I’m a neurotic, lazy, anally-retentive, emotionally volatile loner.
At least according to my test results from Understand Myself.
I’m also a compassionate, dominant, creative, intelligent daydreamer.
Again, not my words. It’s all in the 16-page report from Understand Myself.
What is Understand Myself?
Understand Myself is a 100-question personality self-assessment that compares your answers to those of thousands of other people in order to rank you on the different components of the Big Five Aspects Scale.
The Big Five Personality Traits are:
- Agreeableness: compassion and politeness
- Conscientiousness: industriousness and orderliness
- Extraversion: enthusiasm and assertiveness
- Neuroticism: withdrawal and volatility
- Openness to experience: openness and intellect
Understand Myself is the most reliable and comprehensive personality test you can take on the internet.
At time of writing it’s under ten bucks and it will give you more insight into your personality, strengths and weaknesses, along with potential directions you can take in your career, relationships, and emotional life than any other free or paid test around.
It was developed by Dr. Jordan B. Peterson (you know him by now), Dr. Colin DeYoung, and Dr. Lena Quilty.
Understand Myself takes about 15 minutes to complete.
You have to make sure you’re not in a bad mood when you take it. You want to feel fairly neutral otherwise the results will be inaccurate.
By comparing your answers to those of thousands of others, you will be given a percentile ranking on each of the personality traits.
Percentile rankings work like this:
If you receive a percentile score of 57 for Extraversion (like me), that means you’re more extraverted than 57 out of 100 people. In this case I’m not super extroverted, but I’m also not incredibly introverted.
What do each of the personality traits mean?
It’s right there on the Understand Myself homepage, but I’ll reproduce it here:
- Extraversion: Enthusiasm = spontaneous joy and engagement; Assertiveness = social dominance, often verbal in nature.
- Neuroticism: Withdrawal = the tendency to avoid in the face of uncertainty; Volatility = the tendency to become irritable and upset when things go wrong.
- Agreeableness: Compassion = the tendency to empathically experience the emotion of others; Politeness = the proclivity to abide by interpersonal norms.
- Conscientiousness: Industriousness = the ability to engage in sustained, goal-directed effort; Orderliness (the tendency to schedule, organize and systematize.
- Openness to Experience: Openness = creativity and aesthetic sensitivity; Intellect = interest in abstract concepts and ideas.
Do you really need to know this stuff?
You don’t really need to know anything.
But we’d probably all agree that knowing fire can burn is a pretty useful tidbit for ensuring your survival.
And I’ve always ascribed to the Socratic dictum that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’.
If you came to Understand Myself by way of Jordan Peterson, you likely feel the same way.
Know thyself.
Understanding where you fit on the scale of the different personality traits will help you not only understand your own weaknesses (and fix them) and strengths (and play to them), but you’ll also have an easier time understanding others around you.
How can you strengthen your social, familial, and personal worlds if you don’t know where your biological and environmental proclivity to sit within them is?
How can you be the best version of yourself if you don’t understand your current self?
Is Understand Myself worth it?
If you want to be a force for good in the world (to borrow a well-worn Petersonism), if you want to be better tomorrow than you are today, if you want to truly know what you’re working with…
I think Understand Myself is the best place to start.
- If you haven’t read Jordan Peterson’s book 12 Rules for Life yet, why not listen to it for free through Audible? Following this link will give you 2 free audiobooks and 2 free Audible Originals.
Many of the results won’t come as a surprise. But the depth with which your results report goes into them will make you see parts of your personality you thought you knew in a different light.
And there will be aspects that even the most self-aware individual didn’t realise about themselves.
My Understand Myself results.
We’re all friends here.
We’re all trying to sort ourselves out.
So what the hell.
I’m gonna stick my Understand Myself results here and also come up with a few areas of improvement.
Maybe this will help you too.
Go take the test, get your own results, and if you sit around the same percentile for certain traits, you might wanna adopt some of my ways of improvement.
Obviously I’m not going to stick all of my results here.
