Personality Tests: A Guide for Neurodivergent Thinkers

Jan 25

How Personality Tests Can Help

If you’re navigating ADHD or ASD, you might experience unique challenges in areas like communication, emotional regulation, and career alignment. Personality tests can:

Provide self-awareness about how you think, feel, and act.
Highlight strengths you might not recognize in yourself.
Offer strategies for managing difficult situations or tendencies.
Help you align with careers, relationships, and environments that suit you best.

A Few Personality Tests To Try

Here are some of the most effective tests, along with why they’re useful:

Enneagram

Purpose: Identifies core motivations, fears, and behaviors to uncover deeper patterns that influence decision-making and relationships.
How It Helps: For individuals with ADHD or ASD, the Enneagram offers insights into emotional drivers and coping mechanisms, helping to address avoidance or overstimulation. It supports personal growth and improves self-awareness.
Resource: Truity has a free Enneagram test.

Positive Intelligence Saboteurs Test

Purpose: Identifies mental habits (or "saboteurs") that undermine your productivity and happiness. For example, ADHD can intensify self-doubt, procrastination, or overthinking.
How It Helps: Offers strategies to shift from negative mental habits to positive "sage" responses, building resilience and fostering a growth mindset.
Free Resource: Positive Intelligence Saboteurs Test

DISC Assessment

Purpose: Analyze communication styles and how you interact with tasks and people.
How It Helps: Offers insights into adapting your communication and understanding how others perceive you. This is especially helpful for those who might struggle with social cues or collaboration.
Free Resource: 123Test has a short version of DISC.

Holland Code Test

Purpose: Matches your interests and preferences with compatible work environments and roles.
How It Helps: Helps individuals with ADHD or ASD identify careers that suit their strengths, like creativity, independence, or problem-solving, while steering away from environments that might feel overly rigid or unsupportive.
Free Resource: Truity has a modified Holland Code Career Test.

EQ-i 2.0 (Emotional Intelligence)

Purpose: Measures emotional self-awareness, empathy, stress management, and interpersonal skills.
How It Helps: ADHD and ASD often come with heightened emotional responses or difficulties managing stress. This test provides tools to improve emotional regulation and build stronger relationships.
Resource: Full EQ-i 2.0 assessments are available through certified professionals.

Case Study: Personality Tests & ADHD Coaching

Client Profile:

Jane is a 32-year-old Asian American digital marketing professional who was recently diagnosed online with ADHD. She is not comfortable disclosing her ADHD profile to her workplace or even her family due to cultural stigmas.
Jane faced challenges with time management, self-doubt, and maintaining focus, which made her question her abilities and career trajectory.
Contemplating a career transition, she wanted to move into a role that aligned with her marketing expertise while also leveraging her creativity and enjoyment of working with clients. However, the path forward felt unclear and overwhelming.

Client Journey:

Step 1: Self-Awareness | Enneagram Test (free)

Tool: Jane took the Enneagram Test, which revealed she is a Type 7 (The Enthusiast). The Enneagram is designed to uncover core motivations and emotional drivers, and for Jane, it highlighted her tendency to thrive on excitement and variety while avoiding routine and uncomfortable emotions.
Insight: This explained why she felt easily bored with repetitive tasks and gravitated toward new, dynamic projects. However, it also revealed a blind spot: her avoidance of discomfort was leading to procrastination and incomplete tasks.
Action: To work with this insight, Jane began scheduling her day with short, focused sprints of creative work followed by regular breaks. This approach kept her energized and reduced her tendency to avoid difficult or tedious tasks.

Step 2: Overcome Mental Barriers | Positive Intelligence Saboteurs Saboteurs Assessment (free)

Tool: The Positive Intelligence Saboteurs Assessment identified Jane’s top saboteurs as “Avoider” and “Restless.” This test focuses on uncovering mental habits that undermine effectiveness and happiness.
Insight: Jane realized that her Avoider led her to steer clear of uncomfortable but important tasks, while her Restless saboteur drove her to jump between projects, making it hard to complete them. Together, these habits reinforced feelings of chaos and self-doubt.
Action: With this awareness, Jane adopted mindfulness techniques to stay grounded in the present moment. She also implemented an accountability system by partnering with a colleague to help her stick to her commitments and prioritize her focus.

