Hey everybody, this is Steve. Today I'm going to look at personality types and
how it can be useful to look at personality types but also how it can be
really bad self hypnosis. Along the way I'm going to look at a couple of ideas
from the field of neuro linguistic programming which has kind of gotten
misunderstood over the years and turned into a system of personality types but
it wasn't meant to be. I'm also gonna be looking at how labels can be traps. I'm
gonna be looking at how questionnaires can be unreliable, and, hang on, because at
the end of all this I'm also going to be exploring how we can be deluding
ourselves, even if it seems like a personality reading is absolutely
accurate. So stay with me! Now, personality types is something that comes up a lot
in coaching and something that comes up a lot in the field of neuro linguistic
programming, and I've spent many many years looking at how some of these
systems seem true and how we get suckered by them, but ways that they're
actually also misleading us and leading us down the wrong path. That's really
what I want to get to today. So, first of all: is personality real? It's a partly
philosophical question. On the one hand personality isn't real because it's
not a thing. You can't put it in a wheelbarrow, as they say, it's a thought
construct and thought constructs aren't real, they're only a simulation of
reality. But that doesn't mean that they're necessarily a bad simulation of
reality. You see, we do exhibit a psychological makeup. We do each exhibit
a set of predictable, recurring ways of responding to the world. We know that
some people enjoy public speaking for instance and they enjoy consistently not
haphazardly. Other people hate it. So there are certain discernible
differences that are predictable and repeating, and you can point to them.
Here's a phrase that points to the potential usefulness
of a thought construct like personality types. That is: The map
is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to
that territory, which accounts for its usefulness. You may recognize that
phrase or at least the first part of it. It comes from Alfred Korzybski in
1933's Science and Sanity and a lot of personal
development fields pick up on at least the first part of that, that
the map is not the territory it represents. A lot of people do forget
though to put the second half on that, which is that: but if correct it has a
similar structure. You see a lot of people use that first half of the
sentence, the map is not the territory, as a way of dismissing all
possible mapping, all possible approximation, but that's not actually
intention of what's being said here. It's pointing out that, yes, the map is
not the territory, but it's also pointing out that a good map can be useful, so
let's start then with the understanding that personality is to some extent
illusory and to some extent useful at the same
time. So now I want to look at something that got misused as a personality type
from NLP. It's something which has unfortunately been miss taught a lot and
this is the idea of Representation Systems used as personality types. Neuro
linguistic programming brought to our attention and made us
conscious of how we use our visual, auditory, kinesthetic olfactory and
gustatory representation systems, the sensory systems in our thinking, learning,
decision-making, and we call these the representation systems. When I did my
first introduction to NLP I was told to listen to the words that people use and
use that to diagnose them with a personality type. So if I was hearing a
lot of words like, "That sounds like a good idea," I was to
diagnose you as an auditory person. Or if I heard a lot of
things like, "That looks like a good idea," then I had to diagnose you as visual. And
if I heard a lot of feeling words like, "That feels right," then I had to diagnose
you as kinesthetic. The idea was if I figured out that you were a
visual person and I spoke back to you using a lot of visual language then this
was going to build some great rapport between us, whereas if you were
a visual person and I was using a lot of auditory words then the rapport would
break down you wouldn't understand me etc etc. Well it's a massively
over-simplistic reduction. Let's dig deeper. Now, let's be clear good NLP
certainly talks about tracking and mirroring people's use of so-called see-
hear-feel language. It helps us figure out people's habitual thinking processes.
It helps us figure out which systems they can use more strongly than
others, and from this comes the idea of a preferred representation system, one that
we might lean on a little bit more than others, because it is unlikely that we
have all exercised our sensory faculties equally. Physically and
cognitively, what we exercise most, what we stretch, most gets stronger, and what
gets stronger gets used more, so people may well exhibit a preferred
representation system. We shouldn't be surprised for example if a painter, an
artist, develops a particularly strong visual faculty
and a particularly strong visual kinesthetic pairing, because
that's what's getting exercised a lot. similarly we shouldn't be surprised if a
logician has a particularly strong auditory capability or an auditory
kinesthetic pairing, because again that's what's getting exercised a lot.
That doesn't mean though that the preferred representation system is the
only one we use or it's the only one we can work with, and similarly, you know, if
somebody does have a particular strength for the visual system, you might loosely
call them a visual person, but if that's a label that we take too literally we
can really be hypnotizing people. I've met people who have been
taught that they are visual and that's become a kind of self-hypnosis that says,
"Oh I can't do auditory things, I can't do kinesthetic things." The truth is
we use all of our representation systems and it's how we organize them
that's more interesting than laying a static label on it. This brings me to
the point about how labels can be traps. In the book Frogs Into Princes by
Bandler and Grinder, which is one of the original NLP books and I still recommend
it, because I still feel that the original NLP books do more to
communicate the real spirit of NLP than the many copycat books that have
come since. Now that book says labels are traps. I'd refine that slightly in
saying they can be, because I don't rule out the possibility that that there can
be good profiling out there. For example as a coach I find the Enneagram a very
good, predictive reference guide for choosing useful meditations, useful
inquires and useful tasks, but here's how labels can be traps. Deciding that
somebody is something is to make a generalization about them, and
generalizations distort our perceptions. They cause us to see what we expect to
see and to miss what's really there. I believe that all kinds of
interpersonal work and communicative work is at its best when we're as free
from expectation as we can be, and as present as possible to what actually is
in front of us. That doesn't mean not having knowledge, it means opening
our perceptions up rather than closing them down and filling in gaps
from our expectations.This brings me to the idea of another NLP thing which
is called meta programs. Now meta programs in NLP are a set of
identifiable overarching patterns in our behavior. One of the meta programs for
example is called the motivation direction. A towards motivation
direction means that you're getting motivated when you get close to
something that you like and away from motivation direction that means that
you're getting motivated when you're close to something that you dislike, so
the closer you get some you dislike the more motivated you get, If you're
exhibiting an away from pattern in that context. Now,
I've never been a big fan of using meta programs as a sort of myers-briggs type
of personality profile although I accept that it's commonly done and I
accept that it probably works reasonably well most of the time. You could say it's
a good heuristic but we can do better than that. A woman once insisted to
me that she was an away from person. She'd taken that distinction
and turned it into a personality type. She turned it into a label. I
asked her how she knew. She told me that it was because she'd done a
questionnaire and it was asking her things like what typically made her
change her job, what made her typically change her car, and the answers that she
had given had divined her as being an away from person. I asked, so
what would you have been if the question had been, "What makes you open your
Christmas presents on Christmas morning?" You see it's not that somebody is a
towards or away from person, it's that you can track predictable
patterns of towards-ness and away from-ness this in in their behaviour. Like with
representation systems, you know, both patterns will show up in certain places.