Like I said, it’s a 16-page document with small font type. I’m just going to give the cliff-notes and cook up some ways of improving.
Agreeableness: Moderately High
I’m more agreeable than 71 out of 100 people.
Agreeableness is a complicated trait – and is broken into the two elements of compassion and politeness – with positives and negatives depending on where you rank.
When it comes to compassion, I’m more compassionate that 85 out of 100 people. That puts me high on the compassion scale and makes me very other-oriented. It also makes me more left-leaning politically.
When it comes to politeness, I’m typical. I’m more polite than 45 out of 100 people. Being typically polite means I am respectful of authority but am not afraid to push back when pushed. This means I’m conflict-avoidant but not averse to conflict if it comes to it.
Simply put: I’m more kind, nurturing, conflict-avoidant than most people. Others see me as warm, considerate, peaceful, even submissive.
This is actually where Understand Myself is so interesting and reveals complexity of character because later in the report I’m revealed as being quite dominant, which I suppose balances out some of the weaker aspects of being agreeable.
There is a real danger in being too agreeable.
If you’re too high agreeableness, you are susceptible to being taken advantage of by those much lower in agreeableness.
If you’re low in agreeableness, you’re stubborn, competitive, and, at its most negative and extreme, predatory.
Another danger in being too agreeable is putting the needs of others before those of yourself.
Agreeable people wish to avoid conflict in the present, which can lead to neglecting their best mid-to-long-term best interests.
So let’s look at some ways to improve upon the worst aspects of being high in agreeableness and also capitalise on the good aspects of being highly agreeable.
Ways to improve:
- Assertiveness training: Whether you work with a psychologist or you learn and apply assertiveness principles (like the Bill of Rights) from books or courses – doesn’t matter how you do it. Ranking high in agreeableness means your soft side leaves you open to exploitation if you don’t regularly and consciously work on it.
- Learn to negotiate: This tip comes straight from Dr. Peterson himself. Effective negotiation and assertiveness go hand-in-hand and is a skill you can master like any other. CreativeLive have two great negotiation courses: ‘The Power of Negotiation’ and ‘Negotiation Strategies for Creatives’. The Great Courses also has an great negotiation called ‘The Art of Negotiating the Best Deal’.
- Get into your body: Do Wim Hof breathing regularly, play a competitive team sport, practice dominant body language.
- Mindset shifts: You need to start telling yourself that you’re number one. Always. The best way I’ve found to do this when you’re naturally inclined to put others first is to tell yourself that putting yourself first ultimately benefits others. Your best self is the self most capable of being a positive force in the world.
Here are some books on assertiveness to get us started:
And here’s a great TED Talk about the power of body language that we can implement today:
So that’s agreeableness dealt with.
Let’s take a look at conscientiousness.
Conscientiousness: Moderately Low
In a room full of 100 people, I’m less conscientious than 71 of them and more conscientious than 28 of them.
Conscientiousness is the trait of dutiful achievement. It’s all about obligation, attention to detail, efficiency, persistence, cleanliness, hard work, and adherence to rules.
The fact that I’m pretty low on the conscientiousness scale means I’m not a natural-born workaholic.
Being moderately low in conscientiousness means you’ll only work hard if pushed and you don’t mind wasting time.
This translates to being late on deadlines or submitting incomplete work. It also means finding excuses to justify failures.
My Understand Myself results had a lot to say about conscientiousness, but I was particularly impressed by this nugget:
I’m lucky that my creative interests were strong enough to fuel my reading habits and intelligence. I’m also lucky that I had a father, mentors, and teachers that pushed me towards Oxford University. If it weren’t for them, I’m totally convinced that my naturally low conscientiousness would have resulted in me dropping out of high school (I was definitely close).
We can understand conscientiousness further by breaking it down into its constituent parts of industriousness and orderliness.
I’m low in industrious. I’m actually less industrious than 88 out of 100 people.
That means I’m not judgemental of myself or others. I’m also resistant to guilt, self-contempt, and self-disgust with a laissez-faire attitude towards life. Personally I don’t see this as a negative.
