Meta lessons: 1) self-awareness can move us from unintentional or unconscious to intentional actions, which will bring us to more integrated lives, and 2) we aim to give a curated, “best of” insights from all of our creative, personal, and professional development work of the last 20+ years.

Audio tutorial transcript // your creative personality

Nate: Back in 2018, I was working at HiRoad, a car insurance startup that uses a smartphone app to recognize and reward mindful drivers. It was the early days of defining the HiRoad brand, so our team had sketches and workflows and headlines and ideas all over the walls. 

One day my coworker Gareth’s wife came in to visit him at the office, and saw some of my headlines on the wall. I didn’t know it at the time, but she was Molly Owens, holder of a master’s degree in counseling psychology, and founder of Truity, the world leader in online personality testing. (Molly had been working in organizational development, and she founded Truity when she saw the huge gap between the enterprise-level assessments she was doing, and the trivial, fluffy personality quizzes people would do online.) Truity has now been around since 2012 and their tests are informed by rigorous research. Today they do over a million personality tests a month!

I know this because years after I left my job at HiRoad, Molly remembered those headlines on the wall and reached out to me. I’ve been doing freelance writing for Truity ever since, and part of my job has been to spend a lot of time thinking about Myers-Briggs, the Enneagram, the Big Five, and other personality tests. Truity has been one of the most fun clients I’ve ever had, because I get paid to work on something I’m already interested in.

I wanted to open with that anecdote first of all because it’s the perfect setup for this module on your creative personality. It’s also a good reminder to share your work with others, or as Austin Kleon says in his book Steal Like an Artist, “do good work and put it where people can see it.” You never know who might see (or hear) it.

Laura: You might be wondering at this point what in the world personality tests have to do with podcasting. 

Beneath that question of “why create” that we began with is another one: what kind of creator are you? 

Why create helps you know where you’re headed. But understanding your creative personality helps you to understand what you need to get there.

The tests we’ll discuss in this module all have significant supporting research, and some are more detailed than others. We’ve found that the best personality tests are like mirrors; they show us the truest versions of ourselves, and we can learn as much about that vision on the bad days as we can on the good ones.

***********

Nate: My own history with personality tests started in high school, when I got interested in Myers-Briggs after hearing my parents talk about it: you know, extraversion versus introversion, sensing versus intuition, thinking versus feeling, and judging versus perceiving. (You may have seen personality type nerds on Twitter or LinkedIn put “INTJ or “ENFP” or whatever on their profile.) I remember very clearly emerging into the sunlight that afternoon on the school campus, being pleased with how I’d scored: 25 to zero on Thinking versus Feeling! Emotions? We don’t need no stinkin’ emotions! 

Laura: thank goodness we didn’t meet back then!  

My first exposure to personality tests came when I met Nate’s family, who immediately sat me down with the book Please Understand Me so they could determine my Myers-Briggs type. And no, I’m not joking. This actually happened.

Fortunately, I was game. You might have noticed that we’re into self-reflection here at Shelter in Place, and over the years my interest in personality tests would evolve from the Myers-Briggs to the Big Five, Strengths Finder, Right Path, and the Enneagram. Each of those tests have helped me in different ways over the years, but maybe the most basic lesson I learned from all of them was that the way I experience this world is not the same way that everyone else experiences it. 

Once you really let that sink in, it accounts for a lot. Politics, relationship struggles, family dysfunction . . . seeing the world through the lens of different personality types wouldn’t solve our problems, but it might give us more compassion for each other’s differences.

Nate: In other words, people are innately different: different in how they make decisions, different in what drains or energizes them, different in how they run their lives, and different in how they process information. Some aspects of personality are shaped by our upbringing and environment, and can evolve over time. If we can keep that truth in mind in our relationships and our work, we’ll be a lot more gracious to others—and kinder to ourselves when we make mistakes. 

Laura: Years ago Nate and I took an assessment called RightPath, which focuses on leadership development and corporate consulting. One of the best insights from RightPath was the observation that personality traits fall along a bell curve, so the more extreme you are on a certain trait, the fewer other people you’ll encounter who will see the world the way you do in that area. 

