In the last blog we discussed some of the more popular personality type systems. Once you’ve taken some basic training on your personality system of choice, how do reach true mastery of it? Here are five ways you can work toward personality type mastery:

Practice. Do free assessments and validations with ten people, or even twenty or more! Share your knowledge and improve the lives of your friends, family, church, or small group while you learn. Practice builds proficiency.

Find Exemplars. A great way to remember the characteristics of a certain personality is to pick an exemplar (someone you know who fits that profile to a tee) for each type. When you remember that person, the characteristics of that type will immediately come to mind and make it easier for you to remember.

Get a Type Buddy. That’s a friend who is as interested in type as you. Spend time talking about the type of your mutual friends or well-known political, business or religious figures. Trade anecdotes about your own personality. Can you learn to roughly type people together without using a formal assessment?

Have a Type Night. Invite two or three friends or couples you know over, give everyone an assessment, and then validate the results by having each person read their type profile aloud from a book. You’ll get lots of laughs and learn a lot.

Teach on Type. Offer an interactive personality class at your church (whole books of interactive learning games exist for some personality systems—it makes doing a workshop a blast). The learning activity that produces the highest retention is teaching others.

Tony Stoltzfus is a best-selling author, leadership coach, master coach trainer and director of the Leadership Metaformation Institute. Additional information on this topic can be found in Tony’s book, The Christian Life Coaching Handbook.