Itis critically important to us at Retexo that the personality tests we provide, and all psychometric assessments in general, be used wisely. These tools should be used to increase compassion for self and others and to build authentic human connections, not to judge, label, criticize, or stereotype, or to justify bad behavior (“that’s just my personality.”) A personality test is a tool, and like all tools, what comes of its use depends largely on the user. With that in mind, before you use one of our assessments, we ask you to remember the following:

• You are not your personality. You have a personality. The same applies to others.

All personality tests provide a narrow view of an overwhelmingly complex human being living in an equally complex environment. That does not mean personality tests are not useful, just that they are necessarily incomplete pictures of who a person really is.

Each different assessment is just one way of describing personality. Body temperature is an essential tool for understanding health, but it does not provide a comprehensive diagnosis. In any attempt to understand who we really are, we can never see the whole picture, because we are the whole picture.

• Personality tests are for deepening understanding and increasing compassion, not for categorizing others.

Personality tests cannot determine if a person will succeed in any given job. They should never be used as the decision criteria for hiring, firing, or promotion.

You can never directly understand the inner experience of any other person. Only outward behaviors are visible to us, and there could be dozens of explanations for any given behavior beyond measurable personality traits.

• Your results reflect your responses to the questions, nothing more.

This might sound obvious, but personality tests are not magic. They simply quantify the responses you provide. They are designed to get at the stable aspects of your personality that typically don’t change much with external circumstances or over time. That said, intense or unusual circumstances, either good or bad, can influence how you respond, and thus can affect your results. And yes, you can probably manipulate your results and “game” the assessment, but we hope you don’t.

• A personality test is the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one.

Retexo strives to offer the most reliable, research-based assessments available, but they are never perfect or complete. Yet we also find that an inquiry into why you disagree with a certain result can be just as useful as a result with which you resonate strongly. Understanding self and others is a lifelong process of inquiry, not a destination at the end of a personality test report.

Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.
—attributed to Aristotle