What do my psychometric tests show?

I have some faith in psychometric testing as a way of gaining a general insight into another human being. The results of my tests won’t help you recognize me in the street but they might give you a guide as to my general direction in life.

I’ve always been finely balanced in Meyers-Briggs tests, on the E/I line but especially on the F/T and J/P measures. I have always been clearly an iNtuitive, however. I am currently settled in as an INFP/J with the last two still too close to call.

This is a slight shift from when I first created this website when I hovered between INTJ and an INFJ.

The TTI Personal Interests, Attitudes & Values analysis reveals:

• I have stronger than average drives to discover the truth and to uncover the form and harmony in life;
• I have an average motivation to help others;
• I have a lower than average drive to make money;.
• I am only into power as part of a team; and
• I have a much lower than average interest in maintaining tradition: I don’t hold on to things or ways that don’t work.

In Ayurvedic parlance I’m a pitta-vatta with a strong emphasis on pitta.

For believers in horoscopes my sun is in Pisces, my moon in Virgo and my rising sign is Aries.

I have an IQ that was measured at school as 154. My EQ is 135 on a scale of 1-150. My belief in the significance of these measures is low in terms of social achievement, especially as I freeze at the sight of a test. However, taken with the other factors they do mean that I’m probably going to be able to keep up with you pretty closely and I’m aware enough to know that my ‘insights’ can be as off-target as anyone else’s.

Assorted other tests show the same broad picture of interests and motivations. I’m basically a thinker and communicator with a strong drive to work with others and to follow through on my chosen path. They also show that the quality of my work is more important to me than the income or the fame arising from it.

What has prepared me to act as your coach?

There are three essential components in the preparation of a coach:

• life experience,
• professional training,
• an ongoing commitment to rigorous self-examination and self-development.

Without the third component the first two are virtually useless. Life experience without reflection contains nothing learned and therefore nothing worth passing on. Professional training without rigorous self-examination makes it impossible for coaches to be sure they are acting on their client’s behalf rather than from their own unconscious motivation.

I offer the following personal and professional autobiography to help you in your decision-making.

Life experience

I now live and work in Geneva, Switzerland, but have also lived and worked in the UK and the USA, in Massachusetts, New Mexico and Oklahoma. I have joint USA and UK citizenship.

I work out regularly. I haven’t smoked for decades and no longer drink alcohol even socially. I have always been deeply involved with my professional association and the governance of my profession. I read avidly on my subjects and enjoy the challenge of staying abreast of developments in my several fields.

In particular, I enjoy the incredible variety of people I work with and feel fortunate that I have found my niche at last.

But it wasn’t always this way . . .

I was born in England, the son of a Royal Air Force officer who completed his career in the British Foreign Office. My mother was born and brought up in South Africa, the daughter of an expatriate German mother and English father. I have two sisters, one older than myself, one younger.

My formal education was carried out over ten years at a very traditional English public school. I was intelligent in class and successful at sport but this was not a happy time for me and I rejected the idea of going to university.

I left school at 18, completely unprepared for anything, so I moved to London and followed my interests. My first two significant jobs were in boat building (with Jack Holt) and in the film business (with Warner Bros). At the age of 21 I trained as a systems analyst.

This was intellectually and financially rewarding and I worked my way up to IT consultant before moving sideways and becoming an IT industry journalist. I married a music industry journalist and we bought and restored a cottage in the country. We weren’t very good at marriage and after three years we separated.

I left my job and went to work as a deckhand on a classic ketch working out of Antibes in the South of France. I thought of buying a boat and settling there but was sidetracked by the offer of money and friendship and joined another weekly IT newspaper back in London. I had just started editing this when it was sold to a competitor and I was made redundant.

I starting working as a consultant to hi-tech companies, helping them on marketing and marketing communications matters. Most notable among them were IBM, Unisys, Burroughs and a range of software companies whose names have now gone out of existence.

It was when I was 32 that I started to take control of my life. Up until then I had lurched on from opportunity to opportunity, totally reactively, with never a serious thought of putting together a strategy to give me the life I wanted – even if I’d known what it was.

I was naturally task-competent, so I stayed busy and financially OK, but I was life-incompetent. I was smoking and drinking heavily, my love life was a mess and I couldn’t see what I was doing wrong. I needed a complete change so I took a job in the United States and put myself into therapy.

Over the next fourteen years I maintained a course of individual and group therapy and coaching. It transformed my life. I learnt a tremendous amount about myself and about others and continually tried new things. I took a ten-year training as a psychotherapist. Such depth of preparation is unheard of today.

That period in the USA was a wonderful time of discovery from the business point of view. With the strength of my therapist/coach relationship working with me, I started a number of companies and worked with a number of major US corporations in the Boston area. I won industry awards and was much in demand for my reflections on industry as well as technological matters.

During that time I also learnt that I lack the specific distribution of personal qualities necessary to figurehead a substantial business enterprise. I can create exciting boutique corporations but they don’t scale. I am a brilliant right-hand man, a creative chancellor or consigliere, but for my talents to manifest in full I need to work in collaboration with another’s complementary set of qualities.

Professional Training

My psychotherapy training took place at a private institute in Massachusetts that closed during the 1990s. The institute was intellectually rigorous and placed a strong emphasis on experiential development. The course theory was very advanced for the time, integrating aspects of psychoanalysis with humanistic and existential beliefs. There, over fourteen years, I learned psychotherapy, counseling, supervision and a good part of my coaching skills.

The rest of my formal training has consisted of taking an ILCT course in life coaching, numbers of workshops, a diploma course for coaches in sports psychology, another in business coaching, and a prodigious amount of reading and writing. I maintain my own commitment to self-development with weekly sessions with both a psychotherapist and a coach. This, together with my daily reflection and reading, keeps me fresh and alert for my clients.

Reflection

Reflection, journaling, pondering – whatever you want to call it – is a daily pursuit with me. Whether sweating my way through a 60-minute cardio workout, or simply sitting with a pad and pen, I am constantly reflecting on life and what I am learning from it. I hold internal dialogues with the writers of the hundreds of books I read; I reflect on the patterns and dynamics of my clients’ lives and activities; I look at my own life and my partnerships. I have written literally millions of words in my journals and drawn countless diagrams in my efforts to understand what makes us tick.

I also reflect in conjunction with those around me: my clients, my friends and my coach. I question until I feel I have a solid base of conviction from which to operate and can then act with strength and focus.

This experience and intellectual and emotional gravity are all appreciated by my clients. Lest that sound daunting, I have a sense of humor, too.

I hope this information has been helpful to you. If you would like to find out more about Dynamic Life Coaching or myself, please use the form below to schedule a free 50-minute ‘phone or Skype discussion.