By Francesco Zuppichini, Francesco Cicala
- 9 min Read
Most tests drop you in a box with a 4-letter code and call it a day. We went the other way. SoulTrace maps the mix of five drives you actually run on, scored 0 to 100 each, and lets the combination do the work.
The five colors, White, Blue, Black, Red, Green, aren't types. They're forces that live in everyone at different volumes. Know the volumes, and a lot of your life stops being mysterious: why meetings drain one friend and feed another, why you keep postponing the same decision, why the same advice works for your sister and bounces off you.
When faced with a complex decision, I prioritize a methodical approach over intuitive leaps.
The five drives
Each color is a core orientation toward the world. You carry all of them. What changes is the dosage.
White: structure
Fairness. Responsibility. Order. Boundaries.
White is the push toward principled coherence. It shows up in people who organize plans, clarify expectations, and make sure everyone gets treated the same. At its best, a high-White person is why your group chat actually confirms a place. They build rooms where others feel safe because the rules hold.
You'll probably clock White in yourself if you organize plans without being asked, get genuinely uncomfortable when rules are applied unevenly, and take quiet responsibility for keeping things running. Consistency and follow-through feel non-negotiable.
Too much of it and the drive turns anxious. You start policing other people's behavior, resenting the ones who don't read the group chat, catastrophizing about small disorder. Too little and plans stay mushy. Boundaries blur. You postpone decisions with a vague "we'll sort it out" until something breaks, and nobody's sure if the thing is happening Saturday or not.
Blue: understanding
Curiosity. Clarity. Precision. Mastery.
Blue is the drive to actually know the thing. High-Blue people ask questions the rest of the table didn't think to ask, read the manual cover to cover, keep 40 tabs open, and quietly optimize a workflow three weeks after everyone else stopped thinking about it.
If you need time before deciding, enjoy learning for its own sake, and feel weirdly uncomfortable acting without a mental model of why something works - that's Blue talking.
Cranked too high, Blue gets stuck. Analysis becomes the exit. You delay real decisions waiting for them to feel "correct", and you retreat into ideas when emotions in the room get loud. Cranked too low, life runs on reflex. Decisions get made because "that's how we've always done it", and reading before acting feels like homework nobody assigned.
Black: agency
Ambition. Power. Strategy. Self-interest.
Black is the drive toward agency and getting results. High-Black people notice power dynamics, think in trade-offs, and move from wanting a thing to arranging for the thing to happen. They negotiate instead of waiting to be picked. Building quiet influence beats hoping someone notices them.
Recognize it in yourself? You think strategically about how to actually hit a goal, you read power dynamics in any room within 30 seconds, and you'd rather do what works than what looks nice.
Too much, and Black turns suspicious. Everything becomes a chess move. You guard hard, struggle to trust, and sometimes confuse vulnerability with weakness. Too little, and you wait to be chosen. You hope your effort gets spotted on its own. You don't ask directly for what you want, and other people's decisions end up shaping your life more than your own.
Red: intensity
Passion. Impulse. Honesty. Risk.
Red is the drive toward intensity and honest expression. High-Red people act on what they feel. They say the thing everyone else was tiptoeing around. They'd rather live a vivid, slightly messy life than a perfectly controlled one. Red is the friend who texts "I'm outside, let's go" at 11pm.
Spot it in yourself if you act on gut more than analysis, say what others are only thinking, feel alive taking risks, and get restless when life goes three weeks without a surprise.
Too high, Red sprints off cliffs. You jump, stir drama, burn out, and realize afterward that not every impulse needed to become an action. Too low, and things go muted. You swallow strong feelings. Days blur into "fine" routines. Big desires stay shelved until the window to act on them has already closed.
Green: connection
Belonging. Growth. Patience. Ecology.
Green is the drive toward connection and slow, organic growth. High-Green people track how things and people fit together over time. They notice the emotional temperature of a room within a minute of walking in. They care whether a path feels alive, not just whether it's impressive on paper.
If you tend friendships like a garden, value slow steady progress over bursts, and keep an eye on whether people are actually okay under the surface, Green is running strong.
When faced with a complex decision, I prioritize a methodical approach over intuitive leaps.
