my top three quizzes to get to know yourself

We humans love to be told about ourselves! Here are links to the earlier posts in this series:

Today is all about quizzes. People LOVE a quiz. For me quizzes harken back to the good ol' days with teen magazines and taking quizzes about love style, which first day of school outfit is right for me and my perfect vacation destination. I used to do the quizzes in magazines over and over so I'd always use a pencil OR do my scoring on a separate sheet of paper.

These days I still love quizzes and use them in my business so you won't be surprised to learn that two of my own quizzes make the list here. For our purposes, I consider quizzes less complex than assessments and they generally give you a simple result after you've taken them; by contrast assessments involve more self-reflection and results can change through your own discernment.

Here are my favorite quizzes online for self-knowledge and growth.

The 5 Love Languages

This book and concept is a classic because these results never go out of style. I find it incredibly helpful to know the love languages of the people in my life (though kids can be surprisingly tricky sometimes). Sometimes I joke that I am all five love languages!

If you're new to love languages it can be eye opening to assess past relationships through the lens of your love languages and getting your needs met.

It's a simple, easy to understand system and super useful day to day.

The 5 Love Languages quiz is here.

The Joyful CEO Snapshot

Are you an Appreciator, Potentializer, Explorer or Maximizer?

I created this quiz to support the Joy|Money Matrix™ - my mental model that helps participants prioritize both joy and money in their lives and businesses.

I realized that people fell into the above four categories based on how much joy/money they were experiencing in their work and their lives.

Appreciators love what they do but aren't making enough money for it to be sustainable.

Potentializers feel so-so when it comes to enjoying their work and are making just okay money.

Explorers make great money and have some satisfaction from their work but it could be better.

Maximizers have great joy levels and great revenue.

The ideal is that we all move towards Maximizer over time- even though we might go through all of the other types at some point or another.

You can take the quiz here (and I'll be sending out invites for master classes for each type very soon so we can all be Maximizers).

MBTI

No doubt you've heard of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. It's been around for a while, the results are nuanced and helpful. You may have interacted with MBTI in a professional setting but I've found that there are other tools that work better in workplaces.

MBTI looks at spectrums along four axes:

Extroversion to Introversion
Intuitive to Sensing
Feeling to Thinking
Perceiving to Judging

Once you know about the extremes of each type, you can then start to understand how they vary and how they work together to create patterns of behavior and relating. MBTI is based on Jungian psych (I'm a huge Jung fan) and

One thing about MBTI is that people get REALLY into it and I think keeping it light and less rigid is helpful. I've noticed that those trained in MBTI love to live in MBTI boxes more than almost any other tool for self-knowledge- the label becomes Very Important.

For me, it's helpful but please keep in mind that we want to have facility to choose our behaviors from a cornucopia of options.

Here's a free MBTI test.

My WorkFlow Styles Quiz

Another quiz that I find super useful is my own🙂

The Workflow Styles quiz separates people into two categories: Sprinters and Marathoners. Sprinters do work in short, intense bursts and Marathoners are more of the slow and steady type.

Some people are indeed a combination.

I like this quiz because it's easy, it's helpful and because it gets us thinking about different ways we can set up our work and our lives to support who we actually are instead of having to stuff ourselves into schedules and structures that don't make sense.

Take the Workflow Styles quiz here!

Josh Haynam, the founder of interact (an online quiz software) interviewed me in 2020. You can find that podcast interview year.

Thanks for reading this series and I'll be coming back tomorrow to share my most favorite workplace tools that I've used with my corporate clients for close to 20 years.

with love,

Lauren