By the fall of 2018, I had started to get comfortable with being rare.
The INFJ result had shown me I was in roughly two percent of the population.
Kolbe had named a dominant instinct that didn’t fit the obvious categories.
I was used to assessments showing me something uncommon about how I moved through the world.
I thought I was ready for another one.
I wasn’t entirely ready for this one.
How I Found It
The Fascination Advantage came to me through a mastermind I was part of in 2018, led by Maggie Patterson of Scoop Studios. She was a certified Fascination Advantage adviser at the time, and she gave us all the assessment as part of our work together.
The Fascination Advantage is different from most assessments in one important way. As Sally Hogshead, who developed it, puts it: other tests measure how you see the world. This one measures how the world sees you.
It’s not about personality in the interior sense – it’s about your communication brand. How you’re most likely to fascinate others.
What you lead with. What makes you distinctly, memorably you in the eyes of the people around you.
There are seven triggers: Passion, Trust, Mystique, Prestige, Power, Alarm, and Rebellion – and 49 possible archetypes, each a combination of a primary and secondary trigger. Your result tells you your archetype: the combination that defines your personality’s greatest competitive advantage.
Mine came back as The Intrigue.
Primary trigger: Passion. Secondary trigger: Mystique.
What The Intrigue Actually Is
The report described it this way: “Your warm, attractive nature contains your very complex and private interior.”
Passion is the trigger of emotional connection: expressive, intuitive, social, and approachable. People with Passion as their primary trigger create immediate warmth. They’re an open book. They make people feel seen and included quickly. They communicate with color, energy, and genuine feeling.
Mystique is the trigger of substance and understatement: complex, rational, reserved, deliberate. People with Mystique communicate selectively and purposefully. They rarely show inner emotions. They remain calm under pressure. When they do share an idea or opinion, it carries more weight precisely because they don’t share everything.
Put them together, and you get The Intrigue: someone who draws you in with warmth and then holds depth in reserve. Someone who feels accessible on the surface and layered underneath. Someone whose first impression is one thing and whose third impression is something else entirely.
The report named five competitive advantages for this archetype: perceptive, nuanced, selective, observant, and warm and cool simultaneously.
I read through all of it and thought: yes. That’s accurate.
And then I sat with a feeling I hadn’t expected.
The Loneliness
Every assessment up to this point had given me some version of relief. The INFJ mirror. The Kolbe naming my default. Even the inconclusive DISC result, which stung at first, ultimately confirmed something true.
This one gave me something different.
Not the recognition this time. The recognition was there – I could see myself clearly in the Intrigue description. But underneath the recognition was a feeling I can only describe as loneliness.
Here’s the paradox I was sitting with: I experience myself as an open book. Completely transparent. Warm, accessible, come get to know me. I don’t try to be mysterious. I’m not playing a game or holding things back strategically. I genuinely want to be known.
But The Intrigue, the report warned, creates a specific dynamic: “When they first meet you, people might make certain assumptions about your personality. Yet there’s far more to you than meets the eye. Your initial impression can be quite different from your third and fourth.”
In other words, people meet the Passion and think they’ve got you. And then they find the Mystique and don’t know what to do with it. And some of them don’t stay long enough to find out.
I felt that.
Not as a concept, but as a lived experience I suddenly had language for.
There have been people throughout my life who’ve encountered the warmth and assumed that was all there was. And when the depth showed up – when the complexity surfaced, when the layers revealed themselves – some of them stepped back. Some decided I was too much. Some just didn’t want to do the work of going deeper.
And I had spent years wondering if that meant that there was something wrong with me.
The Fascination Advantage showed me it wasn’t. It was just The Intrigue. The warm exterior that contains a very complex interior. The open book whose pages go further than most people expect.
The Deep Diver, Crystallizing
Looking back now, I can see that this was the moment the deep diver framing started to crystallize for me, though I didn’t have that exact language yet.
The threads had been showing themselves across every assessment. The INFJ who goes looking for the meaning beneath the meaning. The Restore instinct that moves toward what’s broken rather than what’s easy. The Counselor who builds deep relationships over time rather than many shallow ones.
And now this: an archetype defined by depth, by layers, by a complexity that not everyone has the patience or desire to reach.
The world is full of surface dwellers – people who are satisfied with the first impression, who don’t look past the warm exterior for what’s underneath. And there is nothing wrong with that. It’s just a different way of moving through the world.
But I am not that. I have never been that. I am someone who lives in the deep water and always has, and who sometimes, reading an assessment result in the fall of 2018, felt the loneliness of that very clearly.
Not everyone goes deep. Not everyone wants to. And if you’re someone whose warmth draws people toward you but whose complexity sometimes loses them before they get there, that’s not a flaw. That’s The Intrigue. That’s the price of the depth.
The Dormant Trigger (And Why It Makes Complete Sense)
There’s one more piece of the result worth naming, because it connects to something I’ve come to understand more deeply over time.
My dormant trigger – the one I’m least likely to lead with, and the one that costs me the most energy when I try – is Prestige.
Prestige is the trigger of higher standards, status symbols, and competitive drive to impress. People whose primary trigger is Prestige are motivated by recognition, by being seen as exceptional, by the external markers of success and achievement. They want the spotlight. They want to be known for being the best.
The report is clear about what it means when Prestige is dormant: actively attempting to use it costs a disproportionate amount of energy and is rarely your path to success.
Reading that, I exhaled.
Because I have never been motivated by the spotlight. I don’t lead with status or pursue recognition for its own sake. The idea of positioning myself as the most impressive person in the room – of competing to be seen as exceptional – has always felt not just unnatural but genuinely exhausting.
And yet I want my work to have impact at a systemic level. I want the ideas to travel. I want the book to reach people. I want to change things.
That tension – between wanting broad impact and having zero instinct for self-promotion – has been one of the defining friction points of my professional life.
The Fascination Advantage named one side of it clearly: Prestige is dormant. The spotlight is not my natural language.
I would come to understand the other side of that tension more fully later, through the Values Bridge Assessment, specifically through the Radius and Luminance conflict that showed up there. But the thread started here, in the fall of 2018, reading a dormant trigger result and feeling something between recognition and relief.
The work is the point. Not the spotlight. It always has been.
What This Means For The Work
The Fascination Advantage sits a little differently in my ecosystem than the other assessments do. It’s not primarily about how I experience myself. It’s about how others experience me. And that distinction matters enormously when you’re doing service design work, when your entire practice is built on the gap between what you intend and what people actually receive.
Knowing that I lead with warmth and hold complexity in reserve, that my first impression and my fourth impression can be quite different, helps me be more intentional about how I show up. About when to let the depth surface earlier. About when the Mystique is serving the connection and when it’s creating distance I didn’t intend.
The Intrigue is a gift. It’s also a responsibility.
And the loneliness I felt reading that result in 2018 has, over time, become something closer to clarity.
I live in deep water. Not everyone will come down here. And the ones who do – the ones who stay past the first impression, who want to know what’s underneath the warmth – those are my people.
