Here are some of the most common questions people have about the 6 Moods. All of these are naturally touched upon in the book too. If you have any additional question that you’d like to see addressed here, please contact us directly. For a brief introduction to 6 Moods terminology, you can also visit the Glossary.

Aren’t you just putting people in boxes?  Surely people are more complex than that?

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We all put people into boxes all the time:  ‘male’ & ‘female’, ‘old’ & ‘young’,  ‘my team’, & ‘their team’.

As the statistician George Box wrote: ‘all models are wrong; some are useful’. The fact remains that classification is one of the ways that humans create meaning from data. However, perhaps the really interesting question is this: ‘does this classification yield any useful information or not?’

In our experience, even engaging at the entry level of the 6 Moods (working out your Home mood) can yield staggeringly useful information. 

In reality, the 6 Moods approach can be as quick & easy, or as advanced & complex as you want or need it to be…

  • 6 Home moods

  • 30 combinations of ‘top two’ moods

  • 120 combinations of ‘top three’ moods

  • over 4,000 unique Moods Signatures

  • 1 Million different Moods Palettes

What’s so different about the 6 Moods? Aren’t there enough personality theories already?

The key strength of The 6 Moods of Success is that it is both a model and a method. Many people’s experience of ‘personality theories’ (such as Myers-Briggs for example, amongst many others) begins and ends with finding out their ‘type’ as the result of taking a test at work. If the ‘type’ seems like a good fit, it serves to confirm their ideas about themselves, and rarely much more.

However, what such models often fail to capture (and certainly at the entry level that many people encounter) is the contradictions and complexities inherent within each human personality – one example amongst many being the way that some people (but not all) behave differently at home than they do at work.

As a model, the 6 Moods is able to illustrate how different aspects of each personality combine to create behaviours in the moment, and how certain parts of the personality (‘moods’) come to the foreground (or not) in different circumstances. 

The method aspect is that the 6 Moods contains unique exercises for understanding, developing, standing down and recombining these moods for oneself in order to develop a more rounded personality. It definitely gives anyone greater awareness of self and others.

Aren’t the 6 Moods just Myers-Briggs with pretty colours?

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a personality typing system based on the work of the early 20th Century Swiss Psychologist and Psychoanalyst Carl Jung in his book Psychological Types (1921). Created by Isabel Briggs Myers and Katherine Cook Briggs, the MBTI further classified Jung’s thinking, and created questionnaire’s to generate the now distinctive 16 four-letter profiles, such as ENTP, ISFJ, etc. Jung’s background research was extraordinarily eclectic and esoteric and included an synthesis of earlier typology systems, including the ‘Four Temperaments’ model of the ancient Greeks.

Whilst the MBTI is undoubtedly a powerful tool, the 6 Moods approach includes additional ways to understand personality than Jung’s four dichotomies, and has a unique way to describe how different aspects (‘moods’) in each personality show up at different moments in life, irrespective of how they have come about (through nature, nurture, or culture).

Unlike the MBTI, the 6 Moods approach offers unique and tailored techniques (the Devices) to understand, shift and develop areas of the personality. The 6 Moods model owes a debt of gratitude to all the theorists that have gone before it, from the ancient philosophers to Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, Isobel Myers Briggs, David Kiersey, et al. (see influences).

All new ideas stand on the shoulders of giants, and the 6 Moods is no exception.  However, it is both simpler to comprehend than many other approaches, and yet also has the ability to genuinely describe human diversity & individuality.

Where do NLP and CBT fit in to the 6 Moods model?

NLP is a system created by Richard Bandler and John Grindler and was inspired, amongst other things, by the work of psychiatrist and hypnotherapist Milton Erikson and the bodywork of physicist Moshe Feldenkrais.

At the core of NLP is the idea that we are the result of the stories we tell ourselves. This, along with the idea that our emotions are created by our thoughts (the core principle of CBT), has been very influential in the development of the 6 Moods.

However, neither of these ideas are entirely new: the roots of CBT can be seen in the Stoic philosophy of the Ancient Greeks (3rd Century BCE) and both NLP and CBT can be seen in the Buddha’s teachings (approx 5th Century BCE). Both systems teach the value of learning to ‘drop the storyline’ when our emotions flare up, and to invest effort in learning mental and physical techniques to cultivate more productive states of heart & mind. Humankind has a long history of seeking to understand human distress and happiness, and the 6 Moods is but one branch of a tree with ancient roots.

Please do contact us directly if you have a question you’d like to see answered about the 6 Moods

Discover the other key elements of the 6 Moods model: Moods Profile, BED Drivers, Devices, FAQ, Glossary, Influences