I Took Chase Hughes' Authority Assessment Twice. Here's What It Actually Measures.

After writing about Chase Hughes' Authority Triangle, I sat down with his self-assessment — the fifteen-page inventory where you score yourself on the five traits he says authority is made of — and took it twice.

Once as the person I was a year ago.

Once as the person answering now.

I wanted to know what the difference between those two people would look like on paper. What I found instead was something more useful: the assessment doesn't measure what it says it measures. And once you see what it's actually measuring, the entire instrument becomes more valuable — just not in the way it intends.

What You're Actually Holding

The Hughes Authority Behavior Inventory (a publicly floating copy is here, hosted by Art of Manliness; an older version circulates via the Jordan Harbinger Show) has three parts.

Part one covers the five traits Hughes says authority is made of — confidence, discipline, leadership, gratitude, enjoyment. Each trait is a grid of behaviors sorted into levels one through five, and you mark every behavior you identify with. Level one confidence describes someone who panics around new people and reshapes themselves to please others; level five describes someone whose confidence is so settled that other people start imitating it.

Part two has you score your lifestyle from 1–5 across the five life areas he considers upstream of authority: environment, time, appearance, social life, finances.

Part three is a worksheet with one core instruction: find your lowest trait and fix that one first, because your weakest area — not your strengths — is what caps your ability to influence people. It also, without any apparent self-consciousness, references a "self-brainwashing" formula for rewriting your beliefs. I'll come back to that.

If you've read my triangle article, you know where this is going. But the assessment makes the point even harder to unsee than the triangle does.

What a Year Ago Looked Like on Paper

I answered honestly for the person I was twelve months back. Not my worst year — I've written about the decade of anxiety elsewhere — but a person still living a long way from center.

Confidence came out lowest, level one to two. Panicking when meeting new people. Taking criticism personally. Gripping indecision. Changing myself to please whoever was in front of me. And a cluster of level-three items that all said the same thing three ways: self-worth measured by outside opinions, confidence borrowed from validation, reassurance mined from past accomplishments.

Discipline came out split, which surprised me. I marked level-one items — no routine, no plans, goals that existed only as guilt — and level-three items at the same time: gets the most important things done, makes reasonable health decisions, wakes up on time. That's not a discipline level. That's a person whose capacity works fine wherever interest or necessity shows up, and who cannot manufacture structure anywhere else. Anyone with an anxious or ADHD-shaped system will recognize the shape: it's not absence of discipline, it's discipline routed entirely around avoidance.

Leadership was the strangest one. My marks split into two clean groups. Everything relational sat at level four: genuine interest in people, inspiring growth in others, setting an example. Everything stress-related sat at level one and two: couldn't endure pressure, prone to outbursts, behavior changing drastically the moment things got tense. And one level-three item captured the whole mechanism in a single line — "engages with others fully when in a good mood." The leadership wasn't missing. It was state-dependent. It existed whenever my nervous system permitted it and vanished whenever it didn't.

Gratitude and enjoyment told the same story from two more angles. No level-one marks in either — I could always see what mattered, always locate the positive side of events. But the felt versions were gated: easily overcome by stress, shut down by setbacks, enjoyment available only as long as conditions held, the outside world deciding whether the day was good. Gratitude as a thought, never as a temperature.

The Pattern the Worksheet Doesn't Score

Lay those five profiles side by side and something jumps out that the assessment has no column for.

My low marks were almost never capacity items. They were state items. I didn't lack the ability to lead, appreciate, enjoy, or decide — every one of those showed up somewhere in my marks, usually at level three or four. What I lacked was access to those abilities whenever my system was activated. Overwhelmed by stress. Shut down by setbacks. Fully engaged only in a good mood. Enjoyment only while conditions remain.

Five separate traits. One nervous system, measured five times.

That's what I think this instrument actually is: the most granular inventory I've ever seen of what living in threat-mode costs you — written by a military behavior specialist who was cataloguing the outputs and calling them traits. A body that doesn't feel safe will score low on this assessment across the board, not because it lacks five different qualities but because dysregulation taxes all five through the same channel. The checklist can't tell the difference between a person with no leadership and a person whose leadership is being held hostage. Both mark the same boxes.

The Second Pass

Then I took it again as the person answering now, and the deltas were consistent in a way no self-improvement narrative would have predicted.

Confidence moved from the bottom of the scale into level three and four — and the specific items that dissolved were the validation cluster. The inner commentary still broadcasts; it just stopped being read as the news. Leadership barely "improved" at all, in the sense that the level-four relational items were already marked a year ago. What changed is that the stress items stopped vetoing them. Nothing was added. Something stopped subtracting.

The item I'm most sure flipped is the one about the outside world dictating whether the day is good. Enjoyment and gratitude stopped being conditional on the environment behaving — which is the entire difference, because unconditional versions of those two are what Hughes' level fives describe.

Here's the part that matters: between those two passes, I never once practiced anything on the checklist. I didn't train composure, rehearse conversations, or build an authority habit stack. I spent the year doing nervous-system work — teaching my body, slowly and unglamorously, that visibility, silence, and disapproval were not emergencies. The checklist scores rose as a side effect, the way a whole house warms when you fix the furnace instead of lighting fires in every room.

Why "Fix Your Lowest Trait First" Is Backwards

Which brings me to the worksheet's core instruction, and why I'd ask you not to follow it.

Hunt your lowest trait, the worksheet says, and level it up as fast as possible — with a year of goals, milestones, and daily checklists, plus that self-brainwashing routine for the beliefs underneath. For a healthy operator optimizing for influence, maybe that's fine. But if your scores look like my first pass did, the instruction points you at exactly the wrong target. It hands a person in threat-mode a performance plan, and a dysregulated system will metabolize that plan the only way it can: as one more set of conditions to satisfy before you're safe, monitored by the same inner auditor that produced the low scores in the first place.

I know because I ran that program for years, before this assessment existed in my life. Fixing my weakest area was my personality. The Berlin psychologist Kerstin Hoffmann's observation, which I keep coming back to, is that the people most committed to self-optimization are often the ones most afraid of feeling what they feel — and that the healthiest people aren't the ones who improve the most, but the ones who stop treating themselves as defective. A worksheet whose first step is "locate your biggest defect" is not neutral for people like us. It feeds the exact loop it claims to fix.

The alternative isn't complicated, just slower: work on the state, not the scores. Regulation first. The traits are downstream, and they come back on their own schedule, in roughly the order your body releases them.

What the Assessment Is Genuinely Good For

Having said all that — I'm glad I took it, and I'd cautiously recommend it, with the frame turned ninety degrees.

Don't take it as an authority audit. Take it as a regulation X-ray. Answer honestly, then ignore the level totals and ask one question of your own marks: how many of my low items are about what I can't do, and how many are about what I can't access under stress? If your pattern looks like mine — capacity present, access conditional — then you don't have five weak traits to grind. You have one frightened system, and a fifteen-page document accidentally proving that every "authority behavior" you've been trying to fake is just what your body does by itself when nothing is bracing.

That's also the honest answer to what this assessment measures. Not authority. Not character. It measures, behavior by behavior, how much of you is currently being spent on defense — and, if you take it twice with enough time in between, how much of you comes back when the defense stands down.

The instructor signature line stays empty. Nobody signs off on this kind of work. One day you just notice, somewhere in an ordinary conversation, that you've been at level four for a while and never once checked the box.