Personal Energy Profile Assessment

LE has created an online assessment called the Personal Energy Profile that measures these Elements in a person’s life, and from that can derive a person’s personality, values and core motivators.

Much of this understanding of what motivates people comes from Self Determination Theory (or SDT). In Self Determination Theory, your motivators are measured by three primary components: Competence, Autonomy and Relatedness.

1. Competence

In SDT, Competence refers to the need to feel capable and effective at performing certain tasks.

In combining SDT with the 16 Elements, competence refers to the need to feel capable in that Element and effective at performing within its attributes.

LE’s research shows that those things that motivate you you’re likely to invest more in and be good at, so your level of competence in an Element is an indicator that it’s core to who you are and what drives you.

A high competence score in an element shows that it’s fundamental to your personality, whereas a low score indicates it’s more foreign to your core identity.

People who score high in competence have a high degree of confidence in that thing and tend to perform very well in it. The overuse of competence can show up as hubris, or pride, and can sometimes cause you to be blind to others’ input and feedback.

2. Autonomy

In SDT, Autonomy refers to the need to feel in control of one’s life.

In combining SDT with the 16 Elements, it means that you feel like you have control over that Element and its attributes, and that you desire to have control over them.

LE has found that there are two aspects to autonomy.

The first is that those things that motivate you are things you want extra control over. You want to have autonomy in those things. Partially this is because you’re good at them (which shows up as competence), but also because you care about them that you want ownership of them.

The other aspect of autonomy is that you feel like you have the ability to be successful in that thing through your investments in it.

People who score high in Autonomy can be very self-directed and need very little management or guidance. People who score low on Autonomy need more help and guidance to be successful.

3. Relatedness

In SDT, Relatedness refers to the need to feel connected to others and to have a sense of belonging.

In combining SDT with the 16 Elements, relatedness describes your willingness to involve others. When you are good at something and are motivated by it, you are willing to be inclusive and involve others in your journey.

This does not compete with autonomy, which is more a measure of your desire to be in control of that thing, whereas relatedness describes your willingness to include and involve others.

Relatedness with an Element also means that when you seek for belonging, you seek for it in a way that includes that Element or its attributes.

People who score high on Relatedness will naturally work well with others. They are more social and inclusive. People who score low on Relatedness prefer work in isolation, they are more introverted and prefer to navigate their path and do their work on their own.

To this set of factors, LE adds a 4th factor called Passion:

4. Passion

Passion describes the raw energy, emotion and enthusiasm you have for that thing, and your ability to draw energy from it.

As it pertains to the 16 Elements, your passion for a given Element describes now naturally that Element and its corresponding attributes resonate with you, energize you, and spark you into action.

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Energy Attributes

The Energy Attributes are the combination of these 4 Attributes (the three attributes of competence, autonomy and relatedness, plus the attribute of Passion). 

In the Personal Energy Profile Assessment LE measures these 4 attributes across all 16 Elements. This allows LE to understand an individual’s level of Competence, Autonomy, Relatedness and Passion for each Element, and based on these results, understand how deeply that Element impacts the individual (LE calls this Resonance). The combined score of these 4 attributes for each Element comprises the Element Weight (overall impact on the individual’s identity—more on this below) for that Element. In this way, LE is able to derive the Primary Motivators and Secondary Motivators of an individual’s personality. LE is also able to understand their overall level of Competence (which LE also calls Confidence), Relatedness (which LE also calls Connectedness), Autonomy, and Passion. In the Personal Energy Profile, the total scores of these attributes LE calls Core Attributes. They consist of:

1. Potential Energy
2. Confidence & Self-Efficacy
3. Connectedness
4. Autonomy
5. Passion

Additional training and context on these attributes will be provided separately.

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Personality Drivers

Each Element tends to manifest (or show up) in someone’s life in very similar ways. We call these Personality Drivers. These include, but are not limited to:

• Attributes
• Characteristics
• Competencies
• Talents
• Traits
• Preferences
• Desires
• Values
• Beliefs
• Behavioral Tendencies
• Weaknesses (often caused by us over-relying on—or over-using—one of these things).

Core Personality Set

The Core Personality Set are the Personality Drivers corresponding to that individual’s Core Motivators. Those Personality drivers combine and synthesize in unique ways to comprise the majority of that individual’s personality.