Where they show up is what's predictable, but to reduce your whole personality
type to I am one or the other is a misconception. That's people getting
the idea wrong now. The way I like to say it is it works better to think about
meta programs in terms of when rather than what, so when people respond towards,
when they respond away from, not which of the two are. It's about tracking
patterns rather than trying to diagnose a static personality type. I also think it's
important that when we talk about tracking happens that we're tracking
what people actually do rather than how they answer a questionnaire, because
questionnaires can be unreliable. What people do unconsciously when nobody is
watching, when nobody is measuring, is often very very different to what we do
when we are being watched when we are being measured. When we're answering
a questionnaire, if I go back to the idea of towards and away from, I also
spoke to somebody once who'd profiled herself as a towards person, which she
felt was better than away from. Because she thought towards was better than away
from, that's how she'd idealized herself, so when she imagined how she would
respond to something she imagined herself responding with a towards
pattern, because she thought it was better.In fact she once said to
me these exact words: "I'm a towards person because
what motivates me is getting great results, because I don't want to be like
the non achievers in the team." Now think that through. She was representing
herself as a towards person in line with her
preferred self-image, but in that language is revealed a more fundamental
away from driver. Let me repeat it again: "I am a towards person because
what motivates me is getting great results, because I don't want to be like
the non achievers in the team." is that "because I don't" which reveals the
inherent away from that's going on at that time, so there is a problem that
we tend to imagine our behavior from an idealized version of who we are and that
might be very different to what we actually do. The other problem we have is
the confirmation bias, the idea of confirmation bias, which predicts that we
will sort and filter information in a way that makes our beliefs confirmed. You
know, we sort of filter information to confirm our existing beliefs to
ourselves, to reaffirm those beliefs. So if we've come to believe a label that
we've put on ourselves then we'll start to reframe all of our experience in such
a way that it proves that label. This brings us to the duality of elicitation
versus installation, of discovery versus self-hypnosis. When somebody gives you a
questionnaire and you fill it in, and they, with their authority, turn around
and say to you that makes you a visual towards person, is that a
discovery of what's there, or is that a suggestion that will become self
hypnosis? This brings me to my final point, my key point, and this is how it's
possible we could be deluding ourselves when we decide that our profile readings
are accurate. I once raised all of these points
that I'm raising today with somebody who not only really believed in in
representation system and meta program style profiling, but he also was
a passionate believer in other profiling systems including handwriting analysis
astrological profiles. His objection was, but every profile reading
got my personality exactly right. Well there's a well-known experiment in
psychology by a professor Hans Eysenck, think I'm pronouncing that right,
I'm not entirely sure to be honest with you! And he tested whether astrology
provided accurate predictions of personality. He asked a large group of
astrology students to take a personality test and see if the results conformed to
astrological types, and remarkably they did, however when he repeated the
experiment with people who did not believe that they had an astrological
type, the results showed no correlation whatsoever. Does that mean that the
astrologist students were answering the test dishonestly? Well probably not,
not deliberately anyway. Does it mean that their belief in astrology had
influenced their personality? In other words had the label that they'd accepted
actually shaped what their personality actually was? Possible. Could
it be just confirmation bias against a idealized self-image? Maybe, I don't
truthfully know the answer to that, but the point is that the belief was a
factor. Another factor consider is something called the Pygmalion effect,
which predicts that people tend to achieve the results that people expect
of them. They actually change to meet the expectation. Another factor to
consider by the way is that some personality readings use language which
is so vague that it actually fits anyone, but it seems like it's specific to you. I
mean anybody who has studied hypnosis and Universal Pacing Statements will
recognize that it's easy to say something that's actually really vague
but does seem really specific to the listener. Try this on for size:
You're a kind person at heart even if you don't always show it, and you try
hard at things you like, but you get frustrated with people sometimes. Does
that feel like an accurate reading of your personality? The probability is it does
but that's only because it's really vague and it's drawing on things which
are true for most people, and yet because of this this positive search strategy
that we have when we're evaluating whether things are true, it creates the
perception that what's been read is something specific to us. So in a
nutshell please do not be fooled into thinking
that neuro linguistic programming or NLP is about diagnosing people with static
personality types, of the representation system type, or the meta problem type. It
really isn't. There is a predictable 'when' to these patterns which is worth coming to
grips with, but it is inaccurate to use them as labels. The really short
version of everything that I've said is that labels are traps! If you found
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