What's The Secret To Getting Along With Others?
- By
- Steve Williamson, VP Digital Marketing and Content, eRep, Inc.
- Posted
- Monday, January 27, 2025

Compatibility is often assumed to be an automatic and unchangeable thing. You are either compatible with someone else or you're not. But is that really true?
To get along with others, it helps if you understand the other person's perspective and personality. Understanding your own is equally important.
Have you ever met someone who seemed to be able to get along with everyone they meet? What do they have that others don't? Is there some kind of secret or life hack that lets you get along with everybody no matter what their personality type might be?
The trick to getting along with others may be surprisingly simple, and it may take only 8 minutes of your time. Here's how.
First, know yourself.
It takes two to tango, but when it comes to getting along, does it require both of you to know how to dance?
If you meet fifty people, that's fifty different interactions and potential relationships. What do those fifty people have in common? You.
You are the common thread with every person you meet and every relationship you have.
The first trick is to understand your own emotional hardwiring. Learn how you see the world and everyone within it. Your perspective and personality colors and influences every interaction you have with others.
How?
You need a tool that helps you identify your innate and unchanging emotional hardwiring. This tool should be accurate and reliable. In this context, reliability means your personality will be assessed accurately and consistently no matter what day (or year!) it is or what your mood is at the time.
You don't want to take a personality assessment that will return one result at breakfast and another at dinner time.
It's also important to find a personality assessment that is easy to take and doesn't require advanced training to understand your results. It also helps if the assessment isn't expensive or takes a long time to complete.
→ Repeat reliability is the measurement of a psychometric assessment that reflects its ability to return consistent results over time. If you take a personality test at age 25 and again at age 45 and their results are the same, it would have a repeat reliability score of 100%.
Does such a tool exist? Yes!
The Core Values Index™ psychometric assessment and personality test takes only 8 minutes to complete, anyone can take it aged 13 and older, and produces results that are easy to understand. It also costs less than $50.
The CVI has a 97.7% repeat reliability rating.1 This means if you take it now and again in ten years, odds are your scores will differ by less than 3%. No other psychometric assessment on the market today even comes close.
Second, learn how others tick.
When you complete the Core Values Index, you not only learn the fundamental composition of your own personality — the particular ratio of four personality types called core value energies — but you can also learn how those core value energies work in others.
For example, if your CVI psychometric profile reveals that you are primarily a problem solver ("Innovator") and secondarily a data gatherer ("Banker"), this will shape how you see the world and prefer to operate within it.
The CVI helps you learn how to identify the likely personality profiles of others.
Let's say you are a product rep for a technology company and you're at an industry networking event. You meet a potential customer, the owner of a small business in your area. They give a very firm handshake, look you in the eye, and seem to get right to the point in your conversation with no small talk ("Builder"). They also pay close attention to the facts and data that you discuss ("Banker"). Your conversation closes with them saying, "Please send that white paper you mentioned to my email address, and if the product specs match up, I'm ready to get started first thing next week."
In CVI parlance, you are an Innovator/Banker (your personality is primarily comprised of Innovator energy and secondarily Banker energy), while the business owner you met is likely a Builder/Banker.
Your ability to recognize the business owner's likely CVI profile of Builder/Banker tells you they are to the point and aren't afraid to make a quick and affirmative decision, but they want the data and research available to back it up.
→ A
person's CVI profile contains a particular ratio of four core value
energies, each represented by a score of 0 (none) to 36 (maximum). Since
every CVI profile's scores total exactly 72, when one core value energy
is higher, one or more of the others are proportionally lower. There are
millions of combinations.
(The person who organized the networking event and works the room, introducing themselves and getting everyone enthused, likely has "Merchant" as their primary core value energy.)
Fundamentals of Personality
Understanding how the four core value energies influence and shape an individual's personality, especially your own, is a bit like a super power.
This knowledge gives you the ability to quickly identify the psychometric profile of others and then shift how you communicate to suit their preferences.
The effectiveness of communication is measured by how much of your message is successfully received and processed by the other person. If they heard and understood 100% of what you wanted to convey, then you communicated successfully.
Like trying to put a square peg into a round hole, you can't communicate effectively if you don't convey your message in the way your recipient is hardwired to receive it.
Knowing how the CVI works is the quickest and most accurate way for you to determine another person's likely psychometric profile and then adjust your message so they receive it effectively.
- First, understand how you like to communicate. This is determined by your CVI profile and your particular scores and ratio of the four core value energies.
- Next, learn the fundamentals of the key ways all four core value energies work and how to spot them in others. Shift your communication style to match their profile.
→ This article can help: How to Guess Someone's Core Values Index Profile
If you use these two steps, you will gain the ability to get along with practically anyone you meet, and your ability to communicate will improve in profound ways.
Core Values Index™ and CVI™ are trademarks of Taylor Protocols, Inc.
NOTES:
[1] Compare against Myers-Briggs MBTI which struggles to crack 70% repeat reliability. The CVI achieves 97.7% repeat reliability. Source: Seattle Research Partners, 2014 [PDF]
Go to eRep.com/core-values-index/ to learn more about the CVI or to take the Core Values Index assessment.

Steve Williamson
Innovator/Banker - VP Digital Marketing and Content, eRep, Inc.
Steve has a career in project management, software development and technical team leadership spanning three decades. He is the author of a series of fantasy novels called The Taesian Chronicles (ruckerworks.com), and when he isn't writing, he enjoys cycling, old-school table-top role-playing games, and buzzing around the virtual skies in his home-built flight simulator.
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