Step 3: Improve Teamwork | DISC Assessment (free)

Tool: The DISC Assessment revealed that Jane is high in Influence (I) but low in Compliance (C). DISC measures how individuals approach communication, collaboration, and tasks.
Insight: Jane’s high Influence score showed her strength in building relationships and sharing ideas, making her a natural connector. However, her low Compliance score indicated difficulty following strict processes, which often led to frustrations in team settings where structure was required.
Action: Jane worked with her manager to delegate process-heavy tasks that drained her energy and focused instead on client-facing roles where her interpersonal skills could shine. This also helped reduce friction in collaborative projects.

Step 4: Build Emotional Intelligence | EQ-i 2.0 Test (paid)

Tool: The EQ-i 2.0 Test provided a detailed evaluation of Jane’s emotional intelligence, focusing on areas like self-regulation, empathy, and stress management.
Insight: Jane learned that her emotional highs and lows often disrupted her work, especially under stress. Her tendency to overreact to challenges created cycles of burnout and frustration.
Action: To improve, Jane began journaling daily as a way to process her emotions and identify triggers. Additionally, she adopted a simple breathing exercise that she could use during stressful situations, such as high-pressure meetings, to maintain calm and clarity.

Step 5: Career Alignment | Holland Code Test (free)

Tool: The Holland Code Test revealed that Jane’s top codes were “Artistic” and “Enterprising.” This test identifies work environments and roles that align with an individual’s interests and preferences.
Insight: Jane’s results emphasized her need for creativity and independence, confirming her desire to work in roles that allowed her to innovate and take initiative.
Action: With this understanding, Jane narrowed her job search to positions that offered flexibility and opportunities for innovation. She focused on finding environments where her strengths would be appreciated, and her creative energy could thrive.

Coaching Impact:

As her coach, I took a holistic view of Jane’s situation:

Her Enneagram Type 7 emphasized her need for variety, but it also illuminated a blindspot: her tendency to avoid discomfort. This was compounded by her "Restless" saboteur from the Positive Intelligence test, making it challenging for her to stay committed to long-term tasks. The DISC assessment highlighted her ability to influence and connect with others but also her struggles with structured, process-driven environments.
As an Asian American woman, Jane faced unique pressures rooted in cultural expectations around success and perfectionism. She felt the weight of "model minority" stereotypes, which exacerbated her self-doubt and fear of failure. Additionally, cultural stigmas around mental health made it difficult for her to disclose her ADHD diagnosis to her family or workplace, leaving her feeling isolated. This internal conflict often manifested as overcompensation, leading her to take on more than she could handle to prove her worth.
Jane’s ADHD was further shaped by a history of internalized criticism from feeling “lazy” or “scatterbrained” due to undiagnosed symptoms in her youth. This self-criticism left her hesitant to take risks or advocate for her needs. The EQ-i 2.0 test revealed that these past experiences often triggered heightened stress responses, which she hadn’t previously linked to her trauma history.

Client Results

As her coach, I helped Jane recognize her creativity and ability to influence as her superpowers while addressing her blindspots. We reframed her "Restless" and "Avoider" tendencies as opportunities to pause and reflect rather than escape tasks. By connecting her past experiences to her self-doubt, we worked on affirmations and actionable strategies to overcome these patterns.
We developed a system balancing her need for variety with structure. This included flexible deadlines, collaboration with accountability partners, and regular check-ins to ensure she stayed aligned with her goals. We also implemented strategies to help her build resilience, self-trust, and the confidence to advocate for herself in culturally sensitive ways.
Jane gained confidence in her abilities, improved her focus, and began advocating for accommodations that played to her strengths. Within three months, she reported feeling more balanced, productive, and capable of handling challenges without resorting to avoidance. She successfully transitioned into a role that leveraged her creativity and client-focused strengths while providing her with the flexibility she needed to thrive.

Free Personality Tests

Start with one test from each category:

Self-Awareness: Enneagram.
Overcoming Barriers: Positive Intelligence Saboteurs.
Teamwork: Short version DISC.
Career Alignment: Modified Holland Code.

Final Thoughts

Personality tests are here to help, not define you. Use them to learn more about yourself, find your strengths, and tackle challenges—especially if ADHD or ASD makes life a little more complex. The insights you gain can guide you to better decisions and deeper self-acceptance. Start small, stay curious, and remember: you’re more than any test result!

Minal Kamlani