The Tests Weren’t Wrong. They Just Weren’t Finished.

What Myers-Briggs, the Enneagram, and a late-arriving archetype shift revealed about my midlife development!

For most of my adult life I’ve been oddly committed to understanding my personality. Not in a deeply clinical sense, but in the very practical sense of taking every personality test the internet has ever produced.

Myers-Briggs? Done.
Enneagram? Obviously.
Corporate color wheel personality profiles? Of course.
Leadership styles, emotional intelligence inventories, strengths assessments… if someone sent a link, I took it.

And here’s the obvious part: the results were almost always the same.

Different systems. Different language. But I kept landing in the same general personality neighborhood.

On the Myers-Briggs, I’m an ENFP. On the Enneagram, I’ve consistently tested as a 9. On the various corporate color systems, I usually fall into the warm, relational, harmony-seeking categories.

After a while I realized these tests were all describing some version of the same person.

Someone who is naturally curious about people. Someone who connects ideas and humans easily. Someone who tends to lead with optimism and emotion first. Someone who prefers collaboration to confrontation and would generally rather keep the peace than start a fight.

In other words, the personality tests kept confirming what I already suspected: I’m wired as a connector and someone who sees patterns quickly. Many of those profiles suggest a big-picture thinker who starts with possibility and figures out structure later. There, though, I’m almost the opposite. I need to see the structure first. Once the framework is clear, that’s when I start seeing all the potential inside it.

That description felt right for a long time. It fit the way I worked, the way I built relationships, and honestly the way I moved through most of adulthood.

But recently I’ve started noticing something interesting.

I don’t think the core personality has changed, but I do think something new is getting louder.

For most of my life my instinct in almost any situation has been to explore, to understand, to find the common ground. I was usually the one asking questions, connecting dots, looking for the collaborative path forward.

Lately, however, I’ve noticed a different instinct showing up alongside that one. Instead of endless exploration, there’s more decisiveness. Instead of smoothing things over, there’s more clarity about what I will and will not tolerate. Instead of waiting for consensus, there’s a stronger impulse to simply act.

Out of curiosity, and because apparently I will never stop taking personality quizzes, I recently took another one. This time it was an archetype test, which looks less at personality traits and more at the energetic roles people tend to embody.

You can take the same one here if you’re curious:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/cmc33/12-archetypes-quiz

My result surprised me a little but definitely tracks: I scored as The Warrior.

If you had asked me ten years ago whether “warrior” described my personality, I would have laughed. I’ve always thought of myself more as the diplomat than the fighter.

But when I read the description, it was hard to ignore how much of it felt familiar.

The Warrior archetype isn’t really about aggression. It’s about clarity and protection. Warriors tend to move toward challenges rather than around them. They are motivated to defend what matters, set boundaries, and take action when something needs to change. They are comfortable making decisions, cutting through noise, and stepping forward when leadership is required.

In other words, they spend a lot less time negotiating their own authority.

The more I thought about it, the more it made sense.

Midlife seems to do something interesting to many of us. The traits that helped us navigate our twenties and thirties (collaboration, flexibility, patience, diplomacy) don’t disappear, but they start pairing with something stronger.

The connector learns how to confront.
The peacemaker learns how to protect.
The big-idea person learns how to execute.

What used to be harmony-seeking slowly grows a backbone.

Maybe that’s the real midlife personality shift. We don’t become completely different people. The core wiring is still there. The ENFP curiosity is still very much alive. The Enneagram 9 instinct toward peace hasn’t vanished.

But something else has joined the party.

There’s more willingness to say the uncomfortable thing. More confidence in setting boundaries. Less patience for unnecessary nonsense. A growing comfort with taking the lead instead of waiting for permission.

The personality tests that once described us so neatly might not be wrong. They might just be incomplete.

Because midlife doesn’t erase who we’ve always been. It simply activates parts of ourselves we didn’t need earlier.

And if the new version includes a little Warrior energy alongside the curiosity and connection, I’m starting to think that’s not a bad upgrade at all.

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#RealGirlsGuidetoMidlife, #PersonalityTest, #NavigatingMidlife
#TheWarrior, #Curiosity, #Connection #MidlifeMood #RGG

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