It probably won’t shock you to learn that Nate and I both score very high on the “adventurous” factor; our position way out there on the edge of the bell curve is part of what made it possible for us to upend our life and start a podcast, move across the country and back, and create a training program—all in the middle of a pandemic! That’s an area where those outlier scores has really helped us.

But equally important is looking at the traits that can be our achilles heel; our second-highest score was on left side of the bell curve in the range of “unstructured” to “structured.” While some people may naturally gravitate to spreadsheets and systems, we’ve spent a lot of time looking at the blind spots our unstructured personalities present, and often bringing in outside help or advice to help us account for those weaknesses.

Nate: Another one of the tests I’ve worked on with Truity is Strength Finders, and Marcus Buckingham, one of the developers, had an insight that has stuck with me: A strength is not something you’re good at. A strength is something that makes you feel strong.

Laura: Put another way, what are you working on right now that energizes you? What are you working on that drains you? We all have to do work we don’t like sometimes, but all of us have subtle shifts we can make toward the work we find most life-giving. 

We’ve found this shift to be crucial for building sustainable creative rhythms. We don’t just want to equip you to create great podcast episodes; we want to equip you to keep creating for many years to come. 

Enneagram intro

Nate: The episode assigned for this week is one Laura did way back in season 1, and it’s the final installment in a series she did about the Enneagram.

If you aren’t familiar with the Enneagram, we recommend taking a look at the nine type descriptions and watching the videos included in this module. As someone who spent many hours writing scripts for them, I can say with confidence that they’ll give you a succinct picture of what the Enneagram is and how it can help us.  

Our Enneagram type (our adult patterns and central desires and fears) comes from the coping mechanisms we learned in childhood. For example, growing up in a household where negative emotions were not welcome, my type Seven tendency is to gloss over the negative, and make jokes when I feel uncomfortable—both in creative work and relationships. Intense emotions will probably always strain my internal resources, but being aware of this part of myself has helped me to work through conflict instead of avoiding it. 

Laura: One thing I love about the Enneagram is that no one type is better than another. Every type has a healthy, average, and unhealthy version of themselves. Truity uses kinder, more value-neutral language to describe these different versions, but the point is this: when we’re at our best, all of the types can be heroic. When we’re at our worst, we probably need help to get out of that unhealthy way of looking at the world. And also, it’s normal to shift between healthy, average, and even unhealthy. It’s all just part of being human.

Nate: Every type also has another type it moves to in strength and in stress. Once you know this about yourself, you can see it coming and make adjustments before you sink to that unhealthy version of yourself. 

Laura: But maybe the most important reason of all to consider the Enneagram—or any of these tests—is that it can give you clues to how you can use your strengths and even your struggles to find the approach to work and creativity that suits you best. 

If you’re an idealistic One, you might find that mission-driven work is what you need to feel satisfied. 

If you’re a Two who loves helping others, you might find a lot of joy in helping others create. 

If you’re a performing Three, you may find that you are most yourself when you’re hosting or speaking in front of crowds of people. 

If you’re a big-hearted Four, you may find a channel for all of those feelings in podcast episodes that don’t shy away from the harder parts of humanity. (And if you guessed that I’m a Four, you’re absolutely right. I talk about my journey of accepting that in this week’s episode, Special.)

If you’re an analytic Five, you might find yourself coming alive when you get deep into research, or when you can definitively solve a problem.

If you’re a loyal and skeptical Six, you might see the potential pitfalls in a project and know exactly how to avoid them.

If you’re a variety-seeking Seven, you might find the constant shift of podcast production exciting and invigorating. 

If you’re an Eight who thrives in a good argument, you may find your decisiveness and grit give you the stomach to tackle hard issues and difficult conversations.

If you’re a peacemaking Nine, you may find that your gift of bringing people and making them feel safe makes you a gifted interviewer that people intuitively trust.

Just as each type has potential strengths, they also have blind spots that can hurt their ability to work well alone or with others. 

The more familiar you become with your own strengths and struggles, the better equipped you’ll be to step away and take care of yourself when you find yourself reverting to that unhealthy version. The more you learn to recognize those traits and behaviors in others, the more gracious you can be when you see them struggling. 

