed just for you. Today, Linda takes us back to the origins of the interaction styles lens, revealing how it evolved, how it relates to other popular models like disc and social styles, and why focusing on patterns can transform how you guide others and talk about time Type. By the end of this episode, you'll be inspired to experiment with different type lenses and gain practical insights on how to creatively adapt and refine them to fit the unique needs of your clients and communities. Let's see how understanding the origins and foundation flexibility of interaction styles helps us go beyond personality types. How did your last meeting go? How did you reach your goal as a team? Who in the team motivates you the most and who doesn't? How would you have managed that sensitive step differently? Why did they not listen to you? We would like everybody to be like ourselves. Unfortunately or fortunately, we are not all the same. Yet there is a solution. Knowing oneself better to live better with other people.

Olivier Caudron [00:03:10]:
The Interstrength Institute research on personality types identified four different patterns related to to the interactions. Hence the name of the lens, Interaction styles. Linda, what is the origin of the interaction style Lens?

Linda Berens  [00:03:30]:
Oh my goodness. Back in the early days, fairly early days of type maybe I had been involved for about five or six years. Disc came out, the disc test. I took it. I didn't relate to anything, nothing fit me. Other people took it. I remember that we were at a conference and some people said, well, I wonder how type Myers brings in. The Jungian stuff relates to disc and my stance was it's getting at different information so don't try to confuse them.

Linda Berens  [00:04:08]:
Interestingly, the disc is based on a model that was developed in the 20s. In the 1920s, the same time Jung was Thinking about personality type and other people. Another book came out on social styles. I read that book and I pretty much liked what they had to say. We started just playing with how might it match? In our certification workshops for the Myers Briggs, we put a little tape on the floor that made a matrix. We had people go there. By this time we would have known their full type. We had a hypothesis that certain letters in the type code went with each of these four different ways of being that related to disc and the four social styles.

Linda Berens  [00:04:57]:
We put them stand up and then I would tell them some things about them. Then they would say, yes, no, whatever. I went to the social styles. We like this. The facilitators. And I liked this. And we didn't really have a name for what they were, but we were thinking about these. What would it be? I went to the book by Robert Bolton and Dorothy Grover Bolton called People Styles at Work.

Linda Berens  [00:05:25]:
In that book, I read about these four styles that they talked about. They called them driver analytical, they amiable and expressive. And I thought, well, that kind of matches some of these patterns. If I took each of the 16 personality types and said, which one would be more of a driver? Which would one be more analytical? Which one would be more amiable and which would be more expressive, it's pretty clear that they would fall into this, at least most of them. When I worked with someone who knew social styles and he said, oh, you're an amiable driver. I'm like, what? And I went, I don't know. So I read those things and I thought, okay, now what can I take? If we put these people together in these groups by looking at different type codes and not sticking with E, I, S, N, T, F, J, T. Kirzy looked at the type codes.

Linda Berens  [00:06:26]:
This is my model for this. He looked at the type codes that Isabel Myers had created and saw that these ancient patterns from many years ago and said, if we took the 16 types, we could put those with S and P in their code, which we now call improviser, and those with S and J in their code, what we now call stabilizer, and those with N and T in their code with what we now call theorist, and N and F, what we call catalyst. The ground had already been broken by David Keirsey in my mind for the legitimacy of just looking at those different type codes. Because each of the type codes stood for a whole personality type pattern. We could just take those whole patterns and cluster them to see what works. We weren't using their material completely. So I wrote some descriptions and we didn't want to use their terms because we were talking about something else and we were looking for something that was a little more descriptive and user friendly in our view. We came up with in charge for what they call driver, which I think is high D on disc.

Linda Berens  [00:07:33]:
If I remember right, for chart the course we related to analytical which relate.

Olivier Caudron [00:07:40]:
To C in the disc.

Linda Berens  [00:07:42]:
Yes, C in the disc. Then the amiable we related to. We called it behind the scenes which relates to S in the disc. Then the expressive, the disc I we call get things going. So we had in charge get things going, chart the course and behind the scenes these were really just a match of patterns. And then the next step we had, and I don't even know if we had named them by this point, but at the next step we had was we wrote up some descriptions and I went around to type conferences and I asked people to set aside what they knew about the type code because in the Jungian framework it's the two letters in the type code that you're looking at and then the extroversion, introversion and then that correlates to Jung. The JP doesn't correlate to Jung because Jung didn't go there. So anyway, we would say we would get people into groups, we would explain the patterns that we saw, have them get into groups by the patterns and then talk about how the type fit.

