7

Personality Preferences: How to Change Yours to Meet Theirs

By now you know that people like other people who are similar to them. You have learned that you can look, sound, and act like others using the mirroring/matching rapport technique. Now let’s see if you can take it a step further and adapt your personality preferences to match those of others, to deepen your personal connections.

Before you can assess the preferences of others, you first have to know your own preference style. A great way to do this is to go online and take a personality assessment test. I took the Myers-Briggs test initially and have based my research on Jungian type personality traits, which this chapter will focus on, but any legitimate test can be of value. Here are a few others I recommend: the DiSK Personality Assessment Tool, the Work Personality Index, the Kiersey Color Test (It Works Global uses this test), and the Birkman Color Test, just to name a few. Whichever one you choose will aid you in assessing your personality preferences and, hence, those of others. You can even study face reading, or physiognomy, an ancient art known around the world that I hadn’t heard of until a student told me about someone named Mac Fulfer. Mac was an attorney who initially became interested in face reading for the purpose of jury selection. After years of study and practice, he wrote Amazing Face Reading, his guide to reading faces. I had the enjoyment of speaking to Mac on the phone and through e-mails after he read my face from a photo I sent him. He was amazing and spot on! He knew nothing yet everything about me, just from looking at my face. I was so impressed I bought his training materials. One day I hope to attend his training in person.

Knowing your personality preferences and the preferences of others will help you in several important ways. It will help prepare you to interact with people, do business, close a deal, schedule and run meetings, negotiate, deliver information, assign a task, select the right candidate for a job, mentor and coach, and so much more! It has helped me in one particular invaluable way that I will share with you in later in this chapter.

Have you ever heard of the acronym MBTI? It stands for Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Katharine Cook-Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs-Myers, studied the works and writings of Carl Gustav Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist. In Jung’s book Psychological Types, he theorized that there are four principal psychological functions by which we experience the world: sensation, intuition, feeling, and thinking, with one of these four functions prevailing most of the time. Myers and Briggs extrapolated on Jung’s theory and developed their own grouping of psychological differences into four opposite pairs, or dichotomies, resulting in 16 possible combinations of psychological preferences. They developed a questionnaire designed to measure psychological preferences in how people get their energy (Extraversion or Introversion), how they take in information (INtuition or Sensing), how they make decisions (Thinking or Feeling), and how they organize the world around them (Judger or Perceiver). They developed this questionnaire in 1942 and called it the Briggs-Myers Type Indicator but it eventually changed names in 1956 to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

The test is not meant to identify personality traits, nor does it measure or determine a person’s character, morals, or values. It is meant to measure personality preferences, not aptitude. The key thing to know is that a person’s personality preferences can and will change, so the MBTI measures your preferences at the time you take the test. Outside influences such as what kind of mood you wake up in that morning, whether or not you just experienced something traumatic, if you feel ashamed or guilty of something, or if you are ill—all will change the way you answer the questions and thus change the outcome of your score, although they won’t be drastic changes. For instance, most days I am a ENTJ, meaning I prefer to get my energy from people around me (Extraversion); I like to learn information by conceptualizing and looking at the big picture before getting into details (INtuition); I make decisions based on analyzing and weighing the pros and cons, not by how it will affect other people (Thinking); and I like to order the world around me so that I complete tasks on a deadline and gain closure (Judging). However, some days, especially when I am upset, I want nothing to do with people and I just want to be alone to recharge my batteries (Introversion). Other days I get so sick and tired of rules, deadlines, and watching the clock that I just want to be spontaneous and live life with no agenda (Perception). But these days are not how I normally prefer to feel or act. If I were to take the MBTI test on a day when I didn’t feel I made the best decisions or performed up to my standards, my results would differ than if I had just gotten off the stage at one of my keynote speaking events. Keep that in mind when you take the test. I will not go into an in-depth analysis of the four MBTI dichotomies, but I will give you an overview so you have an understanding of them and can identify personality preferences in yourself and others. This will help you relate to other people, communicate well with them, and, ultimately, build common ground and rapport. Following is a personal experience that will explain how all of this is possible.

In 2007, I was the project manager for a 10-week interrogation course. It was a very intensive course, and the company I worked for at the time decided to hold two of these courses almost simultaneously, with minimal staff. We were all worked to exhaustion. Because my preference is ENTJ (Extraversion, Intuition, Thinking, Judging) I was trying to organize the stressful world around me, which resulted in that Judging preference kicking into overdrive. I was creating and enforcing rules, time lines, and deadlines for both the students and staff. While I was doing this, unfortunately, I was so focused on getting the job done and providing the best training for the students that I didn’t realize I was coming across as aggressive, authoritative, demanding, and even insincere to the students. The staff already knew me and probably just ignored my actions. Even though I cared about the quality of the training they were receiving, they perceived me as uncaring. My intentions never changed; I put 110-percent effort into teaching and mentoring them because I cared deeply for one goal: to prepare those students to interrogate terrorists and extract intelligence information to save lives. I didn’t teach to make friends. I thought the students would feel rewarded by my determination and hard work. Unfortunately, I was wrong, and it took some ego swallowing to accept that.