Element Weight

Life Engineering’s (LE’s) assessment measures the Element Weight of each element. The Element Weight determines the impact of that Element’s Personality Drivers on that individual’s Identity. For instance, if a person’s assessment shows they register 100% Element weight in one Element, they will tend to inherit all (or most) of that Element’s Personality Drivers. If a person has an Element that scores an Element Weight of 50%, they will only receive about 50% of the impact of that Element.

The Element Weight of each Element within their Core Motivators will generally tend to impact how dominant that Element and its corresponding Personality Drivers are in making up that individual’s overall personality.

Primary Motivators and Core personality set

The 5 Elements whose Element Weights are the highest comprise that individual’s Primary Motivators and represent their Core Personality Set. 

Their personality is predominantly impacted by these Elements, and the level of impact of each Element is measured by its corresponding Element Weight.

Secondary Motivators

The remaining Elements (those that don’t register in the top 5, their Primary Motivators) are Secondary Motivators. They (and their Personality Drivers) have a lesser impact on the individual’s identity than the Primary Motivators, but they still have an impact. Their impact also corresponds to each of those Element’s Element Weight.

Transitory Elements

Occasionally an Element will surface as a Core Motivator, not because it is always a core driver of that individual’s personality, but for reasons that are circumstantial.

For instance, if someone loses a job, their Personal Energy Profile may temporarily register a superficially elevated score for Value. If someone loses a loved one, they may temporarily register high on Relationship. If they lose their home, they may temporarily register high on Environment. Similar circumstances exist for each Element.

Anchor Elements

Anchor Elements are those Elements of an individual’s personality that tend to be inherent to their nature. These are not transitory nor circumstantial, but rather tend to show up consistently because they are innate to the individual.

The important thing to remember is that the Elements that show up as Primary Motivators have a larger impact on an individual’s identity (and the level of impact corresponds to the Element Weight of that Element). An individual’s Secondary Motivators have a lesser impact that also corresponds to the Element weight of each Element.

Supplemental Personality Set

The Supplemental Personality Set are the Secondary Motivators. They comprise the combined Personality Drivers for the other Elements in that individual’s Personal Energy Profile that didn’t show up in their Core Motivators. These Personality Drivers help add variety, variability, and nuance to that individual’s personality.

The degree of influence of each Element’s Personality Drivers on their Supplemental Personality Set are proportionate to their Element Weight (or how high they scored on each Element in their Personal Energy Profile Assessment).

Total Personality Set

The Total Personality Set is the combination of an individual’s Core Personality Set and their Supplemental Personality Set. The degree of influence of the Core Personality Set has on their overall Personality should be significantly weighted over the individual’s Supplemental Personality Set.

Personality Driver Variability

While Personality Drivers are often relatively consistent in how they manifest in an individual’s personality, there can be some degree of variability to this. This can be due to things like:

• Life Circumstances – The specific, current circumstances of someone’s life and what they are going through in the moment. 
• Life Experiences – The way the individual was raised, they things they were taught, the things that person has been through, all shape the way they see and process events, develop learned behaviors (please draw on and refer to the science of Learned Behaviors), create biases (please draw on and refer to the science of biases, where they come from, what they’re associated with, and how they influence our thoughts and actions), process information, and form beliefs.
• Their Personal Energy Profile – the specific combination of other attributes and elements that show up in their Personal Energy Profile.

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Personal Energy Profile

The Personal Energy Profile is the complete report you get when you take the Personal Energy Profile Assessment. For the sake of simplifying communication, Personal Energy Profile will be referred to below as PEP, but when you talk about the Personal Energy Profile, you’ll use the full term.

The PEP consists of multiple components, each of which give a different view on that individual’s personality, talents, capabilities, and motivators (their Personality Drivers).

Following are a description of these PEP components.

PEP Component: Core Personality Motivator(s) or “Energy Formula”

The top 5 Elements that someone rates most highly on (as measured by the Element Weight) are their Core personality Motivators (or Core Motivators) and comprise their Energy Formula. These Elements make up their core motivation formula and are fundamental to their personality. They comprise the largest part of their identity, of who they are, what they value, how they think, what motivates them, and what they’re good at, among other Personality Drivers. These Elements, and an individual’s ability to understand them, can be a guide for their journey through life, as they will help them understand the paths they’re likely to be successful in, find energy and engagement in, and find purpose, meaning and fulfillment in.