Linda Berens  [00:08:50]:
And we got a bunch of resistance, oh, this doesn't make sense, blah blah blah. But it took off and people liked it. We developed more descriptions, more resources for people to self identify. And then there was a way to relate it back to the type code, but not as clear cut as Kersey's. I guess it turned out that it was for chart the course it related to people with N and J and S and T preferences in that type code we had intj, istj, infj and istp. If you have a chart the course pattern, it's a drive to anticipate what's going to happen, have a course of action, not a plan of action because plan sounds a little bit too step by step, but a course of action to anticipate. For in charge it's ENTJ and enfj, so it's still NJ and it's ESTJ and estp, so it's st. If you have an in charge pattern, there's a drive to accomplish something.

Linda Berens  [00:10:00]:
And then behind the scenes the type codes were ntp, nfp, SFJ and sfp. If you look at the type code, for example, in this behind the scenes Group, you'll see three of them have an F in the type code, so feeling preference. And then one has intp. So it's a T. Basically, when we're clustering these four, there's always one that's a little bit different than you would expect. And in this case it's the intp. And I'll just back up to in charge to say that. So for in charge, you have all three have thinking preferences, except for one, which has enfj, which has feeling preference.

Linda Berens  [00:10:47]:
In some ways, some of the stereotypes of in charge, especially those that come from disc or Bolton and Bolton, don't match. So get things going. When we look at the four type codes here clearly, and it kind of goes with get things going, there's a preference for extraversion for all four, for entp, esfp, enfj, and esfj. This is one of those where the odd one out is the ENTP in terms of what you might expect from the type code. Going back to how I did this, when I read those descriptions, I say, okay, I can see how that fits. Say for example, ENTJ and ESTJ and estp, but I don't see how it fits enfj. So what would we have to do to this description and what kind of adjectives? What would we change? We tweaked all of those kinds of things. It never really was taking any of those descriptions wholesale, but taking kind of the words and the meanings and coming up with some kind of descriptors.

Linda Berens  [00:11:47]:
We tested this out with people, many people. I would give them some descriptions, tell me how this relates, and then send it back to me and tell me what your type preferences are. Very often, some of the people that I had more interaction with would discover that their type preferences didn't match their interaction style preference. And then they went back and kind of revisited the whole thing. So we worked hard to keep that kind of language out of the description when we described it. And what is it? That is just interaction styles. We came up with a handout happens to be on page eight in Understanding Yourself and Others. An Introduction to Interaction Styles.

Linda Berens  [00:12:28]:
We came up with a handout with some bullet points. But to try to take care of those variations, the last four bullet points were what. Take those into account. For each of those four patterns, you.

Olivier Caudron [00:12:39]:
Came with the bullet points. And how did it help to develop the interaction styles?

Linda Berens  [00:12:44]:
People, when they were doing type workshops, would, who, like this, would use that handout. That's all we had at first was that handout. Then we started verifying it Trying out words with people and doing workshops. Before I did this, I had been doing MBTI qualifying programs which were a five or six day program with the type resources program. And we're talking in the 90s, early 2000. It was very busy time with Myers Briggs programs. People wanted to get what we now call certified. They wanted to get qualified to purchase the instrument.

Linda Berens  [00:13:25]:
And what was going on in the world was Deming and teamwork. And for some of you who recognize Deming as a name, but there was a whole lot about teamwork. Even managers of teams were coming to the workshops. We had a lot of people and I did one of those workshops almost every month, sometimes two a month around the country and in Australia. So I got to watch each of the 16 types present themselves to the group. And if we didn't have those people, we had video that we would play and we recorded them all. I have boxes of recordings, don't have a VCR anymore, but I could access them and look at them. But it was that experience that gave me a sense of the whole type by itself.

