About Ross Reinhold and Reinhold Development

Greetings,

Ross Reinhold

This is the page on a website where you learn something about who operates the site and how you may contact those in charge.

What you see here is primarily the fault of one person - me. Ross Reinhold. I have had the pleasure of some assistance from friends and professional associates who have contributed articles for this website and offered sundry forms of encouragement. Without this help, I know things would not be going as well.

Those of you who just want the bare bones facts can Click Here and jump down to the bottom of the page where you'll find them. Those who are curious about more of the story, can read on . . .

The Beginning
PersonalityPathways.com is an enterprise that began quite modestly as a small set of personal web pages that were an adjunct to my coaching and management consulting business. As I used Myers-Briggs concepts and three levels of the MBTI ® inventory in my practice, the web pages were among the tools I used to introduce my clients to some basic Myers-Briggs principles. Among the items on this personal website was the first Cognitive Style Inventory. It was designed to assist clients in both understanding and verifying the results of the paper and pencil MBTI ® that I administered.

In the course of using the CSI inventory with clients who had taken the MBTI, I began the process of continued refinement and improvement that continues to this day. My purpose, initially and now, was not to replace the MBTI but to develop a tool that is both educational and useful in estimating personality type.

My business practice involved coaching and career guidance to experienced managers and professionals who were either considering new directions in their careers or were experiencing other career management issues. I also presented workshops for organizations and served as a management coach and adviser to key managers and executives on human issues in their enterprises. Whereever possible I employed the MBTI with my clients, often using advanced forms that are now known as the Step II and Step III versions of the inventory. For me it was an important tool that helped me better understand and communicate with my client.

Part of the ethical standards inherent in gaining qualification privileges to employ the MBTI include providing the client a sufficient baseline understanding of the theory surrounding the inventory and encouraging them to continue to explore type on their own. This obligation stems from the humanistic value structure of Isabel Myers. She felt that ultimately the best judge of type categorization was the person himself or herself. The "Indicator" was just that - an Indicator - not the final arbiter. How I handled this obligation for education, information, and empowerment was through the development of a workbook of exercises and articles on personality type and its application to career management. Eventually some of this material ended up in PersonalityPathways.com as the core of some of the educational web pages.

The Evolution
Over an 8 year period, I assisted hundreds of clients deal with their career management issues. My program was intensive. It was not unusual to spend more than 20 hours of face to face interaction with a client on a more general orientation before we got down to specific issues. That practice is related to my own type. I had a need to be well founded in the background of the client and who they are before advising a course of action. Every client was a custom project. I mention this not to suggest it as a sound counseling practice, but to underscore that a byproduct of how I handled clients was the opportunity to get to know well real live examples of the 16 types. While the "practitioner-coach" was dealing with the practical issues facing the client, the "scientist" was sitting on my shoulder watching what was going on, taking notes, forming and testing hypotheses, and learning more about how the concepts of Personality Type applied to real people.

After 8 years of helping others manage bumps and challenges to their careers, I discovered I faced one of my own. Almost overnight I lost my enthusiasm for what I was doing. I was over saturated. It was time for a change. One of the things I had learned from my work was sometimes one's current circumstances serve to block insight into new directions and opportunities. And my time tested J related skills of investigating, planning, organizing, directing, and focusing action didn't necessarily get me out of this confining mental box. It takes time and to some extent floating along with the current of a different experience to escape this confinement. Often this involves physically changing your surroundings - consciously unfreezing yourself from web of entanglements that had been your life. So with the permission of my understanding wife, I awarded myself a year's sabbatical. One of my operating rules during this time off was that whatever I did . . . it must not be thinking about what I wanted to do next with my professional life. For if I engaged in that type of thinking and speculating it would interfere with the unfreezing I needed to see clearly what was next.

What came out of the other end of this sabbatical was an increasing involvement with the Internet and learning how to make a website successful. I did what comes natural to people like me and my type - INTJ - and began an intensive self directed learning program to master this new found interest. Naturally, the Internet itself was a goldmine of resources for learning about this particular field. And the people who are competent and skilled in this field are quite comfortable using this form of communication and are generous with their advice. So courtesy of the web, my classroom was the world (at least that portion who was on the web). Eventually I learned enough to begin a new form of business consulting - internet marketing and e-commerce consulting.

Meanwhile I continued to keep in touch with my interest in Personality Type and my involvement with the community of professional practitioners and serious students of Psychological Type. Gaining registration rights to PersonalityPathways.com and using the website as a means to test out ideas of successful internet development married my previous passion with my new one. But for three or four years, working on others' websites and working for e-commerce firms occupied the majority of my attention. My connection with Personality Type was stretching further from the center of my activities, and at one time I wondered whether this interest would fall by the wayside. This didn't happen because, while even under some benign neglect, Pathways continued to grow. Eventually the notion finally sank through my sometimes thick skull that the website was reaching people all over the world and was introducing new people to type on a daily basis.

The PersonalityPathways website now averages over 4500 visitors a day and at times has had over 12,000 visitors in a single day. I never imagined such an outcome when I developed my first web page; I was just following my natural instincts to learn about and master a new area of interest. I now feel a sense of responsibility to nurture and care for what has been built. And as I have reached the magic age of retirement, I hope to scale back my e-commerce involvement to spend more time on PersonalityPathways to continue to serve the needs of people who visit and use the site.

In the future, competition for my attention will come from two other web publications that reflect a different side of my personality: travel and outdoor adventure. SuperiorTrails.com is currently growing and getting some nice compliments from visitors. QuiltingPathways.com (an enterprise that grew out of my wife's passion - quilting) was launched in December 2006. In 2010 we added ScenicPathways.com to our fleet of travel-related websites.

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Professional Qualifications and Experience
To meet the needs of those who care about qualifications, particularly in connection with the subject matter of this website, I offer the following:

Education:
BS Psychology, MS Industrial Relations
Graduate courses in psychometrics, advanced statistics, advanced experimental psychology, personality development, group dynamics, and social psychology of change.
Graduate Thesis: Research Study: "Some Aspects of Work Motivation & Job Satisfaction of Health Care Workers."
Post Gradutate Work: 100s of hours of Post Graduate seminars and workshops, including a certificate in Health Care Management. Qualified Administrator of the MBTI and Type Differentiation Indicator.

Work Experience*:
Chicago Civil Service Commission: Psychometric Technician. Writing, administering, and validating employment tests.
University of Wisconsin Management Institute: Research Associate. Study: "Training Needs and Work Stress of Technical Managers."
UW Hospitals and Medical Center: Director of Labor Relations and Management Development
Southland Corporation: Regional Director of Personnel and Labor Relations
Reinhold Development: Human Resources Consultant/Career Management Coach
Reinhold Development: Internet Business Consultant & Internet Publisher

Psychological Type Organizations:
Founder - Madison Association for Psychological Type
Conference Chair - Great Lakes Region of Association for Psychological Type
Regional Chair - International Association for Psychological Type
1997 New Leader Award - International Association for Psychological Type
Internet Consultant - Myers & Briggs Foundation

*I've also had 8 years of owner/manager experience operating a ski resort and a forestry implement & services business.

C. Ross Reinhold, M.S. Business Development Coaching Internet Marketing, Website Development & Maintenance and E-commerce services for small businesses and professional practitioners. ross@personalitypathways.com

^® MBTI, Myers-Briggs, Meyers Briggs, and Myers-Briggs Type Indicator are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Trust in the United States and other countries (aka meyers briggs or myers briggs).

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