We are aware now that our InnerKinetics are a primary influence in our relationships.  Why is that?  How do our preferences – InnerKinetics – affect us so that our relationships are influenced?

Do you get frustrated with a workmate for not responding to deadlines in a timely fashion? How are you affected by people who always seem to be late but don’t seem to be concerned about it?  How do you relate to emotional people? When people are always concerned with or are creating rules and regulations, how do you react to them?  What are your reactions to people who do not seem to take others’ feelings into consideration when making decisions or taking action?  Do you believe decisions should be made based on facts or on feelings? Do you ‘charge your battery’ with friends or in solitude.  Your reactions to these situations affect your relationships, don’t they?

You have probably noticed that you have preferences.  Where did they come from?  Why do you prefer some things over other things?  Environment is not the answer, including how your mother raised you.  Oh yes, the influence of your mother and your environment affected you but if they are the reason for our preferences, why is it that some people develop preferences opposite to their training and experiences?

People exhibit opposing preferences – InnerKinetics

Preferences can be the very opposite — even in identical twins or in children raised in the same family and under identical conditions.  We have free choice but not uninfluenced choices.  So, let’s say a word about this basic human condition.

Free choice means I can choose whatever I want, regardless of whether it hurts me or helps me.  However,  we typically don’t like hurting ourselves so we will choose according to how we feel things would be best for us.  That’s a definition of a preference.

What drives a preference?  

Ah!  That’s the question and one to which many don’t know the answer.  It’s those deep-seated core urges and drives, which I call our core strengths, that drive them.  I’m not meaning our talents, skills, education or experience, which are often declared to be our strengths.  I’m meaning things like an urge to be individualistic, or to do our duty before we play, or to maintain a calm persona, or to be expressive, passionate, empathetic people.

Temperament is what has been observed to be ‘the real me’ as far back as the earliest days of literature.  Our temperament is composed of those core urges that make us like others and yet don’t clone us.  They give us an infinite ability to express ourselves uniquely but also make us who we are.

How do preferences – InnerKinetics – affect our lives?

Preferences shape our lives.  Of course, they do.  And many of our preferences are hard-wired into our nature.  It’s our preferences that truly make us who we are and they are our positive, powerful strengths.  Never forget that.

Dealing with others (both close relationships and casual ones) requires our understanding of the strengths of others as well as our own.  Strengths are always positive, but the strengths of two people may oppose each other. Two different people have wonderful strengths, even when those strengths may oppose each other.  So how do we deal productively with positive but opposing strengths?  That’s the beauty of understanding InnerKinetics.

Want to know your preferences?  If you know them, you will know yourself at the core and in a way that may be a great sense of relief or a signpost to your being your very best and living a life of real satisfaction and happiness.  It was Aristotle (who lived 384-322 BC) who first told us that.  We’d better get with it, don’t you think?

There’s much ahead in these articles that will positively change your life, so follow me weekly in 2017 and share these short articles with your friends.  If you’ve missed week one, you can catch up.  Following along all year could make you relationally brilliant by 2018!