When I was earning my grad degree in Organizational Change Management, we took a lot of assessments. I think this was because many people in CM become coaches or leadership development managers or work in HR, where assessments are a frequently-tapped tool. I was in CM more for implementation and adoption, making teams work better together, but the assessments were fun.

One assessment we took was a learning style inventory. We took the assessment, and then plotted our scores on a flip chart that looked like a bullseye with lower scores near the center and higher scores towards the outside. The bullseye was divided into four quadrants, one for each learning style: visual, auditory, kinesthetic (experiential), and reading/writing.

Each of us put a dot with our initials on it where we fell on the chart.

Now I have always been a reader and a writer. I probably read 6 hours a day, at least and write easily 2 hours per day. I take copious notes during meetings not because I’m afraid I’ll forget something or because I feel obsessed with jotting down what people are saying (not my notetaking style anyway) but because that’s how I process information and encode information in my brain. When I need to process emotion, I write. If the emotion is very strong, I write children’s stories. So I assumed reading/writing is where I would fall.

I also process information visually, through maps and diagrams. You can always tell my office because I’ve got a big white board (or two) covered in drawings and sticky notes where I’m mapping out processes or customer journeys or how strategies come to life cross-functionally. It’s a form of connecting the dots for me that I find very satisfying. So maybe my dot would fall close to the edge of visual learner.

And I am a storyteller. I love listening to other people’s stories and public speaking, telling stories of my own. I need to listen to music while I’m writing and working. TV is too visual. I can’t work in an office that is too quiet – I visited a vendor once and, although they had 50 people on headphones, talking with clients and workers, you could have heard a pin drop. I can’t work like that, it would make me insane. I am very sensitive to construction noise so I cannot work from home, but I do like a hum of activity around me. Perhaps there’d be an auditory component.

In fact, you’d think I’d score more towards the center of the graph.

But no, my dot was off the chart in the kinesthetic quadrant, like way off in Siberia.

At first I fought it: I think I take these assessments wrong. I get in my head and listen to other voices who tell me what I should answer. I am convinced that memories of how my parents – both highly introverted – raised me influenced my MBTI score, pushing me from an E to an I. Following that assessment, I found myself in a room with the other I’s, who sat irritatingly silently, not responding to questions from the facilitator. Out in the hall, the E’s were laughing and topping each other and having a party. “I think I’m in the wrong room. Can I go out there with them?” I asked. But No, the MBTI had spoken and I was forever after categorized as an I. People who know me in some situations agree: I am an I. My husband, a true I, will tell you that I am an E. “Do you have to turn everything into a party?” He often complains.

But it is true that I do learn best by doing. I hate hate hate hate hate online learning. Lecturers lose me in boredom; I need the give and take with other students. And I cannot learn by reading. I have dozens of books about how to determine your career path and I enjoyed reading every one. I am a connoisseur of pathfinding books. But have they done me any good whatsoever? No, data and information and advice from these books has collected in my mind, but they don’t move my heart. I’ve had coaches and mentors that tell me what to do, it worked for them, just do it. Sure. Right. That doesn’t work for me.

I have to get out there and do it, and make mistakes, and adjust my approach and do it again. Like the way I play video games and learn software, which drives my husband, who is a visual learner, nuts. I loved Riven and Myst and Room and Legacy and Fire Maple games and other games where you are dropped into a magical world without an instructions or a guide and have to figure out what the mission is and solve puzzles and figure out riddles and connect dots. When I sometimes show my husband a logic puzzle and ask for his help, he asks for the written instructions and, when I can’t produce them, refuses to play.

This learning style feeds into my fear of trying new things. I hesitate to venture into unexplored territory sometimes because I don’t feel like I know enough. People who learn by reading or taking online courses know the right words to say. People listen to gurus and say, “I can do that!” and go off and prosper. I look at them and my immediate reaction is – no offense – “What phonies!” To think you are an expert because you read something or took a course online or listened to a video? No, you have to get out there in the trenches to really learn it.

I also know that experience is how I will gain that knowledge. And, once I begin learning, I learn quickly. I pick up new platforms and processes quickly, find it easy to chat with strangers, often become the go-to in organizations about how things work, how they connect to the big picture. I leverage this learning style to tease out areas where people think they’re on the same page but are actually using the same words to mean different things, potential pitfalls to future success. I build up speed quickly and retain what I’ve learned, have it accessible in active memory, where I can tap it and share it.

This is who I am.

Who are you?