Nate and I have gotten into some pretty heated creative disagreements over the years. Especially when I’m in my hurricane of feelings as a Four, it’s incredibly helpful for me to step out of it and remember that my creative partner has a very different way of seeing the thing we’re working on together. When I can shift my perspective and see things from his Seven point of view, we can usually extend empathy to each other and come to a resolution much more quickly.

Big Five intro

Nate: The final personality test we want to call your attention to is the Big Five, which is one that you’ll find a lot in professional psychology circles. There is some debate about the most helpful terms to use for the five factors, but you will often hear Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (the most awkward of the terms, which is why it’s sometimes referred to as Negative Emotionality or the far more palatable Emotional Stability.) 

Laura: Again, these categories are not meant to designate better or worse ways of being, just different ways of showing up in the world. We’ve found the Big Five to be particularly helpful when we’re making hiring decisions or putting together teams. 

I’ll give you an example of this. The first factor in the Big Five model is Openness. This is about your preference for abstractions, possibilities, experiments, and new experiences (as opposed to the concrete, tried-and-true, and traditional). 

Nate: Laura and I are both very high on the openness factor, and this has shaped our work with Shelter in Place from the very beginning. It’s a show about reimagining life, about adapting, about reexamining our values and ways of doing things and seeing if we can do them better. 

Laura: This also shows up in our training program, which is designed to move people through the different stages of podcast production week after week. We’ve found that the trainees who thrive in our program are consistently high in Openness. They find the shifting, changing, and adapting exciting and invigorating. It pushes them to be better creators who gain confidence in their ability to learn quickly. They don’t mind the messy middle of the creative process because they know that even challenging experiences will help them grow.

Nate: The second factor is Conscientiousness. This is shorthand for the ability to stay focused. People who are high in Conscientiousness are often orderly, dependable, and ambitious. Laura is higher on this factor than I am, and we have regularly had challenges because she wants to stick to a given task and see it through to an excellent conclusion, while I’m more apt to jump around in projects.

Our work experiences have also shaped us in this area. I’ve been in and around tech companies for decades, and often the prevailing thinking in startup circles is that it’s all about “minimum viable product,” which is more of a low-conscientiousness approach: just make it good enough, put it out there and get customer feedback, and then improve it. 

But Laura’s background in fiction writing has taught her just the opposite. Often with an agent or an editor, you get only one chance to submit your work, so you revise, revise, revise until it’s perfect—or as close to perfect as you can get it. 

While this difference in conscientiousness can be a source of tension in our working relationship, that tension has ultimately been good for both of us—and for the work we’re doing. Laura’s learned to let go of some of the perfectionism, and I’ve learned to value her drive and commitment to excellence.

Laura: the third factor, Extraversion (and its opposite, introversion) is one most of us are probably familiar with. Extraverts get energy from being around other people and in groups. Introverts recharge by being alone or with a close friend. One of the most helpful realizations for me, that I learned first with RightPath, that assessment that looked at categories in terms of a bell curve, is that in many of these categories, we can be what Rightpath calls “mid-range.” We’re right in the middle of the bell curve, which means that depending on the situation, we can show up differently. 

As someone who is smack in the middle of that bell curve, I can say that knowing this about myself has helped me to understand why I need to block off some of my schedule to meet new people and connect with friends, but I also need to block off whole days where I don’t see anyone and I have hours to write or edit audio. I’ve learned over time that dividing my work week into categories makes me a lot more efficient, and that I enjoy the work a lot more when I’m not continually switching from one extreme to the other. 

Nate: The fourth factor, Agreeableness, signifies our tendencies toward being sympathetic, accommodating, and team-oriented. For more agreeable folks, getting along with others is more important than getting individual needs met or accomplishing individual goals. Low agreeableness, on the other hand, means being more competitive, argumentative, and self-interested. 

