Making the Connection: Strategies to Build Effective Personal Relationships (Collection) (53 page)

OK, then stick with Plan A. Quite right—sometimes big change isn’t the answer. Sometimes you just need to keep at it. I lost count of the number of times I tried unsuccessfully to give up smoking. But I did it in the end. What if I’d given up trying to give up? Apart from the irony of it, I’d still be smoking now. The fact I’m not shows that persistence isn’t futile.

Maybe you didn’t get the promotion this time. But now that other candidate has moved on up, maybe you’ll be the one next time—and meantime you can work on making yourself an even more promising applicant.

So no one would look after the kids while you went to Italian classes? They’ll be starting a new course soon and maybe it will be on a better night. Or you’ll find a parent at school who’s happy to do a babysit swap with you every week. Or your partner will get home early on a Thursday.

So don’t quit.
¹²
Make challenging but realistic plans and work at making them happen. And whatever you do, don’t rely on luck. In any case, if you’re doing it properly, you won’t need it.

Footnotes

Introduction

¹
Bit of a euphemism there, but I think I’ll get away with that word.

Know How Much You Want It

²
Starting with a machine that can detect you thinking about coffee and make it before you’ve noticed you wanted it.

Break Big Ambitions into Chunks

³
Check out
www.oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com
.

Write It All Down

⁴
Or screen, if you really must.

Don’t Make Excuses

⁵
OK, maybe I want that last one...

Say What You Mean

⁶
With a happy ending—Hester had a lovely time at the park.

Treat People with Respect

⁷
Sorry—couldn’t resist the pun.

Don’t Respond to Tactical Anger

⁸
Although I can’t recommend sending your boss, say, to time out.

Be Objective

⁹
Yes I made that up (so it’s not objective or backed up with hard data).

Get Someone to Do the Asking for You

¹⁰
So don’t ask your kids to see if your boss will give you a pay raise, or the dog to sound out the bank manager about a loan.

Give Them What They Want

¹¹
Or further away – I don’t know how you and your in-laws feel about each other.

Don’t Give Up

¹²
Apart from smoking.

Also by Samuel Barondes
Cellular Dynamics of the Neuron
Neuronal Recognition
Molecules and Mental Illness
Mood Genes
Better Than Prozac

Making Sense of People

Decoding the Mysteries of Personality

Samuel Barondes

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© 2012 by Samuel Barondes
Pearson Education, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barondes, Samuel H., 1933-
  Making sense of people : decoding the mysteries of personality / Samuel Barondes. -- 1st ed.
      p. cm.
  Includes bibliographical references (p.      ) and index.
  ISBN 978-0-13-217260-8 (hardback : alk. paper)
1.  Personality.  I. Title.
  BF698.B31837 2012
  155.2’2--dc22
                                                    2011001026

For Louann
And for my grandchildren:
Jonah Lazar
Ellen Ariel
Asher Lucca

Every man is in certain respects

(a) like all other men,

(b) like some other men,

(c) like no other man.

—Clyde Kluckhohn and Henry A. Murray

Introduction. When Intuition Isn’t Enough

All of us are personality experts. Ever since childhood, we’ve been paying attention to people’s distinctive ways of being in hopes of figuring out what to expect from them. We depend on this information to get along.

The innate ability to size people up is an amazing gift that we take for granted. With it, we form an instantaneous impression of the personality of everyone we meet. This rapid intuitive process works so well that we learn to rely on it. Most of our assessments of people are formed in this automatic and unconscious way.
¹

But there are times when we want to consciously evaluate someone’s personality.
²
We may, for example, want to understand what it is about our boss that makes us avoid her. We may want to sort through the reasons we don’t approve of our teenage daughter’s boyfriend. We may want to decide if the person we’re dating has the right stuff for a permanent relationship.

That’s when the going gets tough. The difficulty mainly arises because few of us have been taught a systematic way to assess personalities. Instead, we are constantly bombarded with a contradictory mishmash of religious, moral, literary, and psychological ideas that are hard to apply in an orderly
manner. Imagine how we would struggle to do simple arithmetic if we kept getting contradictory instructions on how to work with numbers. Yet we’re expected to make sense of people without having been taught a coherent arithmetic of personality.

This lack of education may be responsible for some of our biggest mistakes. It can lead us to pick the wrong suitor, take the wrong job, or misguide our children. It can cause us to misinterpret a coworker’s intentions and become inappropriately defensive, or compliant, or aggressive. It can keep us from building satisfying relationships, gracefully avoiding conflicts, or developing plans to protect our interests by fighting back.

