TMI US: Time Manager Q & A Corner

Four Personality Categories

Many of you have no doubt seen personality inventories that are quite useful in explaining communication styles. TMI USA uses such a profiling strategy in our Putting People First program. We have given animal titles to the four styles, Panther, Peacock, Dolphin and Owl, and they are four of our corners that you see each month.

For the next four months, we are going to look at a particular test that also breaks people into four categories:

Thinkers,

Feelers,

Intuitives, and

Sensates.

We will look at how the four basic categories influence perception, and, thereby, use of time. This particular personality profiling test is more complex than the following descriptions will make it seem. After taking the test, one is categorized as one of the two rational functions (thinking and feeling) and one of the two perceptual modes (Intuition and Sensation), and then you are given a rating on Introversion or Extraversion. This is a more complex model than is traditionally used in business communication profiling. It's based on Carl Jung's notion of psychological types, and the actual test we refer to in this profiling was developed by the Jungian Institute. It is not quite parallel to TMI's communication styles survey, nor is it like many of those that are on the market today.

We would love to be able to reproduce the test on which this survey is based, so you could take it yourself. It is, however, copyrighted, and the Copyright is owned by the Society of Jungian Analysts of Northern California located in San Francisco, California. The descriptions of the four types are adapted from a chapter written by Harriet Mann, Miriam Siegler and Humphry Osmand, and reproduced in Psychology Today, December, 1972. Osmand and his colleagues were interested to see how people in these Jungian categories experience time in unique ways. If you are interested in obtaining a copy of this article and find it difficult to locate the original Psychology Today article, you can also find it in the book by Humphry Osmond, et al., The Future of Time (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1971).

One way to conceptualize the four styles is to imagine time as a continuum, or time as the past, present, or future. Each of these four styles finds their natural comfort in one place or another in relation to time. We think you might be able to see yourself in the descriptions, and then better understand your tendencies towards time. We will cover one style each month for the next four months.

Thinking Type

The Thinker sees time as a process. This style takes a scientific approach to time. This personality type is not particularly spontaneous. Such a person likes to consider the entire picture and then plan. Thinkers want to see what is going to happen, before they make decisions, and then act. For this reason, Thinkers aren't particularly good in crisis situations. They are not think-on-your-feet kind of people.

This type is interested in the past, but only as it relates to the future. The past is seen as the origin of an act for the Thinker; it is not appealing as part of memories. As a result, they are not particularly sentimental. Typically effective at predicting how things will turn out, they use their natural logical style to project how things will turn out. As a result, Thinkers are keen planners. They find planning tools like the Time Manager a natural for them. We see Thinkers in our Strategic Planning for Results on a regular basis. They love what we ask them to do! In fact, many of them turn up at our seminars already doing much of what we recommend to people, and we see them nodding their heads in agreement with just about everything TMI teaches. Daily plans, which are records of the past, and pictures of the future are very appealing to thinking types. The other styles, while they need more structure in their lives, don't relish planning.

Because of their focus on where they are going, they are often seen to be cold, unenthusiastic, detached. But they are only seen this way. Their excitement comes from the entire process, not from a single event. Thinkers can be narrow-minded and willing to throw away facts that don't match their theories of how things will turn out. At the same time, if they are intelligent, they can be extremely creative and productive.

Thinking types have clocks inside their heads. They like to keep track of time, to know what time it is, how much time a particular activity took, how much it costs. Of the four types, the Thinkers are most temporal in their approach. Time is a very serious matter to them, and they will cut off communication with someone in order to meet a time schedule. They truly dislike changes in their schedules.

In many ways, Thinkers were made for results-oriented organizations. On the negative side, Thinkers can be so focused on where they are going that they ignore people, feelings, or what is happening at the moment.

Please submit your questions to Time Manager Questions and Answers. If you have questions, undoubtedly someone else has the same question. By asking a question, you'll help a fellow Time Manager user become more effective.

Janelle M. Barlow, President
TMI, USA

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Please submit your questions to Time Manager Questions and Answers by fax or e-mail . If you have questions, undoubtedly someone else has the same question. By asking a question, you'll help a fellow Time Manager user become more effective.

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