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    Who Do You Think You Are?: Understanding Personality From the Inside Out
    Who Do You Think You Are?: Understanding Personality From the Inside Out
    Who Do You Think You Are?: Understanding Personality From the Inside Out
    Ebook356 pages5 hours

    Who Do You Think You Are?: Understanding Personality From the Inside Out

    By Tina Thomas and Eric Schulze

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    About this ebook

    “Step aside Dr. Phil; move over Dr. Oz. I truly believe that Dr. Tina Thomas is to personality psychology what Einstein was to physics . . .” (Eric Schulze, MD, PhD, researcher, CEO Lifetrack Medical Systems).
     
    As Dr. Thomas explains, “There is no such thing as a difficult person, just people with difficult personalities!” Those who understand personality and its biological basis never look at themselves or others in the same way again. Understanding personality this way will help you to understand what motivates you and others. This will also improve your ability to communicate.
     
    Who Do You Think You Are? will teach you how to adjust your internal and external environments to optimize your specific personality chemistry to become the person you always hoped you could be and create the life circumstances you only dreamed were possible. And, if that isn’t extraordinary enough, this new knowledge will create more compassion within yourself and more peace within all the relationships you ever had, have now, or will have in the future. Understanding yourself from the inside out may be the single most important body of information you ever need to reach your full potential.
     
    Who do you think you are? You may be delighted and surprised when you discover yourself this way!
     
    “Dr. T has an uncanny ability to combine the art of psychology and the science of biology to create elegant ways to increase self-compassion, improve relationships and help people to become self-actualized.” —Richard Tscherne, PhsD, clinical psychologist, director of The Gestalt Institute and Relationship Center of New York
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJan 26, 2016
    ISBN9781630476571
    Who Do You Think You Are?: Understanding Personality From the Inside Out

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      Book preview

      Who Do You Think You Are? - Tina Thomas

      Chapter 1

      Who Is the Ultimate You?

      Who do you think you are?

      Before you finish this book, it is my hope that you will be able to figure out which of the nine basic human personalities you have and what to do to become the ultimate version of yourself.

      Do you have the ethical and principled personality known as the Reformer?

      Or perhaps you have the positive high-energy personality designed to anticipate others’ needs, known as the Helper?

      Could you be the charming and chameleon-like Achiever, who is incredibly gifted at goal achievement?

      Or the special, highly sensitive, and sometimes temperamental Artist personality who has special gifts and challenges?

      Perhaps, you are more of a brainiac and have the Observer personality, someone who might be the next Albert Einstein or Bill Gates?

      If you’re having a hard time deciding, it’s possible that you have the Loyalist personality—a true blue friend who can have challenges with anxiety and decisions from time to time.

      Might you be the Enthusiast, clearly designed to be a free-range human, motivated to have fun and freedom?

      Or possibly you may relate most to the Challenger, a dominant and straightforward personality that tends to intimidate others without even knowing it.

      Or finally, could you be a Peacemaker—gentle and sweet, avoiding confrontation as much as possible and motivated to seek and create harmony?

      I have no idea who you are right now, but if you were the ultimate you, I would recognize you in a heartbeat.

      Whether famous or unknown, educated or not, rich or poor, if you are your ultimate self, you are by definition what Abraham Maslow² referred to as a selfactualized person; that is, someone living at the peak of human potential.

      Would you like to read a description of the Ultimate You?³ Regardless of your particular personality type, it goes something like this:

      •You are alive, engaged, and spontaneous.

      •You are comfortable with yourself, others, and nature. You accept your own human nature with all its flaws. You have a non-hostile sense of humor and a wonderful capacity to laugh at yourself. You accept the shortcomings of others and the contradictions of the human condition with humor and tolerance. You may even have shed what I call Buddha tears, crying with compassion for the human condition.

      •You are free from reliance on external authorities or other people. You are resourceful and independent and have a mission to fulfill in life, some task or problem outside of yourself you are uniquely equipped to pursue.

      •You are sensitive to what is not authentic, to what is fake or dishonest. Your own interpersonal relationships are therefore profound and marked by deep, loving, unconditional bonds.

      •Despite your satisfying relationships with others, you also value solitude and are comfortable being alone.

      •You constantly renew your appreciation of life’s basic goodness and have frequent peak experiences marked by feelings of ecstasy, harmony, and deep meaning. During these times, you feel at one with the Universe, strong and calm, filled with light, beautiful and good—you get the picture. (For some of you, think Woodstock meets Jazz Festival in the middle of the desert at Burning Man. You know who you are!)

      In short, you feel peaceful, passionate, accepted, loved, loving, and alive.

      In this moment, if you do not feel like the Ultimate You living your ultimate life, then it is my hope that this book will bring you closer to that. On the other hand, if you do feel like you already are your ultimate self, I don’t have to tell you that this peak condition in no way precludes you from seeking more information to help you grow even further, since, by definition, self-actualized people seek ongoing self-improvement. My experience tells me that you will be pleased with the time you spend with this book, and you will find it an extraordinary tool for attaining even higher levels of ability to create and manifest a greater capacity for awareness and compassion.

      In the next few pages, you will find a test by Dr. Richard Boyum related to the characteristics of the self-actualized person. It might be interesting to take this test today and then retake it about six months after you have implemented some of the ideas from this book.

      Once you understand the Nine-Point Personality System (NPS) and the theory of the biological basis of personality, you are well on your way to becoming more of who you are truly meant to be. Furthermore, once you understand the information in this book, I hope you will come to accept that we all do the best we can, given the resources we have. In other words, there is no such thing as a difficult person, just people with difficult (for you) personalities (sometimes in difficult situations).

