Reading People Page 2
Personality insights can be like this. One key piece of information shifts our whole paradigm—and the world suddenly makes a lot more sense.
The frameworks in this book can highlight what upsets you (and why) and what makes you hum. They can help you understand what’s causing friction in your relationships, and what to do about it. They can open your eyes to what’s really going on in situations that currently make you batty.
Unfortunately, finding this information about our own personalities isn’t a straightforward process. It’s not exactly complicated; it’s just that it’s difficult to look directly at our own natures. That’s why I rely on the tool of personality frameworks. These frameworks give us the eyes we need to see ourselves in a new way.
Seeing the World through Someone Else’s Eyes
I’m a big reader. In fact, I have a blog called Modern Mrs. Darcy (modernmrsdarcy.com), where I share what I’m reading, recommend books to others, or—my favorite—connect what I read in a book to the real, off-the-page life I’m living.
I read a wide variety of books, across many genres, but what I really love is to crack open a good novel and step into another world for three hundred pages. When I read a great story, I get to experience the world through someone else’s eyes for a little while. I’ll never be a boy wizard, but J. K. Rowling helps me imagine what it might be like to be a kid shouldering a fearsome responsibility (while wielding my wand and chugging butter beer). I live in the twenty-first century, but Jane Austen helps me feel the pleasures and perils of life in the English countryside two hundred years ago. I had a wonderful childhood, and my parents are still alive and well, living just a few miles down the road, but L. M. Montgomery invites me to experience the sting of being told I’m unwanted, the loneliness of having no one to love or care for me.
I love the personality frameworks in this book because they let me do the same thing.
We all live in the first person. I experience the world through my eyes; we all do. But each of these personality frameworks, when used thoughtfully, gives me eyes to see the world from someone else’s point of view for a little while. It’s a simple way to try out a new perspective, a different worldview. And once we’ve caught a glimpse of the world through someone else’s eyes, we won’t soon forget that point of view. It changes us, and it changes the way we read others.
About This Book
I’ve shared some of my personality-related stories on my blog over the years, and as I’ve interacted with readers, I’ve gotten to hear just how helpful learning about personality has been for many of them. But a big obstacle for many people who would like to learn more about these frameworks is the sheer amount of information out there. It’s overwhelming. People don’t know where to begin or which framework will help them most or where to find the best resources or why to even bother.
My goal in this book is threefold. In these pages, I hope to
provide an overview of the frameworks that have been the most helpful to me;
make this important information a lot more accessible and a lot less intimidating; and
highlight the kind of valuable insights that come from understanding personality.
Keep in mind that I’m not a scholar. I’m a fellow traveler, someone who has benefited from the same information and has learned to pay attention to the right moments, ask the right questions of myself, and tweak accordingly. I’ll hold your hand and show you how I’ve been able to put what I’ve learned to use in my own life in an effort to inspire and guide you to do the same.
You don’t have to read this book straight through from front to back. In fact, I’d suggest you don’t. After reading about my aha! moment in chapter 1, feel free to jump to the framework that interests you most. I haven’t shared every existing personality framework in this book but instead have chosen the ones that have helped me most. Now, you get to choose the ones that look helpful to you. Read a few chapters, take an assessment or two, talk it all over with a friend, and come back to the book when you’re ready. Some frameworks are easier to grasp than others. Some make intuitive sense after your first read, while others may require a reread for them to really sink in. (I’m looking at you, chapter 7.) This book will wait for you.
You don’t have to be an expert about personality to enjoy the benefits of this book, but you do need to cultivate an expertise about yourself. I promise, it’s nobler than it sounds. I’ll be right here, asking the questions right along with you.
1
My Aha! Moment
understanding my personality type
I’ve been fascinated with personality since one memorable family dinner when I was in my late tweens or early teens. My mom mentioned her church group would be reading a new book together. I’d never heard of the book and didn’t know much about the subject matter, but what my mom said intrigued me.
She explained that the author had taken an old idea and updated it for the twentieth century. Ancient Greek and Roman physicians and philosophers had sorted people into four categories based on their “humors,” believing each individual’s unique combination of these elements determined their personality. For the modernized version, the four categories of people are the popular sanguine, powerful choleric, perfect melancholy, and peaceful phlegmatic. These categories aren’t good or bad. There is no “right” answer, only the possibility to accurately see yourself as you truly are. The promise is that when you understand yourself better—your strengths and weaknesses, emotional needs, and driving motivations—it is much easier to understand others as well, especially when they aren’t like you.
I begged my mom to share her copy of the book and spent hours and hours poring over it, trying to spot myself and my loved ones in its pages. I was hooked.1
I became obsessed with the idea that by discovering who I was at my core—what made me tick, who God made me to be—I could gain insight into important questions, such as What should I study? Who should I marry? What do I want to be when I grow up? How am I going to remember to buy milk at the grocery store?
I surmised that finding the right answers to these questions—the profound and the prosaic—would change my life.
