How often have you caught yourself saying or hearing things like, “I’m just not a morning person,” “I’m terrible with names,” “I’m a procrastinator,” or “Do I really have to go to that networking event?” These are all pretty common whether they describe you or the people around you. We see a behaviour, give it a label, and sometimes assume we know what someone is all about. But describing a behaviour isn’t quite the same as understanding what is behind it. My last post talked about how personality and temperament can mean the same thing, but they’re actually two different concepts; and I’m guilty of confusing the two. Personality traits describe what we see, and temperament helps us understand some of the motivation behind what we do – the core needs, values, and ways of approaching the world that can make some behaviours feel more natural.
This is important because not everything we do comes down to temperament or personality alone. Skills, competence, intelligence, the way we process information, the values we’ve picked up from culture and experience, and even the situation we’re in all shapes our behaviour. Sometimes we act a certain way simply because we’ve learned to; sometimes it’s because we haven’t discovered a different way, and sometimes, we’re just making a choice.
Procrastination and writing this blog go hand-in-hand for me; so, it wouldn’t be unusual for me to say something like “I’m a procrastinator, that’s just my personality.” But procrastination isn’t a temperament. It can be a habit, or it can have something to do with motivation, confidence, skills, the nature of the task, or simply not wanting to do the thing sitting in front of us. Or in my case, all of the above! I can’t think of anyone I know that has never procrastinated, even if they don’t admit to it, which would make “procrastinator” a remarkably large personality type. Procrastination can come naturally to any of the four temperaments.
The same can be said for describing someone as “blunt” Someone who is comfortable with direct communication can have a temperament preference that contributes to that, but saying something hurtful and then defending it with “I’m just blunt” doesn’t make hurtfulness a personality trait. It’s a behaviour. Whether we’ve learned how to communicate effectively is a matter of skill and competence. Temperament influences what feels natural, but it doesn’t get to take responsibility for every word that comes out of our mouths.
“I’m not good with change” is another one. Some people may genuinely have a stronger preference for stability and predictability, and temperament does play a role in that. But struggling with a particular change doesn’t automatically tell us anything about someone’s temperament. That change can be genuinely difficult for anyone; maybe they don’t understand what’s happening, or they’ve had a series of bad experiences with change. They may not have the skills or information they need to navigate it. Or maybe they simply really liked the old ways of doing things.
It’s also pretty easy to confuse ability with personality. Someone who is naturally good at solving complicated problems isn’t necessarily showing a certain temperament preference. It’s possible that they have developed expertise, have strong cognitive abilities in that area, or just have a lot of experience. Someone who struggles with the same problem isn’t necessarily demonstrating a different temperament.
The same goes for being organized, being quiet, being talkative or being good with people. These things all cross over with temperament, but they aren’t temperament by definition. Someone can be quiet because they’re thinking, because they’re tired, because they don’t know the people in the room, because they don’t have anything to say, or they just aren’t in the mood for talking. Someone can be super organized because they have developed the skills for it, because their job requires it, because they were taught to be that way, or because they genuinely like having everything in its place. There isn’t a personality label hiding inside every behaviour waiting to be discovered.
When we lump everything we do under “personality” it begins to blur our understanding; a single behaviour is only a cue to understanding someone’s temperament. I can be incredibly organized on Monday and completely overwhelmed by Thursday. I can be comfortable speaking to a room full of people and still avoid making a phone call I’ve been putting off for three days. I prefer spontaneity but at the same time want to know what time I have to get dinner ready. I like figuring things out as I go, but I can occasionally admit that a solid plan is the best way forward. People are inconveniently complicated that way!
This is one of the reasons I think it’s important to be careful about what we mean when we talk about personality and temperament. A temperament model, like Personality Dimensions® gives us useful insight into preferences and patterns; it helps us understand ourselves and appreciate that other people approach the same situation in a different way, but it doesn’t explain everything about us, and it definitely doesn’t tell us everything we need to know about someone else. Temperament doesn’t tell us how smart someone is, what skills they’ve developed, what they’re capable of, what they’ve experienced, what they know, or what is going on in their head at any moment. It doesn’t tell us why someone is behaving a certain way on a random Tuesday afternoon, and it definitely doesn’t explain why someone is a morning person; that one will always be a mystery to me.
Understanding temperament does help explain why something feels more natural; It gives us a useful way to understand preferences and patterns, and it can help us make sense of some of the differences between all of us. But a preference isn’t a prediction, and behaviour isn’t necessarily a trait, and a temperament isn’t all the we are. Personality gets blamed for a lot of things; maybe we should stop making it take the fall for things it doesn’t explain.
Brad Whitehorn – BA, CCDP is a lifelong Introvert, and the Associate Director at CLSR Inc. He was thrown into the career development field headfirst after completing a Communications degree in 2005, and hasn’t looked back! Since then, Brad has worked on the development, implementation and certification for various career and personality assessments (including Personality Dimensions®), making sure that Career Development Practitioners and HR Professionals get the right tools to do their best work. Brad is also on the board of directors for the Career Professionals of Canada, and an advisory committee member with the Career Development Professionals of Ontario.
