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Your personality probably influences your
relationships, health, career and sense of life more than anything else.
Do you have personality traits that make you too aggressive, too passive
or too depressive?
Are you living an emotionally damaging lifestyle? Do you want to change?
Are People Really Equal?
Western concepts that people are fundamentally equal seem to
follow Western legal philosophy. If people are legally equal, then
they should be alike in other fundamental ways.
Although most people share basic needs, they may have different
goals, motives, values, obsessions, impulses, urges, likes and dislikes.
They may think, conceptualize, perceive, understand and comprehend life differently
to you. But their behavior, like yours, is often predictable.
Assessing Human Personality
PERSONALITY: a set of characteristics:
the totality of somebody’s attitudes, interests,
behavioral patterns, emotional responses, social roles, and other
enduring traits
Microsoft® Encarta®
Reference Library 2005. |
A personality reflects both genes and experiences. You
differed from other infants because of variables that you inherited or
experienced during your mother's pregnancy and birth. Perhaps you were more
attentive than others, or you were more passive. These differences may
have influenced how your parents responded to you. And since then you
have had many more experiences ...
Your personality has been assessed many times. Your
personality has been
assessed by friends, salespeople, interviewers, doctors and therapists.
The accuracy of these assessments may have been questionable, yet if
you disagree with an assessment, your disagreement will also be assessed.
If you talk about personalities, you probably talk about
individual differences and commonalities. For example, how do neurotic people
and healthy people differ - and what do they have in common?
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Assessing Personality |
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Human personality is often described in imprecise words,
as a comparison to some imaginary norm. Personality assessment tools
attempt to understand and predict human behavior.
Most formal personality assessment tools are self-report
inventories or projective tests. Self-report inventories question your
personal habits, attitudes, beliefs and fantasies. Projective tests measure
your responses to ambiguous situations.
If you learn to assess and appreciate
preferences, you can better appreciate people. |
- Keirsey Temperament Sorter
- OD-Online Personality Profiler
- Enneagram Test
- Myers-Biggs Personality Test
- Personality Type Test
- Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory
- Integrated Psychological Type Indicator
- Extroversion/Introversion Inventory
- Big 5 Personality Test
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Depressive & Angry Personalities
Depression may stem from helplessness - beliefs that you
cannot control the outcome of events. Prolonged exposure to apparently
uncontrollable and unavoidable events may lead to signs of depression - apathy,
pessimism and decreased participation in life.
Other depressive personality traits include gloominess, pessimism,
introversion, excessive skepticism and criticism, feelings of inadequacy and
worry. People who often behave in dependent, hostile and impulsive ways
risk suffering depression. Melancholic people may have identified with dead
people.
Hostile people may seem to be constantly irritated. Everything
seems to annoy them, nothing is right, and they exaggerate flaws. Angry people
who view the world through cynical eyes and find little that is amusing - may be
identified with victims. (See
Identification and Identity
Loss)
Human Identity & Human Spirit
While most psychiatrists focus on behavior and medication,
Dr Viktor Frankl, founder of Logotherapy, described the human spirit. Dr
Frankl spoke of meaning and spirit, and said that these could
not be defined or measured. With its theme of increasing
sense of life, Logotherapy is integrated into Soulwork systemic coaching.
Frankl spoke of an existential vacuum. If you seek
meaning of life, and you are frustrated, you may feel overwhelmed by emptiness.
If you desperately seek to avoid this suffering, your avoidance can cause obsessions,
compulsions and addictions. Sense of life is linked to integrity and
connectedness. Some people refer to this experience as Soul ... see
Soul of Soulwork.
You have learned many habits and repetitive behaviors ... and you can change your habits if you wish. If you apply your
awareness, creativity, integrity and your desire for happiness, you can make better
choices! You can form new habits, responses and traits. Soulwork can help you
re-engineer your personality, to find and fulfill your life goals.
Personality Change & Systemic Coaching
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Your personality is not permanently encoded
into your DNA. Personality is like a profound post-hypnotic
suggestion ... and who was the hypnotist? |
If you had no memory, your behavior would reflect your
environment. However you not only remember events and
sensations, you remember your emotional reactions and whatever meanings you
attributed to past events and sensations. You remember your personality - and it
remembers what to do.
If you change how you cope with events and sensations,
and your subsequent emotions and inferred meanings,
you can change your personality. Your change can be temporary or
permanent, depending on the severity of the sensation and the method
you use to modify your response.
Systemic coaching offers you the possibility to change
your personality.
Plagiarism is theft. Copyright © Martyn Carruthers 2004, 2005 All rights reserved.
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