They also represent their own personal motivation formula. The majority of their energy and motivation will come from these motivators. When someone finds themself needing motivation, these are the Elements they should turn to first, as they will both produce the most energy, and will be the easiest to get energy from.

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Personality Description Overview

Notwithstanding occasional variability in Personality Drivers, or how an Element manifests itself in someone’s Personality, each of the following are statements and descriptions (called Personality Description Overviews) that tend to most often reflect how an Element impacts someone’s Personality.

When an Element shows up as a Core Motivator, these are especially and more fully accurate. When an Element shows up as a Supporting Motivator, only parts of these Personality Descriptions may manifest in that person’s Personality Profile, or all may, but to a lesser degree.

Note: These summary descriptions are written to be read by the person receiving their Personal Energy Profile to help them understand what they might mean to them. In these descriptions, the use of “you” or “your” refers to the person who has taken the assessment.

These don’t constitute an all-inclusive description of the Personality Drivers for each Element, but rather an overview of some that are most common. A deeper and more exhaustive exploration of each Element and its corresponding Personality Drivers will be provided separately.

Part of your role may be to extrapolate from this information, and an individual’s PEP results, and in particular how Elements in their profile (and their Personality Drivers and weighted impact or Element Weight) may work together to form the actual chemistry of the individual’s personality. A personality is not merely the sum of each Element, but rather is an Emergent Phenomenon that exists by how these Elements and their Personality Drivers Interact. You will derive these emergent qualities and the overall outcome of each individual’s specific chemical formula (their personality formula, which consists of their Primary and Secondary motivators, or their Total Personality Set). It may be that you will need to identify additional Personality Drivers for an Element (or how an Element’s effects on personality may change when found in combination with the other Elements in their profile) based on your expansive expertise as a cross-disciplinary expert. This liberty should also be based on what you think is relevant given the understanding you develop of each Element from the overview descriptions below, and in combination with the additional, deeper Element training details that will be provided separately.

As you answer questions, you should feel free to share these findings based on your understanding and expertise.

Tonality

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Personality Description Overview, Element: Perspective

Congratulations, Perspective is one of your core motivators!

You have a powerful gift. It’s a skill that allows you to control the meaning of events by how you choose to process them, frame them, and communicate them.

Sometimes those events are in the past.

You have an innate ability for casting past events in the light of your choosing so that they take on a particular meaning that is of value to you in where you are today and where you’re going tomorrow.

This ability extends beyond yourself to other individuals. You have the ability to help others process the events of their lives, or their circumstances in ways that can be hugely helpful to them.

This ability can be applied to teams and organizations as well. You have an ability to help make sense of the past in a way that can increase optimism, inspire movement, foster performance, and drive change.

Sometimes those events are happening now, in the moment.

You have an innate ability to forge a lens in your mind through which you process events as they happen. This gives you power to determine what meaning they have for you.

Whether those events are positive or negative is circumstantial; they will take on the meaning of the lens through which you process them, which gives you a lot of control over how you experience your life.

Sometimes those events are yet to come.

You have an ability to look to the future… to peer through the fog that obscures the vision of others, and see a future state in clear, vivid detail.

Your ability to see that detail, the color and texture of a future that is yet to be is one of your greatest superpowers. Seeing a future in that level of detail gives you the ability to shape the present in a way that it ultimately and eventually will come to pass.

Because of the potency of this power, be careful to focus on a positive future state. It is true for all that we tend to move toward our most dominant thought pattern. Our thoughts take on mass and that mass creates a gravitational pull that draws us to make those thoughts a reality.

For you, this is extra true.

Some of these gifts described here may be more familiar to you than others, but all of them fall within the spectrum of this core, innate ability that you have.

As you focus on developing this unique and special talent of Perspective, you will grow into these descriptions, and experience a great many others that are derived from them.

You have the ability to be a great motivator, leader, guide, mentor and influencer because of these abilities. You should seek for ways to leverage this great skill for good, both in your own life, and in the lives of others.