How was the 4 People Within® work discovered?

This blog is a transcribed excerpt from a live Q&A in our Integrated Life Facebook group, so it is written in spoken language. To find the original video on YouTube, click here.

I love using the 4 people within® framework and often wonder how you relate the Myers-Briggs structure to the concept of the Inner Child? What was your process of discovery or creating this?

I do like to talk about my process a little bit, because it does tend to help people with their Inner Parenting work. So I first came across the concept of the Inner Child, several years ago, and through a friend of mine, and I had never heard of it before as a concept. But when I heard it about the Inner Child, it resonated so strongly with me. So many things made sense. And that was one of the reasons why I started down this path of Inner Children and Inner Parenting.

And a lot of people don't recognize that there are more Inner Children than just one. A lot of people talk about the Inner Child and there is nothing wrong with that approach. Do whatever works for you. It’s really important that your personal development is about what works for you, not what somebody else says it should be.

Only you know what the right path is for you. But when I came across the Car Model by Personality Hacker where they identified the four different people that live within us -- the thinker, the feeler, the intuitive, and the sensor. It started making so much sense to me that there would be more than just one Inner Child. In the Car Model, they're talking about 10-year old and 3-year old self as the Tertiary and Inferior processes as if they are children, and I thought this explains so much. We have effectively two different people that are less developed than other parts of us.

So I started thinking about this, and I started meditating on it and I started looking for proof as I have a science degree and am really scientifically oriented. But I'm also looking to proactively contest what I've discovered, as to make the point that, because there isn't one thing in the world that works one hundred percent at a time, you need to find the times that it doesn't work and see, in comparison to the times that it does work. In this case, the Inner Parenting approach and the two Inner Children, I started looking for evidence that it wouldn't work because I need to know what the percentage is with how often does it work? And how often does it not work and then see if this is an actual useful tool for anyone or not. I started looking into it and thinking about it, and did some testing on myself, have been doing testing with about 1000 people around the world with this, and yet to find a time that the Myers-Briggs structure or the Personality Hacker’s Car Model hasn't actually related to the Inner Parenting or whatever issues haven't been able to be remedied by Inner Parenting the child according to the Car Model. I'm a little bit freaked out as a scientist, that I haven't found a time that it hasn't worked yet. So if somebody has put it into practice, so they've actually done parenting around what we've discussed, and they've done their homework, there hasn't been one time that it hasn't worked yet. And I've been doing this now for several years. So I'm I'm a little bit freaked out. Because there should be a time that it doesn't work so that you can prove the legitimacy of your approach so you can give the the contrasting evidence as well as the confirming evidence. I'm still waiting to find out when it doesn't work.

I was just testing to put these things together. Could Inner Parenting and Inner Child work with the Car Model? I’ve tested over 1000 people tested, and I have yet to find a time that it didn't work, that some behavior could not be explained with these two frameworks together.

So if you feel like you're the one, you're the exception to the rule rule, get in touch with me, I want to talk to you. And that was pretty much the discovery process of it. It was just could this work with this? And then testing and testing and testing and testing and testing and testing and testing and testing! I want to test anything I do. I want to test this personal development tool with at least 1000 people before I can comfortably say that, yeah, this could be what's going on.

I have a very imaginative process, it starts with imagination -- asking “Could this work?” And then it's a very concrete, here's the here are the facts and the evidence to go with this thought.

So that was the process. I used my imagination, and then proved it in the real world. If you're a scientist, you want to take a scientific approach anything that you look for evidence of what you want to see happen and what you don't want to see happen with that same. So that's why I was looking for evidence of when it wasn't working. Which again, if you think that it doesn't work for you, I want to talk to you because I want to make sure that you know, I'm proactively looking for times that it's not working for people.

If you’re curious to dive into the 4 People Within® course, check it out here.

Photo credits:

Stones: Image by Susanne Jutzeler, suju fotografie from Pixabay

Car: Photo by David Marcu on Unsplash

Person holding firecracker near grasses: Photo by Kristopher Roller on Unsplash