How to Take and Interpret the Four Tendencies Quiz

Are you an Upholder, Questioner, Obliger, or Rebel? Find out to identify your most effective tactics for reaching your goals.

Photo by Helena Lopes on Unsplash

Even when we have similar goals, we can’t all reach those goals by following the same advice.

The trick, then, is to find a way to identify the advice that is optimal for you, and ignore the advice that’s been optimized for people who are fundamentally different than you. That’s where the Four Tendencies framework comes in. It was developed by Gretchen Rubin, first as a quiz and then later as a book.

I helped adopt it at my own company, giving it both to coaches and coaching clients to help them figure out how to tailor our coaching.

What we found is that the quiz is very useful — that’s why I’m taking the time to walk you through it below. But also in giving it to so many people, I’ve found one common objection to this quiz and any other quiz that smelled even a little bit like a personality test.

People will ask, “is this result true?” and they seem to mean, “is this scientifically accurate?”

I don’t care, and I don’t think you should either.

There’s a different goal for quizzes like these, which is to be a useful mental model that simplifies your view of the world down to something that is manageable for you to work with. Like all heuristics, the point is usefulness, and it’s up to you to be your own judge of that.

With that in mind, and after testing this quiz on hundreds of people, I do think you’ll find your own results useful.