Beyond Personality Labels: How the Energy Leadership Index Assessment® Offers a Different Starting Point

Personality Labels and Perspective

Labels are a common aspect of the human experience. We come to rely on them as a way to relate and create meaning between ourselves and amongst each other. They can be helpful touchstones for context, but they can also limit us. We can easily get lulled into accepting circumstances because of whatever category they’ve been placed in.

Especially our own.

Long before I decided to major in Psychology, I remember having conversations with my mom about a book she was reading on personalities. The book was Personalities Plus by Florence Littauer and the personality labels she explored in it are Sanguine, Choleric, Melancholy, and Phlegmatic. I’m not sure where mom’s interest sparked or how she happened across the book, but I know she found it useful in learning how to parent my sister and me, two polar opposites of any personality scope.

I found it fascinating that nature (e.g., our genetics) could contribute to our interpretations of and contributions to the world around us. My central reason for wanting to pursue Psychology some years later was (and still is) my unquenchable interest in perspective. How two people in essentially the same environment can come to such different conclusions.

I’ve come to know that there’s more subtlety to life than that. An environment can seem identical but in fact be very different, and that our personalities are only one theory explaining the different aspects of our identity and perception.

It’s why I love engaging with things like Enneagram, OCEAN (The Big Five), and Myers-Briggs. 

They’re like any category or label, though. They only really give us a starting point.

Personally, I feel like they’re a bit prescriptive and pathologizing. While the initial intent of them is to create a framework for deeper understanding of ourselves, to the benefit of interpersonal relationships, they feel constrictive and a bit like an excuse to stagnate.

Recently, I’ve been shifting my views on personality as a whole. I’ve drawn the conclusion that the mechanisms behind our choices and actions gain more context based on our experiences. That has me realizing: we almost outgrow the need to identify a “root” personality.

Change, Identity, and Choice

I can’t think of a better example than Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Those more well read, and more studied on personality may see some flaw in where I’m going, but I’ll keep it simple.

The Ebenezer Scrooge we’re introduced to is an entirely different person by the end of the story. Dickens goes from describing him like this: 

“Oh! but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!”

To this: 

“Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, he was a second father.”

Of course, the story is an overarching commentary on the nature of human greed, emphasizing that true richness lies in charitability and compassion. At the center though, is a person who transforms — by adopting different values — through nothing other than perspective. That his experiences unfolded him to a world he hadn’t previously considered. 

If Scrooge had thought of himself as fixed by nature rather than shaped by circumstance, he might have dismissed his behavior as inevitable. We’re presented with the thought that he is the way he is because of his experiences. His values and the culture of the time (at least the culture he grew up in) as illustrated in memory by the Ghost of Christmas Past, molded him to be the insensitive, narrow-seeing, domineering — well…Scrooge.

I suggest that his ability to change had, in part, something to do with his lack of attachment to his personality. That there was no inevitability to his identity because of an assigned personality. He was capable of change, because the box he put himself in was an externally chosen one, not a biological mandate. He had options, and was open to exploring them. Something about seeing the disembodied phantom(s – if you’re a Muppet Christmas Carol fan) of your colleagues can apparently be highly motivating. 

Optimism and Pessimism are the two most basic personality distinctions, but there is a laundry list of theories and models that go well beyond them and what I mentioned above. They’re among the first tools employers, couples, and parents reach for when conflict arises. They create a starting point for conversation.

However, what I don’t love about them is the implication: you are who you are. I just don’t believe that to be true. We are our thoughts, feelings, and actions and all of those things have the ability to be intervened in.

What we lack in this area is not a knowledge of the operating system we’re running, it’s the belief that we have no power to uninstall, try something new, or run an update. It’s why being “self-aware” isn’t enough. It too, it is just a starting point. 

Energy Awareness as a Different Starting Point

This is why I love my work as a Core Energy Coach®, and the tool I was trained to use by iPEC® — The Energy Leadership Index Assessment®.

It too is a starting point designed to raise awareness. But it’s not prescriptive. It doesn’t pathologize who you are or assign you an explanation for “why you are the way you are, and that’s that.” It starts exploration from a different angle. It presents you with a look at your perception. The blank canvas that we’re all given in each moment of our lives, which we color, shade, and texturize in ways we see fit — consciously or otherwise.

Although I personally lean more towards the tabula rasa theory, I’m not saying nature has zero role in baselining our consciousness.

Life is an unending stream of stimulation and data that we’re responding to faster than we realize. Human reaction times on the outside are not representative of the warp speed at which our minds (one big, gooey sensor) process information. It seems more likely to me that our personalities are a manifestation of the thoughts, feelings, and actions that we’ve acquired in our unique span of life.

Which is why the ELI is a really powerful tool that I get to wield for clients who are seeking to make sustainable change. Coaching creates a space to explore patterns and generate personal strategies that create long-term results. The ELI offers a starting point for identifying who you are, and who you want to be. No predeterminism detected. 

It helps me and my clients create a common language to understand their perception (energy) in any given moment, whether they’re floating along or encountering stress. More than that, it invites the client to embrace the idea that who we are is decided by us, in each moment. Not our DNA. Our energy = our choice. We just may not be aware of the choices we’re making.

It may sound like my opinion of personality assessments is fatalist, and it’s definitely not! Sanguine-Choleric, INFJ-T, Enneagram 4: Wing 5, here! They have value, they invite you to start thinking about yourself in relation to your world, your reality. But the ELI gives you the invitation to take the reins on creating your own reality moment to moment.

If you’re intrigued and want to join me down the rabbit hole of The Seven Levels of Energy®, Core Energy Coaching and even take the ELI yourself, book a Discovery Call so we can get started!