Understanding Changes Everything: What Over 17 Years of Psychological Testing Has Taught Me
When I began conducting psychological evaluations more than 17 years ago, I thought a lot about answers.
What is the diagnosis? What do the scores mean? Where are the strengths? Where are the weaknesses? What recommendations will help? Those questions still matter. They matter a great deal.
But after thousands of hours spent sitting across the table from children, teenagers, and adults, I have learned that the most important question is often a different one: What is happening here?
I have watched people solve extraordinarily difficult problems and then forget a simple direction. I have watched a child rush through something she absolutely knew how to do, and another stare at a blank page, unable to begin. I have seen people come alive when a task matched the way their minds worked and struggle mightily with something that looked easy from the outside.
I have listened to parents describe children they love deeply but don't always understand. I've talked with teachers trying to make sense of the student who can do something beautifully one day and seemingly cannot do it the next. And I've met adults who have spent years wondering why things that seem to come naturally to everyone else require so much effort from them.
Testing gives us data. It gives us scores, patterns, diagnoses, observations, histories, and comparisons. But at its best, psychological testing gives us something much more important. It gives us a way to understand.
And over 17 years, I have become convinced of something very simple: Understanding changes everything.
What we see is rarely the whole story.
Behavior is easy to see. We see the child refusing to do homework, the teenager who won't get off the screen, the student staring out the window, the person who is chronically late, or the child who explodes over something that seems very small. It's tempting to respond to what we see because that's the part right in front of us.
But I've learned to look underneath it. What happened before this? What is this person trying to manage? What feels difficult here? What skill does this situation require? What am I not seeing?
Behavior begins to look very different when we understand what is driving it. Sometimes what looks like defiance is overwhelm. What looks like carelessness can be difficulty monitoring. What looks like procrastination can be difficulty getting started. What looks like an overreaction can be the end of a struggle that began much earlier.
And sometimes behavior really is simply behavior that needs to change. Understanding doesn't mean excusing. It means making sure we understand the problem we're trying to solve.
Knowing and doing are not the same thing.
This may be one of the most important things psychological testing has taught me. A person can know exactly what to do and still have difficulty doing it consistently. A child can understand the rule and break it. A teenager can know an assignment is due and fail to turn it in. A student can demonstrate a skill one day and struggle to access it the next. An adult can create an excellent plan and have enormous difficulty following it.
From the outside, inconsistency can look like a choice. Sometimes it is. But sometimes the problem isn't knowledge at all. It's accessing and using that knowledge at the moment it's needed.
That distinction matters. If we assume someone doesn't know, we teach again. If we assume they don't care, we may lecture, correct, or punish. But if the difficulty is actually in doing—starting, shifting, remembering, organizing, regulating, or persisting—then neither response addresses the real problem. We need a different kind of support.
Ability and performance are not the same thing, either.
Testing has given me a front-row seat to something we all know intellectually but often forget in everyday life: human beings do not perform at their highest level all the time.
Performance is affected by attention, anxiety, motivation, fatigue, interest, environment, confidence, practice, executive functioning, emotion, and the demands of a particular situation. That's why a single moment rarely tells us everything a person is capable of.
It's also why “But I know you can do this” isn't always as helpful as we intend it to be. They may, in fact, be perfectly capable of doing it. The more useful question is often, “What is getting in the way of doing it right now?”
That question changes the conversation.
There is more than one way to think well.
I've also learned that there are many ways to arrive at the same place. Some people naturally think in steps, while others see connections everywhere. Some need to talk an idea through; others need quiet before they can find the words. Some organize first and create second. Others create first and figure out the organization later. Some minds seem to move in straight lines. Others travel in circles until suddenly all of those circles connect.
For years, I have described some of these differences as Wagon Wheels and Ladders™. We all use both kinds of thinking, but we don't necessarily begin in the same place or take the same route to get where we're going.
The problem comes when we assume that the way we think is the way thinking should look. When we stop insisting that everyone approach a problem the way we would approach it, we often discover abilities we were too busy correcting to notice.
Strengths aren't the consolation prize.
In an evaluation, it is easy to become consumed by what isn't working. After all, people usually come to see me because something is hard. But strengths aren't simply the nice things we mention after discussing the problems. Strengths are part of the solution.
The child who struggles with written organization may be an extraordinary verbal thinker. The student who has difficulty memorizing isolated facts may understand complex systems beautifully. The person who struggles with routine may see possibilities no one else considered. Understanding how someone's mind works well can tell us just as much about how to help them as understanding where they struggle.
That shift—from simply identifying weaknesses to understanding the whole person—has become increasingly important to me over the years.
A diagnosis should make a person bigger, not smaller.
A good diagnosis can be enormously helpful. It can explain years of confusion, provide access to treatment and support, and give families, teachers, clinicians, and individuals a shared language for something that previously didn't make sense.
But a diagnosis should open a door to understanding. It should never become the room we put someone in.
No person can be adequately described by ADHD, dyslexia, autism, anxiety, depression, or any other diagnostic label. A diagnosis gives us important information, but it is only part of what we need to know about a human being.
The diagnosis is information. The person is the story.
Curiosity changes the conversation.
Perhaps this is the biggest change in me after more than 17 years of doing this work. I have become increasingly comfortable saying, “I wonder.”
I wonder why this happens here but not there. I wonder why this task is easy and that one is so difficult. I wonder what happened right before the behavior changed. I wonder what this person understands that I haven't asked about yet. I wonder what we're missing.
Curiosity creates room for information that certainty shuts out. It doesn't mean we never reach conclusions; my job requires me to reach conclusions. It means we remain willing to look again.
When we become curious instead of immediately certain, we ask different questions. When we ask different questions, we notice different things. And when we see something differently, we often respond differently. That is the work.
Over 17 years of psychological testing has taught me a great deal about attention, learning, executive functioning, emotion, behavior, relationships, and the extraordinary variety of ways human beings think. But perhaps the most important thing it has taught me isn't really about psychological testing at all.
It's about people.
We are complicated and inconsistent. We bring strengths and vulnerabilities, histories and expectations, different minds and different ways of experiencing the same world. What we see on the outside rarely tells us the whole story.
So I've learned to look a little longer. To get curious. To look beneath the obvious and ask what I might be missing. To try to understand before deciding what something means.
Because understanding doesn't simply change what we know. It changes what we see. It changes how we respond. It changes what becomes possible next.
And that is why I believe, more strongly now than I did 17 years ago:
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