Too much, and you avoid conflict that needs to happen. You stay too long. You bend around other people until you've lost the thread of what you actually want. Too little, and relationships feel thin. Transactional. People come and go. You don't quite feel held anywhere.
Your actual color balance
Nobody is one color. You run a mix, and the mix is more interesting than any single label.
Knowing the balance isn't about the label. It's about understanding why certain rooms energize you and others flatten you, what actually triggers your stress versus what helps you recover, and how you naturally approach decisions. Where your blind spots likely live, and the cheapest way to compensate for them, is usually the most useful part.
The growth that works doesn't come from trying to be someone else's shape. It comes from knowing your shape and moving with it.
How two colors change each other
The system gets useful when colors combine. A high Blue score alone says curiosity and precision matter. A high Black score alone says agency and strategy matter. Put them together and the pattern changes: Blue-Black often becomes a builder of systems, someone who wants a sharp model and a path to leverage it.
Green-White is different. Green wants connection and organic growth. White wants fairness and structure. Together they often create the person who quietly becomes the moral spine of a group. They care about people, but they also care about the rules that keep people from getting hurt.
Red-Blue can look like creative experimentation. Red supplies appetite, risk, and expression. Blue supplies fascination and skill-building. The result is not just "passionate and smart." It can be someone who learns by throwing themselves at the thing, iterating fast, and refusing to keep their ideas in a notebook forever.
That is why SoulTrace maps 25 archetypes instead of handing you one color. Pure colors exist, but most people live in the tension between two or more drives. The tension is the point. Your primary color often tells us what you lead with. Your secondary color tells us how that drive expresses itself in real life.
Why the lowest color matters
People usually obsess over their highest color. The lowest color is often just as revealing.
Low White can mean you resist externally imposed structure. That is not automatically laziness. It may mean rules need to feel personally meaningful before you follow them. The growth move is not to become rigid. It is to build enough structure that your freedom stops turning into cleanup work.
Low Blue can mean you prefer lived experience over analysis. You may trust what works in the room more than what looks elegant in theory. The growth move is not to become detached. It is to slow down long enough to ask whether your first read is actually supported by evidence.
Low Black can mean you avoid asking directly for what you want. You may dislike power games so much that you pretend power does not exist. The growth move is not to become ruthless. It is to practice clean agency: naming the outcome, making the ask, and accepting that wanting something is not a moral failure.
When faced with a complex decision, I prioritize a methodical approach over intuitive leaps.
Low Red can mean you mute impulse, anger, desire, or play. You may be stable and considerate, but too much self-control can flatten the life out of you. The growth move is not chaos. It is letting honest signals arrive before they have to become a crisis.
Low Green can mean you move through life efficiently but thinly connected. You may know how to perform, win, learn, or organize, yet struggle to feel held by a place or group. The growth move is not losing ambition. It is investing in relationships before you need them.
Why SoulTrace uses probabilities
A lot of personality systems pretend the answer is cleaner than it is. SoulTrace avoids that by treating your result as a distribution. Your colors can be close. Your archetype match can have a runner-up. That uncertainty is not a bug. It is honesty.
If your Blue and White scores are both high, the system should not force a fake either-or answer too early. It should ask better questions and show how much confidence it has. That is why the assessment adapts while you answer. Each response updates the picture, and later questions focus on the distinctions that are still unclear.
The final result is a map, not a verdict. A 42 percent Green-White match with a 38 percent White-Green runner-up says something different from an 80 percent match. One profile is blended and context-sensitive. The other is clearer. Both are useful if the report explains the uncertainty instead of hiding it.
See your colors
Take the SoulTrace assessment and see the exact mix - which drives run high, which stay quiet, and how that pattern plays out in your life.
Takes about 8 minutes. The questions adapt as you go using a Bayesian engine, so you only answer the ones that actually change the picture. You'll walk out with a detailed map from Francesco Cicala's five-color framework, way past a 4-letter code.
Other Articles You Might Find Interesting
- How SoulTrace works: technical deep-dive - The engine behind the assessment
- SoulTrace 3.0: the new trait model - Latest evolution of the system
- 5 color personality test - Take the test yourself
- Types of personality tests - How color-based models compare to others
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