But they didn’t—or not for a long time, at least. That’s because even though I was fascinated by personality typing and started learning more about it, I was doing it all wrong. When it came to connecting what I was learning to my real life, I was failing. Totally.
Wait a minute, you say. I thought that with personality there are no wrong answers?
Well, yes and no.
Objectively speaking, when it comes to your personality type—at least according to the frameworks in this book—there are no wrong answers. No personality type is better or worse than any other. Some people are better suited than others to be engineers or teachers or executives, while others are naturally more compassionate or more analytical. It takes all kinds to make a world.2
But there is a wrong way to approach personality, and I had inadvertently found it.
An Inadvertent but Common Error
When I initially tried to figure out my personality, the crucial first step in understanding myself and others, I didn’t begin at the beginning. I didn’t ask myself what I was really like. Instead, I asked myself what I wished I were like.
It was an inadvertent error, and so insidious I didn’t even realize I was doing it. (And I wasn’t alone. When it comes to personality frameworks, this happens all the time.) But my understandable mistake still ruined my chances of gaining any useful self-knowledge from the experience.
To illustrate, let me tell you how much I hate parking garages. It relates, I promise.
When it comes to operating a large motor vehicle—and by large, I mean “bigger than a bicycle”—my spatial abilities are, er, not great. This isn’t a big deal (my driving record is beautiful, honestly), unless I’m parking. Parking is hard. I can manage just fine in a suburban parking lot or my own driveway (don’t laugh). But put me in a parking garage, and I sta
rt shaking.
I don’t know about the parking garages in your town, but in the garage I regularly have the displeasure of parking in, it’s important that I pull my car all the way in to the parking space or my Honda’s back end (did you notice how I avoided saying “minivan”?) will block the driving lane. In theory, this is no big deal. But in practice, this means cringing with every fiber of my being as I ease the front end of my vehicle closer and closer to an immovable concrete wall—inch by uncomfortable inch—dreading the repugnant metal-on-concrete scraping noise (and costly-to-repair damage) that will result if I misjudge the distance.
When I first started parking in this awful garage, I would pull my car in just as close as I could bear. Then I’d kill the engine, hop out, check out my parking job, and discover I was still a full two feet from the barricade. I wish I were kidding.
My early experience with personality frameworks was a lot like parking in that garage.
I remember in college when I first really dove into the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)®. The system identifies and describes sixteen distinct personalities, which we’ll learn more about in chapter 6, but for now, suffice it to say, it’s important to accurately identify your type. I spent hours poring over the various profiles and found the information simultaneously fascinating and frustrating.
When I first took the assessment, my result was clear: INTJ. For those of you to whom this sounds like total alphabet soup, allow me to explain. The INTJ is known as the architect, the mastermind, the scientist. This result was no surprise, given my history and upbringing; many INTJs are little bookworms as kids. They’re smart and creative and highly analytical. They prefer to work alone or, at the very most, in small groups. These types are hardworking and determined; they think critically and clearly; they tend to be perfectionists. They grow up to become software and mechanical engineers, project managers, marketing analysts, and attorneys.
I knew the INTJ type, all right. I come from a long line of attorneys and judges and knew the type and their skills very well, even if I hadn’t known to put the alphabet soup label on it. Those skills were valued in my household growing up. Perhaps that’s why it was so easy for me to see myself as an INTJ. And because I knew the type so well, I didn’t realize a critical flaw in my thinking. I didn’t see the INTJ type as one way to be; I thought it was the way to be. So I wasn’t surprised when my personality test confirmed that I was a rationalist type who could grow up to become a terrific attorney one day.
In my assumptions, I completely misunderstood myself, yet I had no clue I had done this. Instead, I continued merrily on my way, convinced I was a strategic thinker and analytical planner and occasionally wondering why this “insight” didn’t seem to help me much in my day-to-day life. I thought my parking job was just fine.
I was wrong. I was still three feet from the barrier, and my back end was blocking the lane.
I spent hours studying the various MBTI profiles, again fascinated and frustrated. And again, I had new information but no insight.
I wasn’t looking for knowledge for knowledge’s sake. I wanted practical information I could put into action. I wanted to cash in on the promise of the first personality book that hooked me: that I could understand others better by first understanding myself better. Unfortunately, the information wasn’t helpful to me because, while I was gaining an understanding of personality typing systems in general, I still didn’t understand what I was really like. I didn’t have a correct understanding of my own personality.
Thales of Miletus, one of the sages of ancient Greece, put it plainly: “The most difficult thing in life is to know yourself.”3 Without realizing it, I had bumped straight into a key problem the Greeks identified more than two thousand years ago: knowing yourself may sound easy, but it’s surprisingly complicated. I was just a kid; I had no deep-seated, long-established wisdom. I had a lot to learn about myself, and I was just getting started.
