Personality - Your Label !!!
Personality is a major decisive factor in your acceptance among people around you, in your society, in your office or the whole world. Some portray, some are real. It depends on you how do you make a judgement about someone’s personality.
We are so comfortable labeling people with their personality. There are so many personality tests and ways to label someone with a respective personality available online. For FREE!!!
Let us look in to what is personality and is it worth being a personality? Identified and labeled by a certain personality type?
As per Wikipedia there are 4 broad personality types (available on internet). Though Myers & Briggs came up with 16 personality types based on their research, we would stick to these 4 for the moment.
“Most individuals tend to have aspects of their personality which identify with each of the four temperaments. However, there are usually two primary temperaments that are displayed at a significantly higher level. An individual could be any combination of the following four types.
Sanguine personality type is described primarily as being highly talkative, enthusiastic, active, and social. Sanguine tend to be more extroverted and enjoy being part of a crowd; they find that being social, outgoing, and charismatic is easy to accomplish. Individuals with this personality have a hard time doing nothing and engage in more risk seeking behavior
Choleric individuals tend to be more extroverted. They are described as independent, decisive, and goal-oriented, and ambitious. These combined with their dominant, result-oriented outlook make them natural leaders. In Greek, Medieval and Renaissance thought, they were also violent, vengeful, and short-tempered
Melancholic individuals tend to be analytical and detail-oriented, and they are deep thinkers and feelers. They are introverted and try to avoid being singled out in a crowd. A melancholic personality leads to self-reliant individuals who are thoughtful, reserved, and often anxious. They often strive for perfection within themselves and their surroundings, which leads to tidy and detail-oriented behavior.
Phlegmatic individuals tend to be relaxed, peaceful, quiet, and easy-going. They are sympathetic and care about others, yet they try to hide their emotions. Phlegmatic individuals also are good at generalizing ideas or problems to the world and making compromises.”
Going by the above definitions, clearly no individual can be put in to single category. You will see a mix of above categories in every single person you know. You can try it out. In my experience and observation there are 3 factors by virtue of which people start labeling others with the personality types. These factors could be a resultant of your interaction, observation, interpretation of what you understood or prejudiced mind. The 3 factors are,
Personal experience (verbal, visual)
Perception based on others’ experience
Perception based on beliefs (not facts)
Personality in generic terms is defined as the qualities which an individual represents. What’s important to be understood is, there is a great deal of behavior which an individual demonstrates, which creates a perception of your qualities directly or indirectly on others. Now, even more important is to understand that people who label you with a personality types may not even know reason behind your behavior at that moment. Last but not the least, as individuals we can make a choice to behave in a certain way or rather change our behavior as per situation and comfort level.
Therefore, to judge someone straight on personality will mislead none but yourself. Rather, it is important to give time to know people, interact with them often, observe more to understand the consistent behavioral traits. This will help you understand others better. Once you understand others better, it becomes much easier to understand their strengths and weaknesses. This makes your relationship sweeter even with difficult persons and you can work much better with people who are perceived to be tough by others.
If you look around in your society, in your work place, your peers, bosses etc. You will find that you have labelled many people around you and you are also labelled the same way. This is like living in a video game. You kick the butt of opponent, but you are sitting on the couch. So, it’s better to hit refresh button of your mind, clean up your recycle bin and start afresh with no prejudice. I personally have experienced this where I was told about some of my would-be team members. he is good, he is bad in their experience. But when I started working with them, things were different. Most productive people were the ones whose strengths weren’t utilized, rather they were pushed to work in their weakness area. You open hot water tap to get hot water, can’t be otherwise.
The message is, before you judge someone, take your time to understand, simulate situation if it were you how would you handle it. Then, you will be able to know the plus and minus of individual personality. Once you know this, you are an easy ride working with different people in any environment. At least, you would know, where not to spend your energy 😊