Personality Styles - A Foundational Principle

As I read and listen to people teach about how to learn the skills of dealing with people in an optimum manner, I always end up coming back around to how foundational it is to understand that there are different personality styles.

Why is that so important?

Because no matter what other principle you are teaching or attempting to apply, if you don't understand that different personality styles react differently to different inputs, then you are constantly stuck in the mode of trying to fit round pegs into square holes!

Your new principle works great sometimes. At other times it seems to work fairly well, and at yet other times it doesn't seem to work at all. Why? I thought principles worked all of the time.

They do! But often the application of the principle requires a tweak here and there to apply it properly to the individual's personality.

I have a situation going on in my life right now where I am working on a project with a friend who doesn't understand this concept. I know his heart is in the right place and that he is a great person, but there is a lot of friction going on because this principle is being violated each time we sit down to work together.

If we want to get optimum results in anything that involves dealing with other people, we absolutely must understand that there are core, fundamental differences in the ways people think, act and perceive the world around them.

As I speak with many different people about this concept of personality styles, I find that probably 75% of them have been exposed to the idea in one form or another. However, the more I learn about it and watch people try to apply it in their interactions, the more I become aware how important it is to delve into it more deeply.

Probably the most common mistake that I see is that we tend to view all of the other personalities from the perspective of our own style instead of trying to understand them from a more neutral perspective. That might sound complicated, but it is really at the core of applying this principle.

So where do we start? I always begin by recommending the book, "Personality Plus" by Florence Littauer. However this is such a deep subject that I believe it is important to dig into 2 or 3 other books to be able to learn more from different perspectives. Robert Rohm has another great one called "Positive Personality Profiles" that I really like.

Another great way to learn about it is to listen to as many audio recordings of people teaching about it as you can. They allow you to learn from yet another perspective of someone who is trying to apply the principle in their everyday life.

Dig into this concept and you will begin to see your interactions with other people in your life make a lot more sense!

Good luck and have an awesome day!