A colleague from the UK mailed me saying: “I suppose what I have difficulty with is … if ‘personality’ is situational, in other words we are ‘at cause’ and can choose to be whoever we wish to be depending upon our outcome and upon our context, then how could we ever measure that? Personality from this perspective is not a stable trait which can predict certain behaviours and language in certain contexts, it is simply what someone chooses to do or not do. Congratulations on getting Mind Sonar to where it is.  A great effort and good news for those who wish to see standards raised.”

Let me respond to what seems to be a misunderstanding here (I am not referring to the compliment of course). MindSonar does not measure personality. MindSonar measures how someone thinks in a given context. MindSonar is a contextual measurement of mindsets. MindSonar presupposes that people have different mindsets in different situations. You can verify this for yourself quite easily. One of the assignments in the MindSonar certification training is to make a profile for two different situations: one in which you were ‘in flow’ and everything was going fine, you were ‘at your best’. And another profile for a situation where you were unhappy with yourself. This usually results in two strikingly different profiles. If you want to experience first hand how your thinking stylesand your value types change with the situation, do this exercise.

Everything changes by context
The same principle was expressed by Rodger Bailey in his adagium: “Everything changes by context”. That having been said, we also noticed that people differ in the extent to which they differ. Everybody’s thinking style changes by context, but some people’s change more than other’s. In other words: people differ in how much their mindset changes by context. Theoretically, we neither subscribe to the position that there is a fixed a personality that people will always show everywhere. But neither do we believe that personality is a matter of choice, that ‘we can choose to be whoever we wish to be’. What we do believe is, that – with effort – we can change our mindset.

Some people change more than others when the context changes
The truth is somewhere in the middle. Everything changes by context, and some people change more than others when the context changes. Some people – although this seems rare – will have the same profile, no matter what happens. And others may have certain clusters (meta program combinations) that remain the same in different contexts. These stable elements might be considered personality traits for these specific people. Personality being defined as: ‘The combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual’s distinctive character’.

Multiple personality
Although it is not being said literally, in this definition it seems to be presupposed that these characteristics are stable over situations and time. Otherwise we would have to wonder: ‘Which personality will he be in today?’ That sounds strange, doesn’t it? How could their ‘distinctive character’ change all the time and stil be distinctive? There is even a psychiatric condition that is characterized by shifts in personality: ‘Dissociative identity disorder’ (previously known as ‘multiple personality’). The fact that this is thought to be caused by severe childhood trauma, shows us how unusual personalty changes are. So we may safely assume that personality characteristics are stable over time and place. And since MindSonar measures mindsets that change with the context, it follows that MindSonar does not measure personality.