Inner Team Assessment Guide
What is the Inner Team?
The Inner Team is a metaphor to describe your personality. It’s based on the idea that you don’t have one single personality, you have many. When you say, “A part of me thinks this, while another thinks that...” you’re describing two different parts of your personality.
Many people experience their Inner Team as the “committee in your head”, in which different parts of you share perspectives, suggestions, opinions, warnings and criticisms, all with the intent of keeping you safe, and helping you make the best choices in life.
A Cast of Characters
We call these parts “characters” because each feels like a whole person inside you, with its own personality. Every Character inside you has its own view of what you should and shouldn’t do. For example, most people can identify a character within that tells you to play it safe, and another that wants you to be adventurous and take risks.
If you’ve ever wondered whether the arguments you have with yourself mean there’s something wrong with you, you can relax! It’s totally normal. Not only does everyone have an Inner Team, the characters themselves are remarkably similar from person to person. This assessment helps you identify twelve of the most common characters and recognize which is most and least active on your Inner Team. This can help you get to the root cause of the challenges you consistently face, and their potential solutions.
Overuse Patterns and Balancing Opposites
Every character on the Inner Team has strengths. But they can cause problems when rely on them too much, because any strength becomes a liability when it’s overused. For example, being caring is a strength, but being over-caring can lead you to exhaust yourself trying to meet others’ needs.
The Inner Team framework describes an elegant solution to the problems which arise from overusing your strengths. Instead of trying to suppress your impulse to care for others, you cultivate the part of you which has a complementary strength. In this example, that would be a part of you which focuses on caring for yourself. You’ll be just as caring as before, but you’ll be quicker to notice when you’re over-extending and exhausting yourself.
Every character in the Inner Team has an opposite. This assessment shows you which opposite part to cultivate when you’re experiencing an overuse pattern.
Why Explore Your Inner Team?
Self-Knowledge
Feeling pulled in different directions by different characters within can be confusing. It can make you feel like a hot mess! Thinking of yourself as an Inner Team normalizes that experience and gives you a way to understand and name what’s happening. And when you name it, you tame it.
Self-Compassion
Sometimes, the characters within feel like they’re trying to sabotage your confidence and peace of mind. But when you discover that every character on your Inner Team is trying to protect you in the only ways it knows how, self-compassion begins to replace self-criticism.
Self-Expansion
Expanding the number of characters who have influence on your Inner Team helps you become more flexible, adaptable and confident. Each character you learn to access offers additional strengths you can draw upon. It’s like taking a small team with a couple of star contributors, and hiring in extra talent with complementary skills.
Understanding Your Assessment Results
Character Scores range from 1-5
Low (1.0-2.3)
Moderate (2.3-3.7)
High (3.7-5.0)
Character Score 3.2
High Scores
3.7 - 5.0
These characters have the greatest influence on your Inner Team. They dominate the committee meeting within, and exert a powerful influence on your thoughts, feelings and behaviors. They describe your most characteristic, habitual and automatic behaviors and ways of thinking.
High scoring characters are nearly impossible to switch off; not using them can feel uncomfortable, unfamiliar, even a little vulnerable.
The higher your score, the more likely you are to experience that character’s overuse patterns. This is particularly true when the opposite character has a lower score, indicating that it’s not offering much of a balancing influence.
Moderate Scores
2.3 - 3.7
Scores from 2.3-3.7 indicate characters which operate in a generally healthy, effective way.
Unlike high scoring characters (which you use all the time), moderate scoring characters are like resources you draw upon when their strengths and capacities are needed.
At the lower end of the scale (2.3-2.7), you may feel a little clumsy or unpracticed in deploying this characters strengths. You don’t use them often, so it’s common to feel a bit rusty when you do.
At the higher end of the moderate scale (3.0-3.7), you’ll feel more fluent and confident in using this character’s approach to solving problems. The liabilities associated with overuse can still occur on occasion, but the strengths of the character predominate.
Low Scores
1.0 - 2.3
A low score indicates a character who has little influence on your Inner Team. Think of this character a member of the Inner Team who rarely speaks during the committee meeting in your head, so their gifts remain largely unavailable to you.
With scores in the 1.0-1.7 range, you are likely to hold negative opinions about this character, judging it as a “bad” part of you. You may even try to suppress this part of your personality or deny that it exists in you.
You can begin to access the gifts of this character by first noticing the negative judgments you have about it. Reflect on what feels dangerous about expressing this part of you.
Having acknowledged this, work to shift your perspective about this part of you, from seeing it as an “enemy within” to be eliminated or suppressed, to a potential ally. Look for how its gifts and strengths could protect you.
Every low-scoring character has capacities that are valuable in their own right, which also act as a moderating influence on their opposite character. This can prevent you from falling into the trap of overusing that opposite character’s strengths.
The Balance Score
Your balance score is the difference between the average scores of two opposite characters.
If you scored 3.0 and 3.0 for both Pusher and Being, for example, your balance score would be 0 – completely balanced. A low balance score (0-1) is generally desirable, because it means that opposite characters have equal influence, and you experience little inner conflict between them.
If you scored 4.0 for one character and 1.5 on its opposite, your balance score would be 2.5. The larger the gap, the greater your preference for one character over its opposite, and the more likely you are to experience some overuse patterns of the higher scoring character.
A high balance score makes you more prone to the overuse patterns of the higher scoring character.
Frequently asked questions
I need help making sense of my results. Where can I learn more?
It’s very helpful to work with an Inner Team Dialogue coach or therapist, who can help you understand what’s going on with your Inner Team, and what you can do to achieve greater balance.
To find a coach who’s qualified for this, please email info@innerteamdialogue.com to request as referral.
What Comes Next?
This assessment is designed to start your exploration of your Inner Team. It directs you towards areas of inner development which will be most beneficial for you.
Self-awareness (or selves awareness) is valuable, but it needs to translate into action to make a meaningful difference in your life.
Partnering with the characters on your Inner Team is a learnable skill. It’s challenging to do alone, particularly when you are trying to re-integrate characters you’ve historically ignored or underused. A coach or therapist is an essential partner.