One of my students, Lisa, offered me advice privately one day at the end of the course—advice that was hard to hear then, but that I am so grateful for now. She told me that she “got” me, but that I wasn’t reaching all the students because I came across as overbearing and insensitive (I assumed condescending, too, but she didn’t say that). And here I thought they appreciated my dedication and effort! What good was I as an instructor if I couldn’t reach and inspire all of my students? At the end of our conversation, she thanked me for being an inspiration to her. After that, I felt I had lost my touch as a mentor, teacher, instructor, trainer—what I loved doing most. How did I go wrong? My dad is a professor and admired for his “school of hard knocks” teaching style. I had developed the same style. The style was good, but I needed to work on the delivery.

I went on teaching for years after that conversation, but in every class I taught, I kept what my student had told me in the back of my mind. It wasn’t until I was working toward my senior instructor badge certification at the Joint Forces Intelligence School, that I dove deeply into the study of MBTI and personality type preferences and applied it in a more practical context, teaching. In order to earn my badge, I had to create a new tool to enhance learning. I wanted to combine my skills of reading body language and rapport-building with this new tool. Once I realized that there were differences in learning styles, I decided to look at MBTI and correlate my personality preferences to the preferred learning styles of my students, and then compare that with the preferred teaching styles of instructors. In my research I discovered why I didn’t reach my students in that class years earlier with Lisa, and why people’s perception of me didn’t match up with how I was seeing myself. Lisa and I lost touch over the years following that course, just because life gets crazy and whisks you here and there, until we reconnected on Facebook. I never had the chance to tell her how that conversation changed my career as a mentor/instructor/trainer forever. When we finally reconnected she told me, “One of my daughters is named after you: Melena.” I was honored and humbled. Here is what I learned from her that day: I needed to change my communication style, which was a direct result of my personality preferences.

Following are the four dichotomies of MBTI, and what I know about my personality preferences and how I change them to meet the preferences of others to enhance their learning and build rapport.

Extraversion/Introversion

The Extraversion/Introversion dichotomy tells us how we prefer to get energized. Extraverts are energized by being around activity and other people; Introverts are energized by being by themselves or with a few close friends in a quiet environment. Because I am an Extravert I speak loudly and quickly, and I sometimes get overexcited and finish the sentences of my students when I know (or think I know) what they are about to say. I didn’t realize that this being perceived as disrespectful to my introverted students, whom I expected to keep up with my energy and communication style, but they couldn’t. In fact, it exhausted and frustrated them to the point that they would shut down and tune me out. I learned that when I was working with introverted students, I had to speak more slowly, and “chunk” my information between pauses to give them time to process it and respond. I had to scale back my energy and excitement, and quiet my body gestures, voice, and overall demeanor so they could communicate more comfortably with me. In short, I had to be like them. Once I started to do incorporate these change in my behavior, my introverted students were much more comfortable and relaxed around me. They asked me for advice and guidance, and could understand the concepts I taught them more readily. The shift in behavior from my students was overwhelming, and it took little effort on my part to adapt a different personality that better suited the people with whom I was communicating.

INtuition/Sensing

The INtuition/Sensing dichotomy is how we prefer to take in information. INtuitives like to take on a task by conceptualizing and seeing the big-picture outcome first and then work down to identifying specific tasks. Sensors prefer to create and read specific tasks, rules, and processes to obtain the big-picture end result. For example, I loved writing this book, but when my editor gave me a packet as thick as an ice cream sandwich, with the font sizes I had to use and the image DPI requirements, I was not happy. Let me conceptualize and theorize; let them format it! Because I am an INtuitive processor of information, I get frustrated when information is handed to me in lists and procedures. And since my students were not all INtuitives like me, guess what happened? I was inadvertently frustrating my students when I delivered information, such as details for a homework assignment or exercise scenario, in a conceptual way. I figured that they could grasp conceptual ideas and break them down to itemized rules and processes, just as I could. I was wrong. Sensors prefer to be given rules and procedures first, and from there they conceptualize and theorize the outcome. In order to effectively communicate a homework assignment or testable exercise scenario I had to change the way I delivered information to reach both my INtuitive and Sensing students. Until I understood this, I lost a lot of students, unbeknownst to me, and left them to their own devices to figure out assignments for themselves. That wasn’t fair to them. Once I understood I only had to present the information in a different way, my Sensors understood my assignment and felt comfortable with how I presented it.