Looking back, I wonder, How could I have gotten myself so wrong? How could I have misunderstood myself so thoroughly? Perhaps, because I was young, I didn’t have the life experience I needed to see a person clearly, even if that person was me. However, I place the bulk of the blame on my own blindness, caused by plain old wishful thinking.
Denial Is a Powerful Force
I have an obstetrician friend who has delivered thousands of babies, including a surprisingly high number from women who didn’t know they were pregnant. Having carried four babies to term, this blows my mind. I’d expect one such delivery over the course of a career, maybe. But my doctor friend has seen dozens—and he’s still young. When he first told me this, I thought he was making it up just to get a laugh, but he was being truthful. When I asked how this could possibly happen over and over again, he explained that, in all seriousness, denial is a powerful force. Or as Christopher Alexander said, “We are not always comfortable with the true self that lies deep within us.”4
Whether my own mistake—of seeing only what I wanted to see—was born of ignorance or deep-rooted discomfort, I know this much: when it comes to understanding yourself and others, wishful thinking will get you nowhere. If personality information is going to help you, you’re going to have to get comfortable with the true self that lies deep within you.
All the personality tests in the world won’t mean anything to you if you’re not honest with yourself about your own personality and the personalities of those around you. Aspirational answers won’t do you any good; only true ones will. And so, the first step is to take an unflinching look at who you truly are. What are you really like?
The Beginning of Understanding
Fast-forward a few years to the winter following my June wedding. My husband, Will, and I had just had another painful fight. It was awful, but not in the way you’d imagine. We hadn’t fought about anything earth-shaking. Our conflicts were excruciating because we lacked the skills we needed to work through routine marital disagreements.
It doesn’t matter how often couples fight. However, how they fight is critical. Married people need to learn how to disagree, figure things out, and move on. Will and I were married, but we hadn’t figured out how to do those things yet. That first winter we were still terrible at conflict. When we disagreed, he became cold and distant. I was extraordinarily sensitive to his change of mood, and I’d get upset, which baffled him. Then I’d become angry because he didn’t understand why I was upset. Secretly (or maybe not so secretly), I thought I was being reasonable and Will was doing it wrong. I blamed him for shutting down whenever we disagreed, and I told him so. Often.
Back to the fight. I don’t remember what it was about—how to fold the laundry, where to store the Tupperware, what we should do on Saturday morning—whatever it was, it was mind-numbingly mundane. But we disagreed, as people do. Then I told Will what I thought, and he acted aloof, then I got upset, and then he was baffled—which made me furious!
Instead of talking circles around our stupid issue again, I did the only thing that seemed to help—I went for a run in the freezing cold to cool off. Then I came home, took a shower, put on my pajamas, and plopped on the couch with a library book. Coincidentally, I was reading David Keirsey’s Please Understand Me II, which I now jokingly call the MBTI Bible.
The previous year Will and I had gone through our church’s required premarital counseling program. We drove across town on a Saturday afternoon to meet the couple we’d been randomly paired with. They were kind, if a bit eccentric. I can still remember our surprise when we pulled into their driveway and saw three hundred pairs of teddy bear eyes staring at us from their home’s bay window.
We drank lukewarm tea and made awkward chitchat at their kitchen table under the watchful eyes of the teddy bears, which lined not just the bay window but every room of the home. After the introductions were over, they presented us each with a personality assessment and a number 2 pencil. Our future discussions would be based on our results.
We spent the next half hour bubblin
g in answers to a few hundred questions about how we handle conflict, what we dream of, how often we seek out new experiences, and if we tend to be agreeable. A month later, we returned to the land of the teddy bears to find out how we did.
According to our results, we were more or less compatible, more alike than different. “There’s one thing we noticed,” our hosts said. “Your tests indicate that you might have problems with conflict. But don’t worry too much. All couples do.”
I found the whole experience frustrating. What kind of conflict—and why? What would we do about it when it happened? I felt as though I’d spent too much time bubbling in answers to get a result that felt like the kind of “wisdom” I could find in a fortune cookie.
I was dissatisfied because, again, I was so close to discovering some genuinely useful information. Could Will and I truly use some good info about our strengths and weaknesses, sticking points, and blind spots? You betcha. We didn’t get it there, but when we left that day, I felt as though it was possible to find that kind of information somewhere.
Like the book nerd I was, I took myself to my friendly local library and started looking for books about personality types. (This was in the days of dial-up internet, so I consulted my local library, not Google. A good thing, I think.) I came home that night with a long reading list.
Because of the typical pre-wedding craziness, I didn’t start reading those books until after the wedding. Trust me on this: spending the first winter of your married life reading books about personality isn’t a terrible way to begin.
Most of what I read went straight over my head, but I was learning. I wasn’t yet able to see myself clearly in any of the profiles. I still felt clueless about my inner workings, my strengths and weaknesses. But I was at least acutely sensitive to the fact that everyone innately has strengths and weaknesses and that all people are different—very different—and that isn’t a bad thing.