When Reality Knocks

In our experience of high school, trade school, and university, the most popular people have tended to be described as having a good personality. People would also say about someone they were dating, “He/she isn’t a beautiful/handsome person, but he/she has a wonderful personality”. I used to wonder what a good personality was and how I could get one, or if I had one already. I assumed the most confident people likely had a good personality to go with the confidence or that their good personality gave them such lovely confidence. What is this thing called personality anyway?

This is not just a modern question, but one which people have struggled with for a long time. The Greek Hippocrates told of four temperaments, The Sanguine, Choleric, Phlegmatic and Melancholic. I have been amazed that these four descriptions have become quite popular in some circles recently. People are doing workshops describing how people are one of these four temperaments. The reading I have done about the types suggests that they are not terribly helpful. Other writers have gone further in explaining personality, but the wealth of books and workshops on the subject are a clear indication that the population at large is very interested in what makes up good personality.

The most helpful description that I have seen comes from the work of Carl Jung. In the nearly 600 page Volume 6 of his collected works named Psychological Types, Jung covers the history of the search for an explanation of personality and how it develops. Dr. Jung’s writing in this book, especially the almost 80 pages of chapter ten, are extremely dense. They never really caught on until Isabel Briggs Myers popularized it with her Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, making this complex theory available for everyone. This has become the most popular personality test, used by millions of people world-wide. I have worked with this MBTI test for 30 years and have found it to be a godsend in working with students, psychiatric staff, clergy, couples, church people, and patients.

For the past ten years my son and I have been using Jung’s theory of types with couples about to be married in a pre-marriage course. It has continued to be very helpful. Given the age we are in, we decided to marry his tech savvy and my understanding of personality on the web. To that end, we have spent the past few years designing a website which includes my new personality test, and my description of the various types. To make this complex theory more accessible to people, we have animated the test with characters who carry you through it, making it fun, painless and informative.

We are launching our site just before Christmas and we plan to compliment it with this blog, which will be focused more on our daily thoughts, while the site will be more of an extensive resource. Before we start with the site, we thought we’d give a short introduction to personality type over the next couple of weeks, both here and on Doug Johnston’s excellent organizational site, www.diyplanner.com. This rich, helpful theory makes work, play and life easier and more fullfilling and we hope you are able to use it in your life.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 1st, 2005 at 1:38 pm and is filed under Personal Growth, Personality Type. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.