The other day, I was talking to a new friend who had recently taken the Color Code assessment. We were having a great discussion about how much she enjoyed it. However, she told me she had real trouble understanding what we meant by the “childhood perspective” when answering the questions. Did we mean how she was as an 8-year-old child? Or a 15-year-old? Or what? And why a child to begin with? 

We ended up having a great conversation about the reasoning behind this. I thought I would share with you what I shared with her in case you (or someone you know) has ever wondered the same things.

What age do we actually mean by “AS A CHILD?”

If you can, we actually suggest answering our assessment questions from the earliest recollections you have of yourself. That might mean 6 years old for some and 12 years old for others. Or, if you truly can’t remember your childhood perspective, we would recommend that you answer the assessment questions thinking of yourself at a time when you’ve been most comfortable with yourself—when you felt you were being most true to yourself, instead of acting how outside influences wanted you to act. We want you to think about your very most natural, innate, gut instinct—what would you do if nothing from the outside were influencing your decision?

Why do we want to know your perspective as a child in the first place?

Hopefully by now you know our stance on Motive (DCM) and why it’s so much more effective than identifying behavior alone. You know, the whole “WHY you do what you do, not WHAT you do.” 

It is for this reason that our assessment seeks to find your Motive (Nature). We want to identify your personality before Nurture got involved—because those nurture influences can make it harder to identify your Motive and give you an inaccurate base from which to build upon.

For most people, the easiest way to do this is to think of themselves as a child—before they were really aware of their personalities or before they felt they had to be a certain way.  For example, I’ve got a cousin who grew up with a Red father, and she told me that growing up she felt she HAD to be Red, because it was the only acceptable way to be. We want to find out who you are BEFORE those types of Nurture influences entered your life. 

I hope that makes sense and gives you a better idea of why we ask you to answer “AS A CHILD.”

And, for good measure, here’s a question we get a lot: 

“What if NONE of the answers on a question apply to me?”

The answer to this is actually also pretty cool. 

Hopefully for most of the questions, there is one answer with which you identify the strongest—that is the answer you should choose. Normally, your gut instinct is correct. 

However, we teach that of course not every question on the profile is going to be totally applicable to every person, but not to worry because that is taken into consideration in the scoring of the profile—in fact, we use a pretty cool computer algorithm to help get the most accurate score possible.

And, when trying to decide what to choose… if there are two choices you find yourself conflicted over, that’s normal. It could be that you have a secondary color (which you would learn more about in the Full Analysis), or it could be that you have developed or learned one of the traits, while the other comes naturally to you. We are looking for the one that comes naturally to you. In trying to identify your Motive, we want to know your natural/innate strengths and limitations, not your learned/developed ones. Remember, we are going after the Nature. Keeping this in mind, we would advise you to choose the answer that feels most NATURAL to you, even if you also identify with some of the other choices. Just pick the choice that feels the MOST like you, even if you hardly identify with it. As long as this is happening on just a handful of questions, it shouldn’t affect your results. 

Well, I guess that’s about it for now. Thanks for reading! 

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Joe England has known about the Color Code ever since 1994 when his Grandpa caused quite a family controversy by “quick coding” everyone.  Luckily, Joe could see the value in what Grandpa Don was going for and years later, when the opportunity arose to work for the Color Code, Joe jumped at the chance. He is a Yellow, enjoys Swedish Fish and typically gets along with children better than adults.