Coaching practices for How to Use Personality Research

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For How to Use Personality Research, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• I’ve done a bunch of those fun online personality quizzes and the labels never quite fit or tell me anything useful
• I’m about to meet someone important for the first time and I have no read on them yet
• I want to genuinely change something fundamental about how I am, but I don’t know what’s actually movable and what’s just baked in for life
• I’ve got a list of my strengths but it reads like a flat personality quiz
• I want to invite someone to try a new approach, and I sense it would land far better if they first connected it to how they already see themselves

Practices that may help

1. Take a validated Big Five measure
   Use a psychometrically validated instrument — not a viral quiz — to get a reliable trait profile.
   The Big Five Personality Model
2. The Big Five Personality Model
   The Big Five (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism — OCEAN) is the most empirically validated personality framework in academic psychology. Knowing your trait profile is useful not as a fixed identity but as a statistical map of your behavioral tendencies under different conditions — especially as a diagnostic for where effort and environmental design can close the gap between your natural defaults and your goals.
3. Read assertiveness and responsiveness quickly
   Observe whether someone talks more than they listen (assertiveness) and whether they show emotion openly (responsiveness).
   Social Style Matrix: Adapting to How People Communicate
4. Understanding trait change — what shifts and what does not
   Big Five traits are relatively stable in rank order but do change in absolute level — especially with deliberate practice and major life transitions.
   The Big Five Personality Model
5. Connect individual strengths to the broader virtues they serve
   Understand which of the six VIA virtues your signature strengths express, and what that reveals about your character.
   VIA Character Strengths, Made Practical
6. VIA Character Strengths, Made Practical
   Peterson and Seligman’s VIA Classification identifies 24 character strengths organized under six virtues, and multiple randomized trials find that using your top "signature strengths" in new ways reliably increases well-being and decreases depressive symptoms. The effect is most robust when strengths are deployed in engaged, relational ways — not just recognized but actively applied.
7. Prime identity before the ask — "what kind of person are you?"
   Invite the person to describe who they are in terms that align with the behavior you’re requesting.
   Pre-Suasion, Made Practical
8. Use a signature strength in a new way each day for one week
   Apply one of your top character strengths to a context or relationship where you don’t normally use it.
   VIA Character Strengths, Made Practical
9. Take the VIA survey and identify your signature strengths
   Discover your top five to seven character strengths using the validated VIA survey.
   VIA Character Strengths, Made Practical
10. Apply strengths consciously in your most important relationships
    Identify how your signature strengths are showing up — or failing to show up — in the relationships that matter most.
    VIA Character Strengths, Made Practical

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