As for orderliness, I’m moderately high. I’m more orderly than 60 out of 100 people. This means I’m naturally disgusted by authoritarian political attitudes (yup – personal freedom over nanny state for me, thanks). This also means I like routine, schedules, and am put off by mess.
Here’s my personal pain-point when it comes to orderliness:
As the rest of my Understand Myself results will show, I am high in trait openness. Hence the tug-of-war I always feel when it comes to creating art.
So let’s think up some ways we can make things better.
Ways to improve:
- Planned chaos: Let’s work with our natural proclivity towards order here in a way that will give us access to the beneficial aspects of mess and disruption. This could be a pre-set alarm that goes off on your phone telling you to go have a random adventure. This could be dates in your diary a couple times a month where you’ve scheduled a completely new experience for yourself. The point here is pushing yourself out of your comfort zone.
- Greater accountability: I’ve already written a review for my favourite acceptability tool here. It’s all about using social peer pressure + loss aversion techniques (like losing money if you don’t do something) in order to solidify habits. If you’re moderately low in conscientiousness, you’re going to need to apply the pressure and light a real fire under your ass in order to get things of worth done and avoid succumbing to your naturally lazy nature.
- Keep a schedule: Plan your goals in advance, write them down, update them, consult them frequently, and use in combination with the above two recommendations.
- Have a strong creative goal: The best way to get up at the same time every morning if you’re low in conscientiousness but high in trait openness is having a creative or artistic goal you can get excited about.
And, of course, Jordan Peterson has weighed in on this topic too:
So that’s conscientiousness.
Next up let’s take a look at extraversion.
Extraversion: Typical or Average
It actually came as a shock to me that I wasn’t more introverted. But apparently, in a room full of 100 people, I’d be more extroverted than 57 of them. So I’m not on the extreme end of this spectrum. This still doesn’t make me what most people think of as an extrovert though.
If you’re typical on the extraversion scale, it means you’re not particularly talkative or enthusiastic in social situations. You enjoy social company, but you also very much prize time spent alone. You’re more likely to let others plan social events.
If you’re typically extraverted, you lack impulsivity to have fun in social situations and you’re more likely to me productive when you’re spending time alone.
There are two parts to extraversion: enthusiasm and assertiveness.
I’m moderately low in enthusiasm and high in assertiveness.
That means I’m hard to get to know and not particularly talkative and prefer solitude. It also means, conversely, my nature makes it more likely for me to “take charge”, am often seen as a leader, and can be seen as influential.
Nobody said personality results would be given to you in a neat little package.
When you look at the results from Understand Myself, you realise what walking contradictions human beings are.
So what are some ways we can improve upon being what’s basically an assertive introvert?
Ways to improve:
- Cultivate time alone: As an introvert, you’re going to do your best work alone. So find out ways you can get some alone time to be productive. You’ll also want to “recharge” from social events and do activities specifically in solitude (e.g. hiking, meditation, reading).
- Actively pursue social relationships: If you’re the “take charge” type, this might take the form of arranging your own meet-ups centred around your interests. However you do it, you need to specifically schedule (and keep the commitment) social events. It’s good for you, but your introverted wiring means you’re not going to do it unless pushed. So push yourself.
- Become a better conversationalist: There are a bunch of different courses and books that teach interpersonal skills. Learn from them and apply them so people find it easier to get to know you.
Next up we have neuroticism.
Neuroticism: High
According to Understand Myself, neuroticism is “a measure of general sensitivity to negative emotions such as pain, sadness, irritable or defensive anger, fear and anxiety”.
And I’m more neurotic than 78 out of 100 people.
Being high in neuroticism can negatively affect both your business and your personal relationship life.
I’ll let this gem from Understand Myself explain more:
Neuroticism is broken down into withdrawal and volatility.
I’m moderately high on trait withdrawal, which means I’m more likely to experience anticipatory anxiety, making it difficult for me to approach new, uncertain, or unexpected situations.
