Your assessments tell you who your client is. None of them tell you how they decide.
You already know their style, their traits, their EI scores. Then they make a call you did not see coming, and none of it explains why. That gap is not a failure of your instrument. It is measuring a different thing.
VALID™, EJI™, and DI360™ measure the decision itself. They are built to sit on top of the psychometrics you already run, not to replace a credential you spent years earning.
Not a replacement
Every instrument you run answers a different question well.
None of them was built to answer this one. That is not a criticism. It is a sequence. Here is where each one stops, and where the decision layer starts.
| What you already run | What it measures | Where it stops |
|---|---|---|
| Behavioral style assessments | How someone shows up, communicates, and is experienced by others | Two people with identical style profiles can validate a decision in completely different ways. |
| Emotional intelligence assessments | How emotionally skilled someone is, often rated by the people around them | Tells you how capable they are, not whether that capability survives the moment of commitment. |
| Trait and type instruments | Stable disposition, temperament, and motivation | Trait is not act. Disposition predicts tendency, not what happens at 4pm on a Friday with a deadline. |
| Cognitive and job-fit batteries | Reasoning capacity and role fit | Capability describes what someone could do with the evidence, not which evidence they will accept. |
| VALID™ · EJI™ · DI360™ | How a person closes a decision, and whether it holds | The layer the others were never built to reach. |
Three instruments
One read is a claim. Three reads are a diagnosis.
Run in sequence, the disagreements between them are the coaching agenda, and the disagreements are where clients stop arguing with the report.
VALID™
How they decide
Self-report · 61 questions
Maps the five channels a person validates through, and which one runs the show when the stakes rise.
The client who calls themselves data-driven and scores Desire-dominant.
See the modelEJI™
Whether it holds
Self-report · 40 questions
Eight layers of emotional judgment, measuring what happens to that profile when the decision gets expensive.
The composed executive whose Defensive Reactivity explains six months of stalled work.
See the modelDI360™
What the room sees
Multi-rater · 45 items · 4 groups
Managers, peers, and stakeholders rate what matters and what they actually observe. The gap is the finding.
The leader rated essential on a behavior nobody has ever seen them demonstrate.
See the modelCertification for coaches
Become a VALID™ Practitioner
Certification licenses you to run all three instruments with your own clients, under your own practice. It is not a badge for attending a webinar. It covers the scoring, the reports, and above all the debrief, because a profile a client does not accept is a profile that changes nothing.
- All three instruments unlocked under your practice
- The debrief method, not just the tool
- The Validated OS platform: send, score, report, track
- V-University and the practitioner library
- The credential, listed and verifiable
- Direct access to the framework's author
Built for coaches, consultants, OD and HR leaders, and therapists moving into executive work. Not built for anyone who wants a personality test to hand out at a workshop. We would rather tell you on the call than take the fee.
Questions
The ones coaches actually ask
- Will this replace the assessment I already use?
- No, and it is designed not to. Style instruments describe how someone shows up, emotional intelligence instruments describe how skilled they are with emotion, trait and type instruments describe disposition. All of them describe the person. These three describe the decision: which evidence they accept, whether that holds under pressure, and what the people around them observe. Most certified practitioners run VALID™ after the instrument they already use, because the profile they already have makes the VALID™ result land harder.
- How do these layer on the assessments I already run?
- By answering the next question rather than the same one again. Your existing instrument gives you the person: their style, their traits, their emotional skill. VALID™ picks up where that stops and maps how they close a decision, EJI™ tests whether it holds under load, and DI360™ checks it against what observers actually see. In practice a coach opens with the profile they already trust and uses the decision layer to explain the behavior that profile could not.
- Do I need to be certified to use these?
- You can take VALID™ free and share that link with anyone. Administering the instruments with clients, meaning sending them, scoring them, running rater groups, and delivering the reports under your own practice, requires certification. The gate exists because the instruments are only as good as the debrief, and the debrief is what certification teaches.
- What makes this different from another personality assessment?
- It is not measuring personality. Personality instruments measure stable disposition, or who someone tends to be. These measure the moment of commitment: which validation channels close the decision, whether emotional load distorts them, and whether observers see the same behavior the client reports. That is why the outputs are a channel profile, a stability band, and a validation index rather than a type or a letter.
- Are they validated?
- Each is built on established science, including dual-process theory, conformity research, and the wider emotional-intelligence literature. Each is also on a published validation roadmap running from content validity and cognitive interviews through pilot testing, criterion validity, and norming. The Research Lab documents the foundations and the current stage. We do not claim norms we have not yet collected.