I was training to use psychometric tests — in particular, Myers Briggs and the 16 PF. I did not find these tests as useful as I had hoped. They did not identify what people enjoyed doing.

My argument was that if you enjoy something you are more likely to build a reasonable level of competence and obtain a much better sense of satisfaction.

Structure

I put together a list of the kind of things that people tended to enjoy and used the results of this inventory to help people identify the ingredients they needed in their personal and working life.

Statistical analysis of about 200 people suggested that there were about twelve interrelated variables which were highly significant. The result of the analysis was published in BACP's journal Counselling at Work (Whapham 1994). This confirmed much of the earlier, largely intuitive, work in this area — The I Ching, the Tarot and Jungian theory.

Validation

In 2004 Dr Lea Brindle did a validation using Factor Analysis on a sample of 475 people. This was published in the British Psychological Society's journal Selection Development Review (Whapham and Brindle 2004) This confirmed the earlier findings of twelve variables and also identified the two key attributes. A person’s ability to deal with Change and to relate to External World — of People and Machines.

Conclusion

Over 1000 people have used this inventory and found it useful as it provided them with an understanding of the ingredients they needed in their personal and working life.