I’ve always been skeptical of systems that claim to deduce a person’s character from questionnaires or physical attributes. At the worst extreme were the bogus sciences of phrenology, where the shape and size of your skull was believed to reveal your mental abilities, and physiognomy, which claimed that your personality could be determined by your outer appearance, specifically your face. These pseudosciences were extremely popular in the 19th century, and were connected to the rise of eugenics, of which many folks at the time seemed to heartily approve, provided that their racial group was at the top of the list, of course. As a Brit, I’m ashamed to admit that the term eugenics was invented by a respected English scientist, Sir Francis Galton in 1883. The Nazis added a few innovations to his ideas, envisaging a utopia of racial purity. Numerous Jewish relatives of mine didn’t quite make the cut and were disposed of with German efficiency.

I also remain unconvinced by some of the psychoanalytical theories of those 19th century European heavyweights in the field, Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud. I may be a weak, inferior, lily-livered female, but I don’t remember ever in my life having any Freudian penis envy. Why on earth would I need one of those cumbersome things dangling from my nether regions? Why would I want to be bothered with having either embarrassingly inappropriate erections or the possibility of performance failure at a critical time? However, I do admit to suffering from eyelash and eyebrow envy. This happened when I was going through chemo for breast cancer, because I didn’t only lose all the hair on my head—all my “eye candy” went too. Even though I wore a wig, I looked really weird without eyebrows and eyelashes. Any professional actor will be aware of the important role that the eyebrows play in expressing universal emotions such as surprise, fear, anger, disgust, contempt, happiness and sadness. Furthermore, eyebrows and eyelashes frame the eyes and make them more attractive in appearance. So whenever I saw someone’s face, whether on the screen or in person, I would look at their eye candy with envy.

A friend of mine, who is much enamored with Carl Jung’s psychoanalysis, filled out a questionnaire to find out his Jungian Archetypes and took the results very seriously. I did one year in psychology as part of my college degree, but I can’t claim to be an expert in psychotherapy. Nevertheless Jung’s Archetype analysis of character seems vague and simplistic to me. I was also greatly under-impressed with the character of Carl Jung himself, as I wrote in my blog “Carl Jung: Shameless Adulterer, Cruel Father and Archetype from Hell.” Maybe because my main Jungian archetype appears to be the Trickster, at least according to a free questionnaire I found online, my response was to create a parody of them on my adultererswife.com website, CJ’s Archetypes. I don’t believe anyone has bothered to read the thing, but at least I had fun writing it.

Then someone recommended that I try the free “How to Fascinate” test online. It told me I was “The Artisan” archetype, with innovation and trust as my main attributes—rather different from the Jungian Trickster I was supposed to be—but if I wanted to unlock my full “Artisan” profile I’d have to pay. I declined. Probably a more accurate archetype for me would have been “The Grump,” but at least I’m not like several people I know whose true archetype I am convinced is “The Couch Potato.”

One New Age couple I knew worked as counselors and used Enneagrams to determine their clients’ personality type, pigeon-holing them into one of nine personality types. I can’t even remember which of the nine they reckoned I was, just that the assessment didn’t seem to fit me at all. Yet again, the personality categories seemed very vague and simplistic. However, I don’t doubt that adherents of Jungian psychotherapy or Enneagram theory will consider me vague and simplistic in my criticism of their systems.

I find the conclusions of some of these character assessment methods as random as what my friends and I would do back in the Stone Age when we were kids, after eating cherries. We’d count the pits in our bowls, for each one saying “tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief.” For the boys, that would be what you’d become, for the girls, that would be who you’d marry.

One man I know met a woman who would only date him if he did well in the character assessment she used for hiring people in her company. He passed the test and it was probably more accurate than those cherry pits, but the relationship did not last long.

Thus, when Alissa Daire Nelson, founder of daire2succeed.com, invited me to be a guest on her podcast, the Frickin’ Awesome Entrepreneur (FAE), but required me to have done a Clifton Strengths Test beforehand, I was somewhat wary. It was an online test administered by the Gallup Organization costing twenty bucks that was supposed to identify my five top strengths, but I’d never heard of the thing before. I asked a friend who worked as a coach for CEOs and high-level executives if she thought the test had any validity. “It gives you basic information that’s useful to know,” she replied, “a bit like knowing your blood group.”