I’m also more susceptible to feelings of sadness, grief, depression, and disappointment.
I’m high in volatility. That means mood variances. Easily irritated or annoyed in the face of disappointment.
Basically, people high in volatility take long to recover when bad stuff happens, while people high in withdrawal suffer from concern that bad stuff might happen. And I’m pretty high on both, so lucky me.
Ways to improve:
These tips come from Jordan Peterson, who has talked quite extensively on the topic of neuroticism.
- Get up at the same time every day: This structure can quell feelings of anxiety.
- Eat a large breakfast: We’re talking a breakfast rich in protein and healthy fats, light on the carbs. Peterson recommends you “eat more than you want”. If you get stressed, and you’re an anxious (read: neurotic) person, you’ll hyper-produce insulin and your metabolism will be dysregulated for the entire day and only be reset when you go to sleep. I’d add that neurotics should carry healthy snacks with them and eat them strategically before stressful situations.
- Lift weights: In addition to other forms of physical exercise, a solid weightlifting routine will dampen feelings of anxiety.
- Keep a schedule: We’ve covered this already above.
- Confront things you’re afraid of: If there are things you’re afraid of, but you need to do in order to meet a goal that is worthy to you, make a list of them and figure out ways you can confront them.
- Morning pages: Not a Peterson tip – although he has spoken about the benefits of talking to someone if you find yourself ruminating. But morning pages, a concept Julia Cameron talks about in The Artist’s Way, is just a few pages of free-form writing first thing in the morning to get all the negative thoughts down on paper and out of your mind.
Openness to Experience: Moderately High
Openness to experience is the main domain of creativity, intelligence, and artistic proclivity. This is the trait that concerns interest in art, literature, philosophy, novelty and also sensitivity to emotions and beauty.
It doesn’t surprise me that I’m ranked as 68th percentile, meaning, in a room of 100 people, I’m more open to experience than 68 of them.
If you’re high in openness to experience, you’re likely to be a reader, a problem-solver, an entrepreneur, and liberally-minded.
All good things, in my opinion, but negatives can arise when taken in combination with the other traits.
For example, problems can arise when you’re high in openness to experience but also high in neuroticism and low in conscientiousness.
This combination can result in self-doubt and constant questioning/anxiety over one’s choices.
This combination can also lead to one being an “under-achiever”.
Openness to experience is split into intellect and openness.
I’m moderately low on intellect. Despite the name, intellect in this trait has nothing to do with IQ, working memory, verbal fluidity, problem-solving capacity, or how smart you are. Intellect basically means an interest in abstract ideas. You can have a high IQ and also score low on trait intellect.
I’m very high on openness. 90th percentile actually. I think that balances out the moderately low intellect score. This openness trait means I’m very creative and I love beauty. I can’t thrive without a creative outlet.
If you’re high on openness, you like to be surrounded by beautiful things, have an eye for colour and architecture, like to collect things, are imaginative, like to daydream, are uncommonly affected by all different genres of music, and can become unusually immersed in books and movies.
Again, good things (in my book), but negatives come in the form of finding it difficult to monetise one’s creativity or, if you’re able to do that, being able to deal with the more practical elements of running a business.
Ways to improve:
- Learn the more practical side of your creative business: If you’re an author, this might be researching copyright and licensing laws, learning about contracts, or learning bookkeeping. If you make arts and crafts, you’d do well to learn the ins-and-outs of ecommerce, PPC ads, and newsletter marketing.
- Nurture your creative side: Don’t go too long without indulging your love of novelty and beauty. Have new experiences. Go to art galleries. Learn a new craft. If you’re a writer, learn to paint. If you’re a sculptor, learn an instrument.
So those are my results from the Understand Myself Big 5 Personality Test, plus a few ways I think I could capitalise on the strengths and compensate for the weaknesses.
Do you have any suggestions?
What did your test results say?
If you don’t mind sharing them, let me know (either below or send me a message) and we’ll brainstorm some ways you can make sense of them.
And if you haven’t taken the Understand Myself test yet, you can do so here.