Laura: Those terms don’t sound very value-neutral, and when I first learned about the Big Five I assumed that if you weren’t agreeable, it was bad. But over time I’ve come to understand that successful organizations often have people on both sides of that spectrum. Sure, it’s nice when everyone gets along, but people who score low on Agreeableness can be incredibly helpful and important when it comes to creative work. Some of my most influential writing teachers fell in this category; they pushed me to take creative risks I wouldn’t have on my own. Over time, I’ve learned to value people who are not agreeable, because if I’m open to hearing what they have to say, they will often prompt growth and change that can benefit everybody. 

Nate: Being aware of where you fall on this spectrum can help you determine whether someone will be a good potential fit for you as a creative partner. If you’re more agreeable, for example, you’ll likely find it exhausting and discouraging to partner with a more disagreeable person who’s always questioning and debating you. But if you’re low on Agreeableness, then that sort of back-and-forth might actually be stimulating and help you generate more ideas.

Laura: Finally, there’s the Big Five factor with the most off-putting name: neuroticism! Really?

I prefer the more neutral “emotional stability” for this one. Whatever you want to call it, this factor refers to our stress response, or how often and how loudly our emotional radar is pinging in response to our environment. If you happen to score high on this factor, like me, you may find it extremely helpful to have systems in place to help you deal with negative emotions. I’ve talked about some of my own systems in a couple of our Shelter in Place episodes, including In the Tunnel and Stuck on the Staircase. I’ve also learned that having a few key friends in my life who don’t mind being around me when I’m a puddle of tears is crucial to my survival as a creator. When I have those systems and relationships in place, my high score in this category is actually one of my greatest gifts. It’s what helps me go deep in my writing, what gives me intense empathy for others. Maybe more than any of the other factors, it’s what makes me me.

Nate: If you happen to be low on the neuroticism factor (i.e. more carefree and optimistic), you may be better able to tolerate anxious or doom-and-gloom partners. And also, sometimes you might just need to go for a walk when you find yourself not understanding why there have to be so many tears.

Laura: Awareness and growth here can help you turn the knob up or down on different traits at different times. What’s been helpful for us is surrounding ourselves with people who will forgive and accept us even when we’re at our worst. Who will call us back to that healthier version of ourselves.

Learning styles

Nate: We want to make a brief note here about learning styles. You’ll see a quick assessment in the module, and while it’s designed for school-aged children, we found it helpful for ourselves, both because it highlighted some of the ways we learn best, and because it reminded us that as with all of these assessments and ways of evaluating ourselves, rarely do we fall neatly in just one category. 

Laura: As a podcaster, I find it fascinating to learn that auditory is my top learning style, though visual and kinesthetic are close behind. For most of human history auditory learning was our primary way of taking in information. The oral tradition gave us stories long before the printing press. It’s only been in relatively recent history that the world has shifted its bias to visual learning. Especially in a culture where everyone has a camera and internet connection in their pocket, where images and video dominate so much of what we consume, I find it exciting that podcasting brings us back to this older form of storytelling, that once again our ears are being trained to listen.

Nate: Remembering that our ears are out of practice can help us as podcasters. As lifelong writers who have been trained in brevity, Laura and I have both had to learn in podcasting that some amount of repetition is actually necessary, especially since listeners are far more likely to be walking the dog or washing dishes or driving while listening.

Laura: We’ve also found that transcripts are helpful not only for visual learners, but for accessibility. We started creating them early in season 1 when we learned that one of our “listeners” was Deaf, and that the only way she could experience the work was through those transcripts. It takes some extra work, but thanks to automatic transcription programs like Descript, it’s entirely possible to include it in your workflow as you’re building your podcast.

You can probably tell that we love geeking out about this stuff. We know that not everyone will be as excited about self-exploration as we are. But we hope you’ll check out the resources we’re providing in this module not just now, but in the years to come, and that each time you encounter them you get a little bit closer to understanding your creative personality. 

—------------------------

Show notes

Steal Like an Artist (wikipedia)

Strengths Finder test ($50)

RightPath assessment ($99)

Truity (MBTI, Enneagram, Big Five; free, with $20 full report option)

Truity Enneagram video series (overview & types 1-6 out now; 7-9 to come)

Big Five overview article

Learning styles: myth or fact?