If you're not familiar with Traitmarker personality types, take your test here and read the explanations. If you want to dive right in and find out about Traitmarker through who we are, go ahead and keep reading. We have both seen how useful Traitmarker can be in describing how people work. For that reason, we want to use it to show you how we work and what makes us tick.

 

Sharilyn is a Merger who is not a Server. She's becoming an Ender.

 

Here's what that means.

 

Mergers love to create something from nothing. They love to put skin on their ideas and show this new entity to the world. That's what gets them up in the morning.

 

Sharilyn is a writer. She lives and breathes stories. She's a word sculptor, a character singer, and a plot artist. So if you want to get her excited about a project, you get her to tell you a story. You get her to make a  new world for you.

 

However, she is not a Server  (think computer server, getting bits and bytes where they go). She needs to make this identity known to the world because Serving is the first thing anyone sees about her. Servers know how to make other people successful, and they create environments where others can shine.

 

Sharilyn is an excellent cook and hostess and mother. People who first meet her think of her as the support for the people around her, the one who made the meal around which everyone gathered for that great conversation, the one who raised the phenomenal, ambitious child that wows the world.

 

But that's not all she is. Yes, she serves, and she does it well. She gains a measure of fulfillment from being a Server. But if she exists too much as a Server and neglects the Merger core of her, she wilts. Then she can't bring the magic to the rest of the people who need her.

 

She is becoming an Ender. An Ender gets things done. An Ender will use a sledgehammer to kill a fly if that's what's close. And Ender accomplishes a task by any means necessary.

 

So when Sharilyn experiences stress, as will happen when she loses sight of who she is and who she is not, she has a hidden strength she can use. She can End. She can decide and do. She can pull out the sledgehammers around her and go to town.

 

Robbie is different. Robbie is a Riddler who is not an Engineer. He is becoming a Server.

 

Puzzles intrigue Riddlers, and the greatest puzzles are those that humans pose. Robbie can spend all day figuring a person out, understanding his decisions and his motivations. He can also spend all day figuring out a puzzle in theology or politics or history. Understanding the mysteries of the world energizes Robbie.

 

But he is not an Engineer. Engineers love to take things apart, label the pieces, and find the problems. Robbie can perform as an Engineer, and he does it well. People come to him with their problems and want to know what went wrong where. Robbie can tell them. He tells people why their offices experience conflict, why their marriages are tanking, why their children are frustrated, and why their books don't pack the emotional punch they expected.

 

You may be thinking that Engineers and Riddlers are the same. They're not. The difference between an Engineer and a Riddler is the difference between a coroner performing an autopsy and a biologist sketching a beetle. The coroner passes a verdict. The biologist describes a living organism. Both are valuable, but they don't do the same job.

 

So what energizes Robbie is to take an Engineering problem and turn it into a Riddler puzzle. People come to him for a post-mortem on a human ecosystem, and he tells them how healthy ones operate and reminds them that they're not dead yet. People come to him for a diagnosis and leave with a life plan.

 

He turns the Engineering problems into Riddler puzzles by using his hidden strength: acting as a Server. He creates environments where people can succeed. He gets them to step back from the noise of their frustrations and view life within the quiet place of power inside themselves. There he guides them into discovering the solutions to their problems that they can accomplish under their own steam.

 

When things are humming along on all cylinders, Robbie and Sharilyn work together within their dominant strengths. Robbie helps them understand the living organism of their thoughts and ideas, while Sharilyn creates a new world where those ideas shine. Sharilyn can help birth those ideas in a supportive environment. Robbie can diagnose the errors in past effort. And when the process of creation becomes stressful, Robbie can take over the work of creating successful environments for the client so that Sharilyn can bring closure to the work. It's a beautiful process.

 

Sometimes things don't hum along on all cylinders. Sometimes Robbie and Sharilyn work out of balance with each other. Friction ensues.