“We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.” – The Talmud
Personality matters in all aspects of our lives. It generates our values, responses and beliefs in decision making, preferences, perspectives and judgment and all of our relationships. Through the years, many clients have used our services to find solutions for family issues with spouses and/or children, career and study choices, conflict resolution in churches, civic organizations and neighborhood dynamics. Most interpersonal conflicts come from a failure to understand the intentions and motivations of others, and of ourselves.
The insistence that people are alike is a viewpoint limited to a brief period in the 20th century. Long before Hippocrates defined his four temperaments in 409 BC and since the mapping of the Human Genome, completed in 2001, philosophers, theologians, and observers of human dynamics have known that people are different in personality, even so with identical twins and triplets.
People are different from each other. At their core, they want, believe and value different things. Anyone who has tried to force change in another person knows it is impossible and that perceived changes are usually temporary at best and create other issues that negate the result. The best and most promising option is to understand and embrace the differences in our individual preferences for how we function to build communication, cooperation and trust.
Trust is the basis for most successful, human interaction, including between employer and employee, sales professional and customer, and in all family relationships. Trust depends on understanding and understanding depends on effective communication. Communication gaps occur when we don’t readily understand the differences in people and how they think, make decisions and choices, and then make assumptions based on our observations about their intentions and motivations.
Our approach relies most heavily on Alfred Adler and Carl Jung’s orientations that what influences most is our individual preference for how we function. Understanding individual preference or purpose is the basis for improving communication, understanding, trust and morale in all relationships in business, families, and friends.
If trust is the basis for most successful human interaction, it is also the central issue at the core of most disappointing human conflicts. Knowing an individual’s predominant, most influential traits, (or temperament), is very rewarding because:
We significantly improve our ability to predict what an individual will feel, say and do most of the time.
We can communicate with them the way they best understand, and meet their needs as well as our own.
We will know the motivations and demotivating factors of others.
Very simply, temperament determines behavior because behavior is the instrument for getting us what we must have, satisfying our individual desires or needs for power, control, relationships, status, security, harmony, belonging, perfection, freedom, or meaning – whatever our inherent, inborn, temperament prefers. Behavior is observable and the most reliable information we can have about others.
An individual’s predominant “temperament” or strength can be measured in a very systematic way, AND it can be identified by observation with a great degree of accuracy once we know what we are looking for.