Key takeaways
- Your mind has three parts: cognitive, affective, conative.
- Various measures have been developed to test these three brain functions.
- The Kolbe A Index is significantly different than the other profiles because it measures the conation (doing) part of your mind.
Years ago, I happened to be in the lunchroom with three women who met for lunch quite often. One of the women was young and had no children. The second had one child and the third woman had two children.
The woman with no children was always telling the other two how to raise kids and about all these things parents are supposed to do. She even told them what they were doing wrong and right and many other things related to parenting.
You can imagine the reaction the two women with children had. They wondered what was wrong with their friend and how she developed such a horrible personality. Who is she to try to tell us what to do? The point of the story is that was absolutely not what was happening. And I didn’t know this until going through a new kind of profile you probably have not taken.
3 Parts of Your Mind
Your mind actually has three parts. The first part is the cognitive and it’s analyzed through IQ tests and similar scales. In fact, a guy named E.F. Wonderlic developed the Wonderlic Test back in the 1930s. It became a standard and all people going into the military and going into World War II had to take it.
The second part of the mind is the affective and it’s measured by tools like the Myers-Briggs test. Back in the 1920s, a mother and daughter who were flappers noticed these different personalities. In addition to the Myers-Briggs, we have the HBDI, DiSC, and several others. In fact, personality tests make up the majority of the profile tests you see in the field.
The third part of the mind is the conative part. The conative mind goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks, who actually studied this relationship between our smarts, feelings and doings. This part of the mind is the doing part. There’s a profile to measure the conative function of the brain. You’ll find it at Kolbe.com.
Kathy Kolbe, who developed this profile, is the daughter of E.F. Wonderlic. When she was about eight years old, she noticed certain behavioral (doing) patterns while out on the playground. Whereas Myers-Briggs measures personality, Kolbe measures what you will, won’t and are willing to do.
She noticed that people did the same things the same way all the time. She mentioned it to her dad and he brushed it off, telling her that wasn’t important. It turns out that she worked for many years and in 1986 came out with a profile she called the Kolbe A Index. This measures how we’re wired to do things, what we’re willing to do, and what we will not do.
So back to my story. It happens that the young lady is what’s called a long fact finder. What this means is that she heavily studies everything there is about raising and parenting children. She has an extremely high level of information about this topic.
She was just doing what she thought everyone else did—heavy research on a topic and then telling these other women how they were doing and what they were doing right or wrong. Should she have informed these women in this way? Probably not, but she was simply acting out her Kolbe Index profile.
It’s not really her personality. It’s really just her natural striving instincts to conduct deep research and inform others relative to the topic she studied. I won’t go through all of this with you, but you can certainly go to Kolbe.com to find out more about it. It’ll help you learn about what you will and won’t do—how you’re hardwired when it comes to doing.
It really does help us to know about this third part of our minds. It helps in the workplace and with personal relationships to know how we’re actually hardwired to do things. It’s much different than any of the other profiles/tests you may have taken. We provide profiles to all of our team members and for our clients. We do this so we understand how they are wired to do things. Then we can accommodate and communicate with them accordingly. Until next time, enjoy.
Gary
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