Have you ever used a typewriter? Yes, that quaint-looking thing in the picture. I have, but I was never a trained typist. I have typed on stencils, made corrections using the correction fluid that I always thought was nail polish and used a cyclostyling machine with panache. One thing about a typewriter was that you’d better have gotten it right the first time, because unlike word processing which we have today, mistakes took a bit more effort to make right.

Did you realize that psychometric tools are a little bit like typewriters? We tend to get cast into a certain mould because of the reports, or because we think the reports are telling us who we are. And, yes, the reports are mostly accurate and yes, they do depict who we are, but the trouble is most of us tend to just stop there. Our human minds tend to devolve to the simplistic more often than we’d like to admit. That is why we need to reduce complexity to simplicity. We forget that complexity is not the same as complicatedness, and that it is very often the extremely complex and intricate that permit the simple. The genotype is more complex than the phenotype, but that does not mean that the genotype is complicated. It is simply part of a fully integrated system designed to function for life.

So, embrace complexity, don’t be afraid of it! Once you have mastered the complexities, you will be able to express what you have mastered in simple terms for others to understand. You’re not the same person you were physically just a year ago. Every single cell in your body is new. Why should you think that your quintessential being is described by a psychometric tool? Cast off your typecasts. Enjoy growing to become all that you were designed to be and to do!