Alissa told me that her podcast would be a live counseling session, which initially made me even more leery. I’m a fairly old-fashioned Brit of the “just get on with it” school, where rather than seeing psychotherapists and counselors, the aim is to keep calm and carry on, although keeping calm is sometimes a work in progress for me. Would this be like a 1970s encounter group that would publicly dig out my deepest traumas and fears, encouraging me to cry, scream and rage at the universe? So I listened to a couple of episodes of Frickin’ Awesome Entrepreneur to ensure that this would not be the case. I found that the interviews were surprisingly stimulating to listen to, providing some useful ideas for my own business. Alissa was genuinely doing on-air counseling sessions, tailoring her advice to each guest’s strengths profile and the specific business they were in. The podcast had an unusual format—so much so that Alissa had produced a video for guests to watch before they appear on the show to understand what will be going on.

When I told my youngest son I was going to take the Strengths test, he thought it would measure physical endurance. Push-ups—zero score? Bench presses—zero score? Thankfully not. When I got my results from Gallup, the categories I fell into seemed pretty appropriate and gave me a better understanding of the way my mind works. My Strengths showed that an appropriate career for me was to be a journalist, which I have been for much of my life. My son, who has inherited his dark sense of humor from me, said that it was a good thing the test hadn’t recommended a career as a banker or a prostitute. “Why did you say that?” I asked him, and he replied, “Well, that would have shown you would do anything for money!”

Before appearing on FAE, I had to give Alissa details of my main challenge: prioritizing poorly and procrastinating, and then being even more inefficient by trying to multitask to get things done. This fitted in with the more negative side of my Strengths profile—being a packrat by collecting endless input and buffeted about by all kinds of creative ideas that just had to be written down, distracting me from completing anything. All my Strengths were in the realm of strategic thinking rather than implementation.

Once Alissa has a guest’s Strengths report, before recording the show with them, she creates a personalized video lasting about 20 minutes to explain in more detail what that person’s specific assessment means. After recording the interview, Alissa sent me a laminated report of my Strengths and a copy of her book, From Frustrated to Frickin’ Awesome! I had been on a lot of podcasts and radio shows, but had never before seen so much advice and personal attention given to a guest, not only at the time of the interview, but also before and after. When I looked at my Strengths profile, it made sense that I really should be capitalizing on my extensive broadcasting experience and my British accent by starting a voiceover business. In an unusual display of efficiency, I came up with a snappy name, Rent A Brit Voiceovers, bought the domain name rentabrit.com and got that website up and running, all in less than a week, so that I could mention the new site in my Frickin’ Awesome Entrepreneur interview. The show aired on June 18, 2018, three months or so after it was recorded.

In the meantime, I found out more about the kinds of personality tests that were taken seriously in the business world. There were plenty available. Did you need to be a rocket scientist to understand these professional assessments and to know which ones had any value? Personal empowerment coach Michelle McCullar should know the answer to that question, as before being a coach, she used to be a rocket scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Michelle recommends three professional assessment programs: the StrengthsFinder 2.0 test that I had already done, The Kolbe A Index which costs $49.95, and the BANK Personality Profiling System. The Kolbe A test may be stupendously accurate and illuminating, but I didn’t feel like shelling out fifty bucks to finds out. BANK, however, has a free version to “crack your BANK code” if you’re willing to let the company harvest your email and phone number. BANK stands for Blueprint, Action, Nurturing and Knowledge, each one of which has a different colored card listing 12 values. I had to sort these four cards in my order of preference. The Knowledge card was obviously my number one and thus my primary BANK personality type, which according to a pie chart on the company’s site was the least common to have. I had difficulty choosing the order of the other cards as the number of values that resonated with me on each one was about equal to those that did not. I felt that the division of categories into the four cards and the values chosen to represent them were somewhat arbitrary and limiting, resulting in too much generalization and too few specifics. The results gave me far fewer genuine insights than the basic Clifton Strengths Assessment I did for 20 bucks. However, the BANK test was free and perhaps the company’s fee-based offerings might have proven more useful. But I didn’t want to spend the money to find out.

You might wonder what these personality test results have done for me in terms of my behavior and productivity. They’ve certainly made a difference. Now when I find myself procrastinating and lacking follow-through, being sidetracked by all kinds of shiny ideas in my head, I’m much more aware of doing it. I can just blame it  all on the fact that, according to my Clifton Strengths test, I have no talents in the realm of execution and implementation. It’s very comforting. Actually, I was trying to come up with a witty last sentence to finish this blog, but I’ve been a bit distracted. Maybe I’ll get back to it later.