Linda Berens  [00:14:07]:
So that when I was working on those descriptions I was able to bring that like, oh, this isn't that pattern. This won't match. Like this won't match all four of those patterns to the party. And then we had several people in our community who had deep levels. We kind of wordsmithed them together. And then as I said, we went out to APT programs, the association for Psychological Type Programs. And I gave people the handout for the type, the description that fit them and asked them to mark it up and send it back to me. And they did.

Linda Berens  [00:14:40]:
So that was how we verified the descriptions. It became really popular. It was a very easy thing for people to see. Then they would say, oh yeah, these differences exist. And then they learned what to do with them, how to appreciate somebody else who has a different style and not make assumptions that they're being bossy or that they're being non participative. It's just been used a whole lot. This is book 2.0. I think we're probably about ready for 3.0 to come out just because we learned more things.

Linda Berens  [00:15:11]:
Things like, oh, let's say behind the scenes these words are too much like the ISFJ version and doesn't meet the needs of the NTP version. But it's just learning how to better communicate that.

Olivier Caudron [00:15:24]:
In what other field does the interaction style lens applied?

Linda Berens  [00:15:30]:
There's a difference in our energy, how we hold our bodies even to some degree, and how we tend to move. There's some research on the relationship between.

Olivier Caudron [00:15:39]:
Movement patterns Linda is talking about research done by Andy Cole for his master's thesis in 2016 called Does Body Language Communicate Observable Behavioral Patterns of Behrend's Interaction Styles at the University of Worcester, uk, he conducted an experiment to see if the ideas about body language in Dr. Linda Behren's theory of interaction styles could be observed in real life. An actor performed four short films, each showing different characteristics related to appearance and talents. People watched the films and then chose words from the theory to describe the actor's personality. The results supported the idea that body language does communicate personality traits. The descriptions people gave followed clear patterns that matched Dr. Baron's interaction styles. In fact, 10 specific words from the theories stood out strongly showing those personality traits were clearly the study suggests more research should be done to explore the full body language model by Linda Behrens.

Olivier Caudron [00:17:00]:
It also recommends creating special training materials to help professionals use this knowledge in their work. Building on this research, Andy Cole created a four minute training video called the Meeting Interaction Styles in Motion. The video clearly demonstrates the four interaction styles through four actors movement, Speech and Focus. It can be used with or without sound to help people recognize the different energy patterns and communication styles in action. The video is available for purchase on interstrengths.org offering an accessible way to bring these insights into training sessions and professional development.

Linda Berens  [00:17:49]:
One of the principles of the inner strength approach is that we look at patterns first, partly because in Western culture especially we're used to looking at parts and adding them up and that doesn't work so well. That's one of the reasons, I think the Myers Briggs itself, or any instrument that does that asks you to sort on separate things may not be as accurate as it could be. We have these four patterns that we can describe. I'll tell you in workshops people go, oh yeah, that's me in charge. Chart the course, Get Things Going behind the Scenes.

Olivier Caudron [00:18:27]:
As we close out this very first episode in our new series on interaction styles, let's reflect on what we've learned and what's ahead. For all the Thai practitioners and enthusiasts, listening today was not just a history lesson. Linda Behrens offered us a behind the scenes look at how interaction styles evolved, how they connect to and diverge from other popular models, and why paying attention to patterns rather than isolated details truly transform our understanding. A key lesson from this episode is the value of curiosity and openness. By questioning existing systems, experimenting with new groupings and remaining responsive to real world feedback, Linda has shown us that our understanding of personality is always great. This perspective empowers us as practitioners to continually refine our approaches and reminds us to observe people holistically without reducing them to static categories. We also touched on how interaction styles reach beyond the workshop, showing up in our body language, our energy, and the subtle ways we navigate the world. As you deepen your studies and help others on their journeys, let today's insights encourage you to look for those living, breathing patterns in every interaction.

Olivier Caudron [00:20:15]:
And remember, this is just the beginning. In this series, we'll dive even deeper into each interaction style, explore practical tools, and share real life stories to enrich your practice. Whether you're helping teams work better, guiding individuals toward self discovery, or seeking to expand your own understanding, we invite you to keep exploring this lens with us. 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 Types thanks again for tuning in.

Olivier Caudron [00:21:18]:
We are Olivier Codron and Linda Behrens. Stay curious and eager to learn until we meet again in our next episode.