Last year, the Purposeful Work & Life Group of the Endeavor Lab Collaborative invited Sterling College to pilot the Life Atlas suite of online tools. Like many of you, I’ve done my fair share of personality and aptitude tests from the weighty Morrisby Profile as a teenager and Myers-Briggs as an adult, to the more tongue-in-cheek quizzes ‘Which Jane Austen heroine are you?’ or ‘Which Hogwarts House would you belong to?’ (Lizzie Bennett and Ravenclaw, for the record). Initially, I thought Life Atlas was just another of these types of tests, however, in trialling it at Sterling last academic year, I discovered instead that it had the twist of promoting deep reflection, thus facilitating purposeful conversation with students.
What is Life Atlas®?
Life Atlas is designed to empower students and employees to craft a purposeful life and work across their lifespan. It is hard to put these tools into a box of ‘personality test’ or ‘aptitude test’; rather, they engage participants in a reflective method to ‘Discover Your Passion’ and mesh that with your particular combination of ‘gifts’ (to use Life Atlas’s own language). The Life Atlas is built on a simple premise: an individual’s greatest contribution to this world occurs where their unique combination of gifts intersects with their passion or interest. It is rather like a broader life-couching version of Marie Kondo’s principle of ‘sparking joy’: “Does this pursuit spark joy? If so, keep doing it, if not, discard”.
The Life Atlas suite contains three main tools: the Gift Compass Inventory®, Discover Your Passion, and the Work Profile Database. In this Praxis post, I focus on the use of the Gift Compass Inventory (GCI) to spur those initial conversations of discovery for yourself and your students.
First Experimentation: On Myself
Like a scientist from the golden age of self-experimentation, before having my Sophomore Career Planning Skills and Senior Professional Portfolio classes be the guinea pigs, I first tried it on myself. The process intrigued me.
The entry point into the Life Atlas assessment is the Gift Compass Inventory. My experience with other self-description seeking tests led me to expect question after question about myself in a very generalized context. For example:
“At a conference evening mixer party, how likely are you to introduce yourself to people you don’t know?”
Check one: Very Unlikely, Quite Unlikely, Moderately Likely, Quite Likely, Highly Likely.
I would probably check ‘Moderately likely’, but that answer would hide a lot of nuance. For me the real answer here would be “it depends on the circumstances”.
Expecting something of a similar ask from the GCI assessment—that is, generalized answers solicited from an abstract question—my initial reaction was one of surprise: “Oh! I can’t just hammer this out in ten minutes in the corner of the noisy dining hall; I need space to think and reflect”, and then “How interesting! I’d never actually thought critically about when I had been performing completely in my element, and why it was that those experiences had been so rewarding”.
The GCI assessment and Life Atlas in general probes that interesting junction between what you have truly enjoyed doing and what you are good at. The assessment guides you to focus on those highlights in your life where you had found your gifts very well attuned to the needs of the task. In doing this, your answers shift from abstract appraisals of how you think about yourself in general, to a specific exercise of identifying why you were satisfied right then?
Following the GCI questions, the system gives you a ranking of your degree of alignment with eight different ‘gifts’ which are described thoroughly, connected with your primary orientation and primary archetype in Jungian terms. Your top three gifts, and their specific order, are identified as the combination that really defines your ‘unique gifts’. In reality, there are 336 different combinations possible for the top three gifts, and over 40,000 combinations of the order of all eight gifts. So not quite unique, but much more precisely discerning than many other assessment buckets. Descriptive language comes along with all of these gifts and particularly useful is the proprietary AI assistant ‘CG’ that is able to infer the characteristics and meaning of any of those combinations of gifts described above, including applying them to particular contexts e.g., what does this combination of gifts mean about how I learn, or my optimal approach to teaching.
The language is, admittedly, intimidating if—like me—you have no prior exposure to the works of Carl Jung. However, there are multiple layers of materials that help you to start and use the basics (which was what I did last year) and then dig more deeply into thoroughly understanding it (which I am doing now). I found that even the basics positively contributed to my classes last year.
Integration into Senior Professional Portfolio Class
A focus previously in the Senior Professional Portfolio class at Sterling had been to develop a student’s ability to articulate their values, competencies, and desires for the world of work post-graduation. Up until last year, this was facilitated through many class and small-group conversations, plus organization of thoughts with self-generated tools such as spreadsheets. This past year, I brought the Life Atlas GCI in as homework on day one: the balance of class discussion of values neatly complemented the subsequent students’ self-discovery of gifts.
Their homework was followed up by a 1-on-1 meeting with me to discuss and interpret the results. This is where the critical value of the tool lies—the focused reflection, conversation, connection, and understanding it yields. In these 1-on-1 discussions with students, plenty of insights emerged that might not have otherwise been realised. It was as if the Life Atlas process gave me and the student keys to multiple doors to understand them, allowing us to rapidly unlock those doors to reveal insights, rather than having to take a lot of effort to pry the doors open and very likely not succeeding at all.
I found the tool was able to accommodate those students who wished to focus on identifying specific job types that matched their gifts and interests, and also provided insight to students who had broader lifestyle development aims in mind. There is space for just one example of an insight that these conversations provided: One student knew she always enjoyed farm work and wanted to work in that sphere. However, her profile revealed that the Social gifts were paramount for her, and as we delved into her various farm work experiences, it was clear that it was not the animals, or production, or the being outdoors that was critical to her satisfaction, but instead the opportunities for intersection with other people—interacting with customers, supervising and teaching interns, welcoming children onto the farm, etc.
Integration into Sophomore Career Planning Skills Class
Overall, I was less successful in the use of this tool for the sophomore Career Planning class—chiefly due to the degree of effort and self-direction it took to get the assessment done outside of class. In future, integrating the assessment itself into class time will be a better approach. I also suspect that class discussion of results, rather than 1-on-1 meetings may be fruitful at this stage to broaden the understanding of the assessment. The joy of the Life Atlas suite is once a student is registered with it, they can revisit the tool at any point in their college career and beyond—using it with an advisor, in another class, or just personally as they navigate life changes.
In Conclusion
Life Atlas lays emphasis on reflecting on those times when you were engaged in meaningful, satisfying pursuits. These occasions speak to your combination of gifts—without you knowing it! It starts there to develop a sense of purpose, rather than asking ‘what are you good at’ or ‘what job do you want to do’. This approach leads to revealing insights about yourself and others and is a fitting tool to support students at small colleges.
Dr. Laura Spence, Dean of Academics and Faculty in Ecology, Sterling College.