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You can change your behavior, but when it comes to personality, you have to dance through life with the one you got at birth, according to Paul Williams, consultant and senior contract specialist for BASF Corp.
Williams, who works for the world’s largest chemical company, spoke to members of the Central Ohio IFMA Chapter January 8 at the Fawcett Center at The Ohio State University on Discovering Your Personality...The Key to Understanding Others and Improving Relationships.
Williams took chapter members on a “journey” to determine their personalities and to learn about the four basic personality types that all individuals share. He pointed out that while an individual probably is stronger in one type, all possess traits of all four, no one trait is better than the other three, and discovering one’s personality does not measure one’s abilities.
“For centuries—from the ancient Egyptians to the present—humans have been aware of the four personality types and in the last 100 years, great strides have been accomplished in the application of this information. For the purposes of simplification, the four personality types are designated as Blue, Gold, Green, and Orange instead of the designators that Hippocrates, the father of medicine, used 2,500 years ago.
“His belief was that body chemistry determined personality type at birth and that people would usually have a dominant personality type as follows: Choleric (Blue), Melancholic (Gold), Phlegmatic (Green), and Sanguine (Orange). (And) as you learn more about your own personality and others as well, your ability to communicate will be enhanced and the people you have contact with will benefit by your ability to understand them.”
While personality has to do with the brain, body chemistry, and electricity, “our behavior is a mixture of our personality tendencies, what we have learned and how we apply the combination of the two,” he said. Factors that influence human behavior include intelligence, family system, introvert/extrovert, ethnic culture, and past experiences.
Williams administered a 10-question personality quiz to the approximately 30 persons in attendance. An overwhelming majority fell into the Blue type with Gold the second type, and Green and Orange tied at third.
The strengths and stress originators of each type included:
Chapter members who did not attend the presentation may want to contact one of those who did for a copy of the test to determine their colors. Williams gave away through a drawing a copy of the book, Follow Your True Colors to the Work You Love, which Shelly Sensenbrenner won. Also, Michael Milenovic won through the members’ drawing a tin of “Buckeye” cookies from Cheryl’s Cookies.
The Program Committee, headed by co-chairs Brittany Hauptman and Milenovic, has planned a number of other exciting programs and events for the year, including presentations on development of Downtown Columbus, negotiating, writing proposals, telecommunications, the future for COTA, the annual golf outing, chapter night, sponsorship/associate night, the annual President’s Dinner, and tours of Discover Card Financial Services in New Albany, and the Ohio Supreme Court building under renovation and expected to be occupied by the court in early 2004.