What’s Your WorkStyle?

My love affair with personality tests began early. I think it was probably 1996. I was a junior in high school, and I remember pulling a copy of Do What You Are: Discover the Perfect Career for You Through the Secrets of Personality Type off my dad's bookshelf.

The promise was intoxicating.

The Value of Self-Knowledge

After reading that book and taking the Myers-Briggs personality test, I soon discovered I was an INFJ, one of the rarest personality types that existed (according to the MBTI folks), which I wore as a badge of honor.

In all seriousness, though, that test helped me understand how I was uniquely wired, what I brought to the world that was different from other people, and where I would likely get tripped up. Even at sixteen years old, I knew intuitively how valuable that self-knowledge could be.

My love for personality tests has only continued as the years have gone by. My current favorites are the Kolbe, the Enneagram, Working Genius, DISC, Myers-Briggs, and Strengths Finder. I believe good self-leadership begins with self-awareness and personality tests are a great way to increase it.

Each of the tests I mentioned help you understand who you are and how to maximize your strengths and minimize the negative impact of your weaknesses. But about nine months ago, we decided that there was something missing.

Performing Under Pressure

All the tests I mentioned above are about identity, a state of being. That is certainly important. But we are a company obsessed with helping people overwhelmed with too much to do, working way too many hours, find a path to radically reducing those hours so they can truly win at work and flourish in life.

That's our mission. And that's not a problem with who you are; that's a problem with what you—uniquely—do under pressure, when the list and responsibilities stack up along with the stress.

We believe that “you, under pressure” has a unique signature, a WorkStyle, if you will. Based on your identity, you will respond to stress and pressure in particular ways, and those predictable behaviors reliably lead to overwhelm and working too many hours.

To truly eliminate overwhelm and successfully find a path to working fewer hours without dropping balls or settling for limiting your earning potential, you need productivity strategies designed for you, rather than generic, one-size-fits-all solutions.

That's why we're launching our brand new WorkStyle Assessment. It's absolutely free, and you can take it here.

The WorkStyle Assessment will tell you exactly what happens to your work, your productivity, and your ability to deliver results when you're overwhelmed and overloaded—not just generically, but uniquely depending on WorkStyle. Most importantly, we'll also show you the specific strategies and tactics that will work best to reduce and even eliminate overwhelming depending on your style.

When you take the test, you'll get a multipage report explaining in detail your dominant and secondary WorkStyle and how that combination shows up at work and home. And why, based on your type, typical productivity advice like “set better boundaries,” “eliminate distractions,” “timeblock,” “implement a better morning routine,” “schedule weekly planning,” or “delegate” rarely gives you relief from the overwhelm—at least not for very long.

Discovering Your WorkStyle

Your report will show you what to do instead, strategies that actually work for your style. Your report will also show how to use the Priority Filter to choose what deserves your time (and what doesn't).

Each report includes:

• Your Default Pattern—the approach to which you most often return and what can happen when its liabilities go unchecked
• How You Show Up—the behavioral tendencies that shape your work every day
• Your Situational Tendencies—how your style plays out in the real conditions of your life, including how you perform under pressure
• Where This Gets Hard—the cost of letting the downsides of your style dominate
• Your Secondary Style—the second WorkStyle shaping how your primary pattern plays out day to day
• Your Growth Path—practical strategies built around how you naturally work

There are five primary types—The Giver, The Achiever, The Juggler, The Optimizer, and the Improvisor—and each of these five has a secondary style, for a total of 20 possible combinations, each with their own situational tendencies.

Next week, we'll unpack into the first of the five types—The Giver—and you can see if it sounds like you.

In the meantime, make sure to take the assessment so you can get your results and start putting the insights to work, validating your experience, lightening your load, and stepping into a path of greater freedom, peace and margin.

Again, this is our free gift to help you get the clarity you need to eliminate overwhelm, reduce your work hours, and finally win at work and flourish in life.

Cheering you on,

Megan Hyatt Miller, Full Focus CEO

AI Disclosure: This newsletter was written by a human—me—for a human—you! I sometimes use AI for research, to critique my writing, or to proofread before I publish. But the words I choose, the sentences I write, and the ideas I share come from my brain and out through my fingertips onto the keyboard before they find their way to your inbox. If that ever changes, I'll tell you. Thanks for reading, and thanks for being a human.