Join the Happy Club

Since publishing the previous post about  authentic happiness  and the annoying positive psychology website, I have been asked things like “Did you actually take those personality tests?” and “Why don’t you like that website? You should try harder to join.”  (This, from my boyfriend.) Also, “That cartoon shows a lot of self-awareness.”

So the answer to the first question is “no, I didn’t do the questionnaires.” Also, in case this is not absolutely clear, you don’t actually have to “pass” these tests to join the International Positive Psychology Association, although I’m sure they’d encourage you to take them for self-awareness/development purposes.

I dislike personality, psychological and aptitude tests, as I have a long history of “failing” them. For my statistics class at University, we did a lot of these tests to generate data to analyse. I was always an outlier – at the “thick” or “uh-oh, mental!” end of the normal distribution.

There’s a horrible personality test called the Big 5, which evaluates you along 5 dimensions: Openness (a.k.a. “Intellect”), Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. What I learned about myself from this test was that I was “surprisingly naïve”, “lazy and undependable”, an “introvert” (which apparently means: “more likely to turn out to be a serial killer”), a “potentially high-maintenance pain in the neck” and “emotionally unstable”, i.e. most likely to end up an unemployable spinster.

For a long time after my statistics course, I adopted a strategy of minimizing self-awareness, of refusing to recognise the nature that had been revealed to me in these tests. This worked quite well, and I managed to earn a living and have relationships by convincing potential employers, boyfriends and sometimes myself that I was outgoing, easygoing and completely committed to whatever it was they were proposing. However, this was exhausting, and I just couldn’t keep it up over time, my true nature eventually always asserting itself.

I was helped to come to terms with my true nature by the “Myers-Briggs Type Inventory,” which like the Big 5 test evaluates you along a series of dimensions, but unlike the Big 5 has positive opposite ends of the dimensions: rather than going from good to bad, it goes from good to differently good. Thanks to this test, I was able to reframe my “unemployable spinster” nature as “independent woman who is better suited to self-employment.”