      Understanding personality from the inside out—that is, understanding how biology and environment create personality—will help you to understand what motivates you and others, allowing you to communicate more effectively (to get more of what you want) and listen better (to help other people get what they want, too). This process leads to more satisfying relationships because satisfying relationships depend upon your ability to understand others. The degree to which you understand your personality and the personalities of others is directly related to the degree to which your relationships (and life in general) feel easy or hard. The most elegant way of understanding yourself begins with understanding your personality, and your efforts to accomplish this will be rewarded with more compassion and peace for yourself and any relationships you have ever had, have now, or will have in the future.

      If you think I’m overstating the importance of understanding personality, consider the possibility that personality affects every aspect of your life. Whether you realize it or not, personality affects how easy or difficult it is for you to fall asleep and stay asleep; it even affects the quality of your dreams. Personality affects how you see yourself, how you perceive others, and how others perceive you. It also affects how you experience your present, how you remember your past, and how you envision your future. It affects how you learn and how you communicate (or don’t), which then affects your personal and business relationships. Personality affects how you motivate yourself. It influences your food choices and even what kinds of people you like or don’t like.

      So, what is this thing we call personality? Well, as long as humans have been human, there has been an ongoing debate about how we define personality. (Three factors? Sixteen? Who knows?) And, what creates personality? (Nature versus nurture? Both?) Put simply, the most elegant definition of personality, in my opinion, is the following: personality is an enduring pattern of how a person thinks, feels, and behaves. If we accept this definition, the next question that comes to mind is what creates the similarities and differences in how each of us feels, thinks, and behaves? And how do we account for our human inconsistency over time as well?

      Dr. Funder, author of the textbook The Personality Puzzle, cites six differing perspectives or approaches in personality psychology that attempt to explain what creates personality. ⁴  Some of the approaches seem quite complementary while others seem wholly incompatible. What has been missing is a unifying framework large enough and elegant enough to make sense of all approaches. Such a framework, ideally, would not oppose or contradict the current traditions of personality psychology. Rather, it would help to explain how each approach is useful and how it relates to the other approaches.

      Personality is an enduring pattern of how a person thinks, feels, and behaves.

      The well-known parable about six blind men who encounter an elephant for the first time ends with the six arguing vehemently over what an elephant really is based on each man’s interpretation of his experience of the elephant. According to the tale, each man touches a different part of the elephant—the trunk, the tail, the leg, the tusks, the ear, and the side of the elephant—then walks away convinced that his truth is complete and that the other five men are wrong. Obviously, what they each lack is a larger perspective of the elephant in its entirety.

      I think the various approaches to personality psychology are all telling the truth from their perspective, but the elephant is what Dr. Funder calls the One Big Theory that unites and makes sense of all approaches. In his book, The Personality Puzzle, Dr. Funder questions, Why doesn’t somebody just come up with the One Big Theory—you could call it the OBT—that explains everything now accounted for separately by trait, biological, psychoanalytic, humanistic, behavioral, and cognitive approaches?

      I believe this book effectively outlines that OBT of personality psychology. I begin with a personality system that offers the most complete and accurate representation of human personality that currently exists, which leads to a biologically based theory, developed after more than thirty years of conducting literature searches and experiments, gathering data, and observing human behavior. The personality system and my supporting theory, when combined, are the NPS. The NPS is as simple and complex as the human beings it seeks to map, and I believe it is large enough, true enough, and elegant enough to serve as a unifying paradigm. Not only can it embrace all six of the approaches to personality that Dr. Funder describes, but it can actually integrate all of them and show how they work together and complement each other. In addition, this system is simultaneously a categorical and a trait-based system. (If you are interested, I explain in Chapter 7 what that means and what makes that so very cool and useful for therapists and researchers.) And, as if that weren’t enough, the NPS is also a dynamic, three-dimensional, and fluid system that is extremely precise and even predictive.

      The degree to which you understand your personality and the personalities of others is directly related to the degree to which your relationships (and life in general) feel easy or hard.

      Here’s a sneak peek at the nine core personalities identified through the NPS—we’ll dig more deeply into what each personality looks like later in the book.

      One—The Reformer—principled and orderly, and under stress becomes perfectionist and self-righteous

      Two—The Helper—caring and generous, and under stress can become possessive and manipulative

      Three—The Achiever—adaptable and ambitious, and under stress can become image-conscious and hostile

      Four—The Individualist—intuitive and expressive, and under stress can become self-absorbed and depressive

      Five—The Investigator—perceptive and original, and under stress can become detached and eccentric

      Six—The Loyalist—engaging and committed, and under stress can become defensive and paranoid

      Seven—The Enthusiast—enthusiastic and accomplished, and under stress can become scattered and manic

      Eight—The Challenger—self-confident and decisive, and under stress can become dominating and combative

      Nine—The Peacemaker—peaceful and reassuring, and under stress can become complacent and neglectful

      Chicken? Egg? Or Both?

      Although the media has yet to catch up with the nature versus nurture (a.k.a. genes versus environment) debate regarding personality, science has shed important light on this issue and reached a consensus. It appears that personality is both (1) something we are born with and (2) something influenced by the environment. In fact, the question in personality psychology is not whether personality is biologically based and then affected by our environment, but how much of our personality is hard wired, and to what degree do our life experiences amplify or attenuate our personality

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