Here is an example. I would give a homework assignment at the end of a long day when students were packing up ready to leave, that consisted of writing a 500-word, handwritten, double-spaced biography on themselves written in the third person. My INtuitive students would hear “write an essay about yourself” and then start to consider what they wanted to divulge: the most exciting experiences, how they would capture the audience with a killer opening line, and so on. Then, two minutes later they would raise their hands and ask, “Ms. Sisco, how many words does it have to be again? Can I type it?” They tuned out all the details and rules of the assignment, just as I would have, but they had the concept down and probably already knew what they were going to write about. My Sensors were so busy concentrating on writing down the rules of the assignment that thinking about what they would write was the furthest thing from their minds. They could tell you exactly how the assignment was to be performed, all the guidelines, and when it was due, but they had no idea what they were going to write about. They would figure that out later, according to the rules and process, of course. To prevent my Sensing students from getting distracted by my INtuitive students (who kept raising their hands asking me to repeat the details and keeping everyone later in the classroom), I decided the best way for all my students to be able to process the information, using their own preferred style, was to hand out the homework assignment typed on a sheet of paper. This way, my INtuitives could read and re-read the rules while they conceptualized, and my Sensors could digest the rules fully in order to theorize on what they would write.

In order to reach all of your students, you have to vary your methods of delivering information: verbal, written, video, lecture, and so on. Try this exercise with your friends or family members, or your students, if you are a teacher. Have them write down a list of words that come to mind when you say the word “tree.” INtuitive processors will write down a bunch of words similar to this: fall, Halloween, broom, kitchen, turkey, football. Where’s the connection between tree and football? I see it, of course, as those are the words I picked. Sensing processors will write down words similar to this: branch, leaves, trunk, roots, moss, earth. Do you see the difference? The Sensors are still connecting to the original tree with their words; the INtuitives are writing words that seem completely unrelated. Now choose a known INtuitive and a known Sensor and have both do the assignment to demonstrate the differences between how their minds work and process information. You’ll be amazed and entertained.

Thinking/Feeling

The Thinking/Feeling dichotomy tells us how we prefer to make decisions. I mentioned earlier that my former student Lisa said I was being perceived as insensitive and uncaring, because I prefer to make decisions based on facts and analysis to reach the best outcome, rather than how they make people feel. Because of this, I sometimes inadvertently hurt people’s feelings. For example, when I was the project manager for the interrogation course, I had to make a decision to drop students based on the company’s set performance criteria. One particular student gave it her all, and because she was smart and had a great memory, she was able to pass the written exams we administered, but she couldn’t meet the expected performance criteria when it came to applying what she learned (interrogation techniques). As a result, I dropped her from the course. Her command became upset and told me that she wouldn’t be able to stay in the department because I dropped her; they would have to move her elsewhere, because this training was required. They asked me to reconsider since she did well on the written exams. My response was that I couldn’t graduate her and give her the credential of being a DoD certified interrogator because she couldn’t do the job in a training environment, let alone down range (in an operational environment, where things get real). She would put herself and others in danger. I was not going to back down even though I liked her and wanted her to succeed. In the end I stood by my decision, along with the other instructors’ recommendations. Some people thought I was being too harsh, but I would make the same decision today.

If you know you are making a decision as a Thinker and the outcome may upset others, make sure you use a few rapport techniques when informing those affected by your decision so that you are not perceived as indifferent, insensitive, or unfeeling.

Judging/Perceiving

Lastly, the Judging/Perceiving dichotomy is how we prefer to organize the world around us. I am a Judger; I like to get things done on schedule, and I like closure. I dislike leaving things unfinished, whether it is a project or a conversation. Even in this age of technology, with smartphones and iPads (I own both), I still use sticky notes to make lists for the bills I have to pay, things I have to do, and groceries I have to buy. I tried really hard to use my iPad as my organizer, but it didn’t work, I went right back to my thick, heavy, leather-bound organizer and my sticky notes. (I guess that’s why I prefer to read books printed on paper rather than downloaded to a tablet.) Because of my intense focus on getting the job done, I am sometimes blind to the fact it could be done a better way. I’ve already decided how the job will be done in my head, so when other people have ideas about changes, I am sometimes stubbornly resistant to their ideas because I don’t want to change what I have already committed to doing. This trait is not conducive to a team work environment, so it is something I consciously work against every day. This is what led to my failing my students as a mentor and teacher years ago. Fortunately I now know that I can adapt and change my Judging preference to be more of a Perceiver, to enhance my interpersonal communication skills.

Unlike Judgers, Perceivers will wait until the last minute to make a decision; they like to keep their options open. They are open to ideas and change, and therefore are more flexible than rigid Judgers. Rules, time lines, and deadlines frustrate Perceivers because they don’t like to feel confined or restricted. The problem Perceivers often run into is that they take too long to make a decision or heed a call to action and thus miss deadlines.

Hopefully you now have a basic understanding of the four Jungian-based preference dichotomies and how you can apply them in your life when it comes to communicating with those around you, whether in a personal or a professional setting. There are a lot of naysayers when it comes to using personality assessment tools, but I wanted to share with you how I used one and how it helped me enhance my communication skill, and it worked. After I earned my senior instructor certification, I had the chance to use the personality assessment as an enhanced communication tool at military training facilities, which made me a better instructor and mentor. Once I become knowledgeable about other tools, I’ll use them, too.

You now have 10 rapport-building techniques, my five communication tips, and an understanding of how to use personality preference types to enhance your interpersonal communication skills and form strong, mutually respectful relationships. Now let’s tackle the next objective: accurately reading body language and detecting deception.