You’ve probably taken one or more personality assessments at different times in your life. And when you got the results after taking the assessment, you probably felt that it got parts of you right, but also missed some of the most essential parts of who you really are.
Why is that?
States or Traits?
Most assessments can be broadly categorized into one of two camps:
Trait-based assessments measure our personality traits or characteristics that tend to stay relatively stable across situations and time. These assessments aim to identify inherent qualities that define who we are — our personality “fingerprint” that remains largely consistent throughout our lives.
State-based assessments, on the other hand, capture how we’re feeling or behaving at a particular moment. They measure temporary conditions, situational responses, and adaptations to specific environments or circumstances.
Both approaches offer valuable insights, but each tells only part of the story.
MCode: The Powerful Intersection
Dr. Peter Larson is Vice President of Assessment Science at our company, Motivations AI. He’s spent his entire career studying assessments, and he maintains that the MCode assessment is unique in that it sits at the intersection of these two approaches. But why does this matter?
Think about it this way: who you fundamentally are and how you express yourself in specific situations are both critical in understanding your motivational patterns — why you do what you do.
The MCode assessment utilizes both of these elements in a few remarkable ways:
The Trait Element: Enduring Motivational Patterns
At its core, MCode identifies motivational patterns that research shows emerge early in life and remain remarkably consistent throughout our lifetime. These patterns represent our most natural ways of engaging with the world:
- They’re enduring: Your motivational pattern emerges early and remains constant throughout life. While your values and lifestyle can and do change over time, the fundamental characteristics of your unique motivational pattern does not.
- They’re irresistible: Regardless of the environment or circumstance, your motivational pattern will express itself in different aspects of your life. Use of your unique pattern is the essence of what makes your life and work meaningful to you.
- They’re explanatory: Your motivational pattern can help you better understand yourself — why you make the decisions you do, why you perform as you do, where you find joy and frustration, and what you find easy and challenging.
- They’re insatiable: The drive that comes from your motivations can never be satisfied, conquered, or completed, regardless of how often you have a chance to express it or how many achievements accomplish.
Your unique motivational patterns are deeply intrinsic — stable, inherent traits that make up who we are.
The State Element: Achievement Stories in Real Time
Where MCode diverges from other trait assessments is in its story-based approach. Rather than asking abstract questions about your preferences or general tendencies, MCode examines your specific achievement stories — those real moments in your life when you felt most energized, engaged, and fulfilled.
This storytelling approach captures:
- Authentic lived experiences rather than self-perceptions.
- Emotional states during peak moments of satisfaction.
- How your motivations manifest in real-world situations.
- The intersection between your internal drives and external circumstances.
By analyzing these stories, MCode reveals not just what your motivations are, but how they actually play out in your life’s most meaningful moments.
Why This Combination Gives Deeper Insights
The power of this approach — combining traits and states — becomes even more clear when we look at the limitations of each one of these approaches:
Traditional trait assessments often feel abstract or theoretical. They might tell you that you’re “achievement-oriented,” but what does that really mean in your actual life?
State assessments can be overly focused on your temporary situation. They might reveal how you’re responding to your current job, but not WHY certain aspects energize you while others drain you.
MCode bridges the gap by grounding your unique traits in real experiences from your life. Your achievement stories reveal your motivational patterns in their clearest form — in those moments when the activity you were engaged in at that moment aligned perfectly with your most innate drivers, allowing them to fully emerge.
The Nature vs. Nurture Connection
This dual approach also enables MCode to bridge the gap between the age-old nature versus nurture discussion.
Are your motivations the product of nature or nurture?
Spoiler alert: They’re both.
Research suggests that our motivational patterns are a blend of both nature and nurture… but with a twist.
Motivational science suggests our core motivational patterns emerge very early in life and remain consistent throughout our lifetime. This suggests there’s definitely a “hardwired” component to our motivations — something inherent to who we are from the beginning. So in that sense, there’s a strong “nature” element.
However, the way these motivations express themselves is absolutely shaped by our environment, experiences, and the opportunities we encounter — the “nurture” aspect. In the way of a metaphor: the seeds of your motivational patterns might be innate, but how they grow and flourish depends on the soil, water, and sunlight they receive.
What’s really interesting is that MCode identifies these motivations as “irresistible,” meaning they will find expression regardless of your circumstances. Even when your environment doesn’t naturally support your motivations, you’ll often unconsciously create situations that allow them to emerge.
Have you ever found yourself gravitating toward certain types of activities or roles, even when they weren’t explicitly part of your job description? That’s your motivational pattern working to express itself.
MCode captures both: your innate motivational patterns and how they show up in specific contexts.
What makes this particularly valuable is that MCode doesn’t attempt to label you. Instead, it highlights how your innate patterns interact with your environment, helping you understand both why certain activities energize you and how to create more of those energizing moments in your life!
Time to Move Beyond Binary Assessments
The best insights about how we’re motivated don’t come from choosing between ‘traits-or-states’, but from understanding how they interact with each other.
What would change in your life if you knew not only how you were ‘wired’ at a fundamental level, but also how you show up in your most satisfying moments?
By analyzing your real achievement stories instead of asking you abstract questions about yourself, MCode grounds your motivational patterns in your actual, lived experience. That creates a more nuanced and accurate picture than just about any other assessment on the market today.
What if the most powerful insights about yourself come from understanding both the dynamic relationship between your hard-wired traits (your strongest motivations) and the exact situations where you show up at your best?
This is where MCode shines. And it’s why understanding your motivational patterns can be so transformative for your work, relationships, and life satisfaction.
The Practical Difference
This is why MCode often reveals patterns that other assessments miss. In fact, people frequently comment that their MCode results were “scary-accurate” and they felt deeply seen. But they also feel that perhaps for the first time in their life, they understand their WHY.
Traditional assessments might tell you what you do or how you tend to behave. But MCode explains why certain activities and achievements bring you deep satisfaction while others leave you drained — even when they draw from the same strengths or skills.
The next time you find yourself low on motivation, feeling drained or even burned out, take a minute to think about the common threads that run through your life and the specific moments when you’ve felt most fulfilled. That intersection is where you’ll find the most illuminating insights about what truly drives you.
Are you ready to learn your unique motivations and how you show up at your best? Let’s have a chat! Or, take the MCode Assessment today and then let me know your thoughts!