Design notes

Six personalities, because there are six ways to help someone.

The six aren't adjectives we liked the sound of. They come from a fifty-year-old map of every way one person can help another, and five of ours landed on it before we knew it existed. Here is the work behind that.

Adjectives blur

The personalities started as adjectives. Warm, Calm, Curious. The trouble with adjectives is that they overlap. Two of ours were doing the same job and one wasn't doing any. If you can't say why you'd pick one over another, six personalities is just a longer menu.

The fix wasn't better adjectives. It was finding out whether anyone had already worked out the real list.

Somebody had, in 1975

John Heron built one at the University of Surrey's Human Potential Research Project, training doctors, nurses, teachers and counselors. He kept finding the same problem: most helpers are stuck in one or two moves and don't know it. Heavy on advice and explanation, which feel productive, and light on the harder move of making room for someone's raw emotion.

So he mapped the whole territory. He argued there are exactly six kinds of intervention one person can make for another. Not five, not eight. Six, in two families.

Authoritative

The helper takes the lead and brings something to you.

  • Prescriptive · Gives direction. Advises, recommends, says what it would do.
  • Informative · Gives knowledge. Explains, interprets, says what it notices.
  • Confronting · Gives you yourself. Raises a blind spot you're stepping around.

Facilitative

The helper draws it out of you and hands back your own autonomy.

  • Cathartic · Makes room for release. Lets you vent, grieve, get it out.
  • Catalytic · Draws out self-discovery. Asks the questions that make you find it.
  • Supportive · Affirms your worth. Encourages, builds confidence, roots for you.

Heron's claim is that every helpful thing anyone has ever done for anyone sits in one of those six.

How ours line up

We had already shipped six personalities, picked by feel. Five of them turned out to be Heron moves, which is the part we didn't plan.

Direct
ConfrontingNames what you're avoiding.
Practical
PrescriptiveTurns it into a next step.
Curious
CatalyticAsks the questions so you find it.
Calm
CatharticMakes room for you to get it out.
Warm
SupportiveBuilds you up, roots for you.
Balanced
No single moveAdapts, for when you would rather not pick.

Warm and Calm were the two that overlapped, and the map split them cleanly. Warm builds you up. Calm makes room for you to unload. One lifts and one lets go, and they belong to different moments.

The one we left out

Heron's sixth move is Informative: the helper who explains you to yourself. We didn't build it. A journal that tells you what you are is a short step from one that tells you what's wrong with you, and that's not what this is. The pattern-noticing it covers survives as a trait of Balanced and Curious rather than a personality of its own.

Aware, not avoidant

Heron didn't stop at the six healthy moves. He described how each one degenerates when it's done clumsily, or from the helper's own need instead of yours.

  • Prescriptive advises becomes a bossy takeover.
  • Confronting raises awareness becomes an attack.
  • Cathartic makes room becomes prying.
  • Catalytic draws out becomes an interrogation.
  • Supportive affirms becomes empty flattery.

The obvious response is a hard rule against each one. We didn't write those. A Direct personality that's structurally incapable of ever being sharp isn't Direct, it's a support bot with a name. Each personality knows its own broken version and watches for it, which is a different instruction from being forbidden.

What this is, and what it isn't

This is where the personalities came from. It isn't a claim about what they'll do for you. Confidants is a journal. It isn't therapy, no personality here treats anything, and Heron's framework is design scaffolding rather than a clinical method.

We did the work of figuring out the six ways a person can be helped so you don't have to think about any of it. You pick how you want to be met.

Sources