The Trouble With Labels

I've become a stickler for language and the use of words. I've come to believe that not only the words we use shape our reality, our reality can inform the words we use. I can't recall exactly when my interest in such things began. I wasn't an avid reader in school. I wasn't particularly fond of studying languages or heavy textbooks. With the explosion of content and social media how we use and misuse language has caught my attention. For instance how we label people.

Just pay attention to the multitude of labels we carry around to help define who we are. We have labels that identify our social, academic and economic position. We have labels that define where we sit in our work and communities. We have labels that capture our racial, ancestral, cultural and religious affiliations. We have labels that define our physical, spiritual, cognitive and sexual characteristics. We even have labels that describe our leadership and personality traits. And we have labels to carry the enormous responsibility to encapsulate all of these aspects of who we think we are.

From a scientific perspective, labels are very useful in establishing baseline generalizations of a group with shared characteristics, traits and qualities. In science, labels can help us understand observed patterns of cause and effect within certain groups. It can also help us to understand broadly how to interact between multiple groups.

However, labels can also be very problematic. Labels, just like the science that defines them is imperfect. Labels can also marginalize groups of people. Labels can contribute to black and white thinking, that somethings are fixed or limited by their definition. And yet their definitions have a way of changing based on new research. They also have a way of semantically expanding with the movement of public opinion. And we create new labels when we deem established labels have outgrown their usefulness.

Labels are mental short cuts. Labels comes with broad assumptions of someone's beliefs, thoughts and behaviours. If we identify someone as "X", we are likely to interact with them from what we've been socially or culturally taught about "X's". However, labels also have a way of shutting off our curiosity. Someone who's an "X" will always be an "X" and we won't expend any energy in challenging our assumptions and say maybe this "X" is a "Y" or an "X+1".

If you subscribe to Labeling Theory which argues that, "self-identity and the behavior of individuals may be determined or influenced by the terms used to describe or classify them". This suggests that when we identify with a label, especially labels deemed culturally negative or less desirable, it can change our concept of self for the worse. Just like a self-fulfilling prophecy we become the label once we are aware the label exists. Or as an observer with confirmation bias, all we see is evidence that supports a stereotype of the label, and ignoring all other information of the contrary, such as in racial profiling.

I am skeptical of leadership assessment tools designed by behavioural experts that intend to profile me using a narrow set of questions, into one of a fixed set of archetypes, without a full context of my lived experience. Don't get me wrong, I think these tools are useful, to a point. For some they can provide novel insights and metaphors that point to our individual or collective strengths and opportunities for growth. And yet, they can create distress in others who fear that their archetypal limitations, weaknesses or development areas, will forever be held against them or limit their potential because that is what others are committed to seeing in them.

I witness this kind of parallax effect whenever I'm asked to debrief a Myer-Briggs or DiSC assessment with an executive client. There's an exclamation of "this is so me!", followed by a dread-filled "dear God, is this who I am?" I see both the expansion and contraction of having to learn a new label.

“In our North American culture, the extravert is highly praised and sought after, particularly in the contexts of organizational leadership and positions of political, social or cultural influence.”

There are two labels that continuously come up in my coaching, which was the original inspiration for the research for this article, the extravert and introvert, a fundament in most personality and leadership assessment tools. They are often portrayed as binary or opposing personality traits. You are either one or the other. However, when Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung introduced these terms into psychology he saw that everyone embodies both qualities of extraversion and introversion. In my reading, these terms were to describe our attitudes (feelings, beliefs and behaviours) towards our external world (extraversion) and our internal world or self (introversion), with one being contextually more dominant than the other, depending on the circumstance or situation in one's life. Over time, these terms have evolved into fixed personality types with positive and negative traits, and associations with organizational leadership, performance and mental health disorders.

In our North American culture, the extravert is highly praised and sought after, particularly in the contexts of organizational leadership and positions of political, social or cultural influence. You can see this bias in the common descriptions of extraverts and introverts. Extraverts are commonly described by their strengths: confident, energizing, engaged, social, enthusiastic, self-assured. While introverts are described by their weaknesses or limitations: reserved, needing to recharge, overwhelmed, overly sensitive, and solitary.

Here two definitions taken from 16 Personalities, another personality assessment largely based on Myers-Briggs:

• Extraverted individuals prefer group activities and get energized by social interaction. They tend to be more enthusiastic and more easily excited than Introverts.

• Introverted individuals prefer solitary activities and get exhausted by social interaction. They tend to be quite sensitive to external stimulation (e.g. sound, sight or smell) in general.

And when you look at their sixteen personality profiles, you can see a bias between extraverts being leaders, influencers and change makers versus introverts are more inclined to be individual contributors and doers.

The other challenge with these labels is the association with emotional disorders such as shyness or social anxiety.

It's very common to confuse introversion with shyness and social anxiety as if they are one of the same thing. This leads people to prejudge or misdiagnose introverts as shy and socially anxious. This can create distress for those who identify as introverted but not necessarily socially anxious.

I was working with a client not too long ago. Very smart, thoughtful and highly productive manager of a financial services company. And he was struggling with his career and where it was going. The truth was it was going no where, mainly because he was too afraid of putting himself out there for new opportunities. He would describe himself as introverted and he had a deep fear of being seen outside of his immediate peer group. In listening to his story, I made the observation that he was using the words introverted, shy and anxious interchangeably. So we did some work breaking these words apart and seeing them in isolation. We explored what beliefs, thoughts and feelings he had for each of them. He believed he was anxious because he was introverted and introverted people are anxious by nature. He learned this at an early age from his immediate family, friends and school teachers. Upon deeper exploration, we discovered aspects of his life where he exhibited traits of extraversion, particularly in regards to his family and sports, and introversion in regards to how he learns, processes information at work and need for personal reflection. The story that he was only seen as introverted and introverted people are anxious, created his anxiety, like a self-fulfilling prophecy. He is relieved to know he's no longer limited by this old story.

This intersection of labels poses problems for extraverts as well. Extraverts are not immune to social anxiety. For some dominant extraverts, maintaining the "life of the party" persona can be emotionally and physically exhausting. What we observe as extraverted traits can be a cover up or a means of avoiding deeper feelings and thoughts of inadequacy, shame or trauma. We can easily point to any number of high profile and successful executives, actors, athletes and politicians who burned out in public, revealing their deeper emotional needs.

If there's a point that I'm making it's this: labels are only information and not a determination of who we are. They can be useful and they can be the source of major problems. Labels like the science that creates them, are imperfect, incomplete, and forever changing. Once you begin to subscribe to a label and its meaning, you are adopting its limits as well as its strengths, as being fixed traits. This can greatly limit how you show up and how you interact with others. This can rob us of curiosity, imagination, longing and discernment useful to seeing other dimensions of our being as it evolves over time.

I was listening to a discussion with positive psychologist Robert Biswas-Diener  who said, "I believe that research tells us averages. Research gives us a great vocabulary. Those are the benefits of the research, but at the end of the day, the person in front of you may or may not conform to what the research says. They are a unique individual and so we are only ever informed, not beholden [to what the research says]."

With love,

Charles