It was June 2016. Florida. Three days of team training with a client I’d been working with since the earliest days of Fresh Take Productions – a dog training business called Paws and Possibilities – and her husband, an FBI supervisor who had spent his career studying how people work, how teams function, and how to build cohesion in high-stakes environments.
He’d brought us all down to put us through our paces. Team exercises, communication work, the kind of structured immersion that sounds intense and ends up being genuinely useful. And as part of that process, he gave everyone on the team the DISC assessment.
I was two years into my business. Still calling myself a virtual assistant, though I knew that wasn’t quite right. Still figuring out how to show up in the marketplace, what to call myself, who exactly I was in this new chapter I’d been building. I was around dog trainers in their twenties and thirties – clear in their identity, clear in their craft – and I was sitting there in my forties still trying to sort out my own.
I didn’t know the assessment was about to say that out loud.
What DISC Measures
DISC is a behavioral assessment that maps how you respond to your environment – how you communicate, how you make decisions, how you handle conflict, and how others experience you. It breaks down into four behavioral styles: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness.
The paper version I took in 2016 had three graphs. Graph one revealed your private self – the least noticeable aspects, set in early life. Graph two showed the projected self – how you think people see you, shaped by adulthood. Graph three was the net effect – the public composite, how people actually experience you. The tally box synthesized all three into a dominant behavioral pattern.
When the results were clear, you got a clean pattern. A recognizable type. A name for how you showed up.
When the results weren’t clear – when the three graphs were pulling in different directions – that told its own story.
The Inconclusive Result
My 2016 results: Graph one came back as Agent. Graph two as Promoter. Graph three as Achiever.
Three different graphs. Three different patterns. No clean synthesis.
The tally box was all over the place.
He pulled me aside – or at least it felt that way, the intimacy of being told something true about yourself in a room full of people – and said:
“This is usually the first sign that you’re in transition. You’re still figuring things out. The test isn’t wrong. It’s just that you’re not settled yet.”
I remember the embarrassment that hit me before the relief did.
How can you be in your forties and still not know who you are?
That thought, sharp and unkind, landed before I could stop it. Here I was, the oldest person in that room by a stretch, surrounded by dog trainers half my age who knew exactly what they did and who they were. And the test had just announced, in graph form, that I was still in transition. Still unresolved. Still becoming.
Nobody else seemed to think it was a big deal. As soon as I said what was going on – the business identity confusion, the naming issue, the sense of being between versions of myself – people understood. The result made sense in context. The FBI supervisor wasn’t judging me. He was reading me accurately.
But something in me went quiet and determined at the same time.
I will get to the bottom of this.
What Was Actually Going On
The naming issue was real, and it was the same thread that had run through my whole life, the one I wrote about in Part 1 of this series.
By 2016, I was trying to call myself a digital producer. But people heard “producer” and thought film. The market wasn’t ready for the language, and more importantly, I wasn’t fully inhabiting it yet. I was still doing anything for anybody – websites, social media, marketing, podcast production – whatever a client needed. The business existed. The business’s identity hasn’t been established yet.
And the test knew.
A DISC result in transition isn’t a failed result. It’s an honest one.
It shows you exactly where you are – not where you want to be, not where you think you are, but where you actually are.
In 2016, where I actually was was mid-crossing. Between who I’d been and who I was becoming.
I wasn’t ready to see that clearly yet. But I filed it away.
Two Years Later
In 2018, I took the DISC again.
By then, I’d stopped apologizing for the title “digital producer”. I was calling myself that regardless of whether the market had caught up, regardless of what people assumed it meant. I was solid in my positioning, clearer on who I served and how, and – importantly – I’d done more of the identity work that had been quietly underway since my early thirties.
My 2018 results: Graph one, three-seven-five-two. Graph two, one-six-six-four. Graph three, two-seven-five-three.
All three graphs pointed to the same place.
Counselor.
Clean. Clear. Resolved.
I remember the feeling – not the lightning bolt of the INFJ mirror moment, not the quiet click of the Kolbe, but something more like relief. Like arriving somewhere after a long drive.
There it is. There I am.
What Counselor Means – And What It Doesn’t
The Counselor pattern is defined by warmth, empathy, and a genuine orientation toward people. Approachable, affectionate, and driven by a goal of friendship and genuine connection. Someone who influences through personal relationships, listens to feelings, and develops a wide range of deep bonds over time. Someone who remains stable and predictable – a steady presence in the room.
Reading it, I recognized myself immediately. The open door. The willing ear. The instinct to look for the good in people before I look for the problem.
But I also want to be honest about the shadow side – because that’s what I do in this series, and because the shadow is where the real learning lives.
The Counselor profile names some real edges: difficulty confronting performance problems. Overly tolerant, especially with nonproducers. Indirect when issuing demands. Taking criticism as a personal affront. Placing so much value on people that task accomplishment sometimes suffers.
Some of that is true of me. The directness around performance – that one I’ve had to build deliberately. The tolerance that can tip into enabling – I’ve lived that, and I wrote about it in the Nice vs. Pushover piece.
But some of it doesn’t fully fit. And that’s where Agent comes in.
The Agent Thread
Agent showed up in my 2016 Graph One – the private self, the early-set layer. And in 2018, Graph Two came in very close to Agent before landing in Counselor.
When I read the Agent description, I recognized things the Counselor label alone doesn’t capture: fiercely independent. Attentive to both human relations and task dimensions. Excellent potential for organizing and completing work effectively. Naturally promotes harmony — but has a fair degree of independence underneath the warm exterior.
Agent fears conflict and dissent. So does Counselor. But the Agent description adds something important: agents are particularly good at doing for others what they find difficult to do for themselves.
That landed. Hard.
And while the Agent profile describes someone who may adopt a low profile with aggressive individuals (that’s sometimes me), I want to be clear about something.
I don’t love confrontation. I don’t seek it out.
But if someone I care about needs defending, or if a line genuinely needs to be drawn, I will draw it. That capacity is in me.
The assessments don’t always show you the full range; they show you the default. The default isn’t the whole person.
What The Two Results Taught Me Together
The 2016 and 2018 DISC results are probably the most instructive pair of data points in this whole series; not because of what the results said, but because of what the gap between them revealed.
The test in 2016 wasn’t wrong. It was accurate to the moment. And the moment was one of genuine transition – in identity, in business positioning, in the ongoing excavation of who I actually was.
The test in 2018 wasn’t a better version of me. It was a clearer one. Same person. More settled. More honest with myself about how I operated and what I stood for.
There’s something I want you to take from that if you’re reading this in the middle of your own unclear season: an inconclusive result isn’t a failure. It’s information. It’s the assessment telling you the truth about where you are — and sometimes where you are is mid-crossing, and that’s exactly right for this moment in the journey.
The clarity comes. But only if you do the work in between.
I will get to the bottom of this.
I did.
