About Us

The Life Traits Quiz began in an effort to better understand clients and their needs for their personal living spaces by Tara Zeleny, Ph.D. and Polly Zeleny, BA, ASID.

Similar to Myers Briggs, also a mother-daughter team, they began researching personality tests and discovered that the concept of categorizing personalities by type was not without precedence. The following is a brief outline of past research in the area of personality profiling:

Hippocrates (400 BC) was one of the first to recognize that the environment affected a person’s behavior and appearance and noted that most personalities could be categorized into four groups: sanguine, melancholic, choleric and phlegmatic.

Carl G. Jung (1921) published "Psychological Types" in Germany and identified four types of personalities categorized by their psychological functions: thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition.

William M. Marston (1928) most known for his contributions in lie detection, published "The Emotions of Normal People" in which he described peoples’ behavior in a quadrant arrangement including: dominance, inducement, steadiness and compliance. This became the basis for the DISC model, further developed since the 1970s by Bill Bonstetter and Target Training International, and is in use today by management professionals.

Polly Zeleny (2001) published Creating Your LifeSpace, including the LifeTraits Quiz, based primarily on the Jungian model, which applies the four personality types to a person’s unique design environment. DISC has validated the LifeTraits model and partnered in programming for client data.

Learn more about the people that drive Concept360°: