The 4 Personality Types

All 3 are variations on a theme

This a rewrite for me. I am quite sure that I wrote a blog on this subject matter but it was likely in a blog hosted on a site called Today.com that is now defunct and so are the posts that were created there. It is nice to see that Blogger hasn't and won't likely suffer from the same fate. I think the fact that it is a Google product will ensure it's longevity.

The basic premise of the 4 personality types aka the 4 temperaments is derived from various studies in psychology that put forth the premise that all humans fit into one of 4 dominant personality types. I once was involved in a training program that defined them as Thinker, Relater, Socializer, and Director, or something like that. The basic premise in this course was that you used it in a sales environment to help you make your presentation in a style more suited to the personality type who was on the other side of negotiation table. It did have its merits but it was only useful as a snapshot in time. People in history might be categorized this way--Einstein would be a thinker, Florence Nightingale would be a relater, Robin Williams would be a socializer and Winston Churchill would be a director. No surprises there but there has to more than just four types. Humans just aren't that simple.

People change over time and are more complex than that. I began to look at my own personality development and devised a system where I could create a name for each individual in my personality based on their primary interests and set a voice and identify at least one dominant characteristic to that player on what I called simply "The Team". An example is Ned the NASCAR guy who speaks in the voice of Darryl Waltrip or Ned Jarret (depending on the era) and tends to be an informative and humorous story teller. My Ned has pretty much been an active player on my team since I was about 11 or 12 years old when I went to my first car race.

While wearing that individual hat, you tended to be more like the character but you also switched hats as quickly as the situation dictated. If the subject matter switched to World War II well then Walter the World War II guy would pipe up in the form of a respected expert and avid follower of that subject. His voice (inside my head) would be Walter Cronkite.

I have a listing of a bunch of them and have lost count on how many there are and team members like Inchy the Internet Guy evolved into Infinity the Internet Explorer as we started to grow with our use of the Internet. Baxter the Baker, Luigi Tartufo the Sing in the Kitchen Guy and Pierre the Chef have all kind of blended into a new guy with the tentative name of The Rambling Hash Slinger which he thinks would be a good title for his potential cooking show on the Food Network but now only appears in Hubpages. com in a series of blogs called Cooking For One.

All of these players (including a bunch more that haven't been listed here) are all bound together by the guiding force who is Bozoplay who is primarily a clown and speaks in the voice of Goofy, the lovable Disney character. This mostly goes on inside my head so people don't think I'm crazy if I actually try speaking in their voices.

The point I am trying to make here that even at my age (64 at the time of writing) I am still evolving and I have changed over my lifetime. Some of the team members are active, some are on injury reserve and some are retired like Gump the Goalie and Satich the Squash guy. It is not very likely that I will strap on the pads and play net again nor will I be found on the squash court but sometimes you move in and out of roles like Max the Music Composer who will get up and running again once Chucky the Computer Geek gets our new computer system up and running and we put a restraining rope on Gorby the Gamer and Infinity.

It might look like I'm a little bonkers here but sit back and take a look at yourself in this light and examine all the players that you have had in your lifetime. Some will not even be on the team yet because circumstance hasn't made its presence known yet. Some of you will travel into space in your lifetime and that is going to have one major impact on your personality.

Putting all these names to my personality traits confuses me, so I don't expect others to totally follow what I am presenting here. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I am very much Bozoplay, Coach, Taylor the Teacher and Spike the Sports Fan most of the time and Raymond the Writer wrestles with the task of keeping them all in line.

And I haven't talked about Otto the Out of Left Field Guy yet. He scares the b'Jesus out of most of us but he does come up with some really creative ideas at times. You think the millionaire who came up the pool noodle idea had his own Otto or Steve Jobs in Apple, or Chuck Yeager or Mark Zuckerberg. I certainly think so.

And if you don't know who these guys are Google 'em. That's how Inchy became Infinity. Human beings cannot be just packed into one of four boxes. With 7 billion+ faces on this planet you would have to think there are more permutations than just 4. Well at least that is how I feel about it, now.

My Helen the Housekeeper should be shot, firing isn't good enough for her. I always have dishes in the sink. I'm working on it but it'a slow process. Very very slow.