Are You Muted?

It may seem counterintuitive, but your core emotional drivers — the DNA of your personality — have essentially been the same your entire life. Your default personality and way of seeing the world is innate and unchanging (barring any significant trauma or other influence such as the onset of mental illness or even the long-lasting effects of drugs, etc.)

Notice we didn't say "behavior." Your behavior absolutely changes in subtle and not so subtle ways depending on the circumstances.

How you act around your boss is likely different than how you act around your spouse or around your children or to the police officer that pulled you over for driving a bit too fast on your commute home.

Behavior is Situational. Personality is For Life.

Each circumstance you experience in life is an external force that your behavior automatically shifts and adjusts to, likely without you being aware of it. It may cause your behavior to deviate in a substantial way from your default and innate personality.

Many people have told us that the way they behaved growing up, especially during their teen years, was very different than the way they feel and see the world now as an adult.

This makes sense.

Few people have more of an impact on your life than your parents.

For example, if you grow up with one parent who has a dominating and commanding personality, any traits you might have that counter that — or compete with it — will likely be muted in response.

It's not until you get out on your own and away from that parent's influence of personality that you can be more of your natural self.

Personality Test Results and the Core Values Index™

Earlier we mentioned personality tests like MBTI. Most of them are inaccurate and unreliable in the sense that how you feel on the day you take the assessment will play a big part in your results. Take the same assessment a year later or on a day when you are in a different mood and your results will vary, sometimes by quite a lot. (Some assessments are so transparent it's very easy to deliberately manipulate or skew your own results.)

The Core Values Index™ psychometric assessment is different. It has a repeat reliability rating of 97.7%. This means if you take the CVI today and again in five years, your results will likely differ by less than 3%. No other personality assessment even comes close to that.

The CVI measures your innate and unchanging nature. It reveals your default — your core — personality. These are your emotional drivers and preferences for how you like to communicate, what kind of activities bring you the most joy, your optimal way of learning, and even how you instinctively respond to stress and conflict with others.

The CVI does not measure aptitude. It doesn't assess the knowledge or skills you have, nor will it predict your golf or bowling score. However, it can predict with surprising accuracy if you are likely to enjoy golf or bowling, or the kind of occupations that you're likely to enjoy the most.

What you enjoy is a strong predictor of where you'll succeed.

If you want to become a professional golfer, the Core Values Index is for you.

If the CVI is so accurate at assessing and describing your default personality, how does it explain perceived differences in your behavior at work vs at home?

It's All Subconscious

The CVI describes your default personality, and by extension, your preferred behavior. When you interact with another person, your behavior will adjust based on the default personality of that person. This is all automatic and unconscious.

For example, if two people with strong-willed and domineering personalities interact, the person with the "higher" level of power in their CVI profile will subconsciously "win". The other person with the lower level of power in their CVI profile will automatically revert to the secondary part of their innate core values personality.

All of this is automatic and functions at a subconscious level.

It also explains why our behavior varies based on the situation and who we're interacting with. Yet underneath, our innate and unchanging nature remains — our Core Values profile continues with its own set of preferences and default ways of seeing the world.

This muting or changing of your behavior is normal and common. It happens throughout your day, and likely only subsides when you are alone and not under any pressure to engage in an activity that is contrary to your personality profile (a creative person having to engage in an analytical task or vice versa, for example).

After taking the Core Values Index psychometric assessment, your report provides the details about how your personality DNA is shaped and how it influences your default behavior. It also sheds light on how other people's CVI profile shapes their behavior.

To paraphrase the musician Prince, understanding where you're coming from as well as the emotional drivers that influence the behavior of other people is profoundly useful at navigating this thing called life.

By the way, the CVI only takes about 8 minutes to complete. Cool, huh?

Core Values Index™ and CVI™ are trademarks of Taylor Protocols, Inc.