In this book, I describe a system for thinking about personalities that may help you avoid such mistakes. Based on decades of research, each chapter will make it easier for you to organize the data you already have about particular people and to start noticing characteristics that you may have overlooked. Sorting through this information will give you a clearer sense of each person and how to relate to them.

To get started, I will show you how to combine two vocabularies that professionals use to organize their observations. One breaks down personality into five well-defined general characteristics, such as conscientiousness and agreeableness, each of which has several components. This makes it easier to think things through using a well-defined set of words.

The other vocabulary shifts attention from these general traits to ten potentially troublesome patterns of behavior, such as compulsiveness or paranoia. Mild versions of these
patterns may simply be notable parts of a well-functioning personality. But some of us have inflexible and maladaptive versions of one or a few of them, versions that frequently bring grief to those we deal with—and to ourselves. More than the rest of us, such people are prisoners of personality who are locked into ways of being they seem unable to escape.

Combining these two easy-to-learn vocabularies will not only help you make clearer assessments of everyone you meet. It will also raise questions about the reasons people get to be so different from each other. In the second part of the book, I will describe the development of the brain circuits that control our distinctive combinations of traits and patterns. I will also show that the decades-long developmental process that builds these brain circuits is strongly influenced by the two great accidents of our birth: the specific set of genes we happen to be born with and the specific world we happen to live in.

But there’s more to a personality than traits and patterns. In the third part of the book, I will turn to the values and goals that give meaning and purpose to people’s lives. To flesh out this view, I will show you how to apply universal and culture-specific standards of morality to assess a person’s character. I will also encourage you to pay attention to the stories people tell about themselves, which will help you figure out what they stand for and their sense of identity.

Systematically organizing all this information about traits, patterns, character, and identity will help you make sense of anyone. It may also influence the approach you choose to engage with them. In some cases, this may encourage you to
shrug off their disquieting idiosyncrasies in favor of forgiveness and compassion. In other cases, it may alert you to telltale signs of danger so that you can take protective actions. In still other cases, it may open your heart to warm feelings of love and respect. In all cases, it will enhance your appreciation of human diversity in the same way that those who know a lot about wine, or music, or baseball get the added pleasure that comes from thoughtful attention to the details. Augmenting your pleasure in understanding and dealing with people, whether you like them or not, is the main aim of this book.

Part I: Describing Personality Differences

The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.

—Chinese Proverb

One. Personality Traits

When I was in high school, I signed up for the student newspaper. To get me started, the editor offered some standard advice on how to write a story. He said I should be sure to answer five questions: What happened? Who was involved? When? Where? Why? He said that knowing about these “five Ws” served as a check for completeness because novices sometimes left out one or more of them. He then assured me that I wouldn’t need them for long because answering these questions was something I was already inclined to do intuitively.

Intuition is also what journalists rely on when they size up people. Through years of practice, they develop a knack for identifying distinctive personality traits and finding the words to describe them. The gifted among them are so good at it that they can create a revealing portrait in a single paragraph. Consider, for example, Joe Klein’s description of the personality of an American politician:

There was a physical, almost carnal, quality to his public appearances. He embraced audiences and was aroused by them in turn. His sonar was remarkable in retail political situations. He seemed able to sense what audiences needed and deliver it to them—trimming
his pitch here, emphasizing different priorities there, always aiming to please. This was one of his most effective, and maddening qualities in private meetings as well: He always grabbed on to some point of agreement, while steering the conversation away from larger points of disagreement—leaving his seducee with the distinct impression that they were in total harmony about everything. ... There was a needy, high cholesterol quality to it all; the public seemed enthralled by his vast, messy humanity. Try as he might to keep in shape, jogging for miles with his pale thighs jiggling, he still tended to a raw fleshiness. He was famously addicted to junk food. He had a reputation as a womanizer. All of these were of a piece.
¹

Notice that Klein needs only a handful of evocative words to highlight the main characteristics of his subject:
carnal, needy, messy, maddening, fleshiness, addicted,
and
womanizer.
To round out his description, he uses a few short phrases, such as “his sonar was remarkable,” “high cholesterol quality,” and “aiming to please.” When he can’t find a simple word or phrase to describe something that he considers particularly revealing, he makes up a whole sentence: “he always grabbed on to some point of agreement, while steering the conversation away from larger points of disagreement—leaving his seducee with the distinct impression that they were in total harmony about everything.” By using words and phrases that all of us can understand, Klein tells us a great deal about the personality of an extraordinary public figure: Bill Clinton.