We have examined the way the individual letters that represent the energy centers of life display the emotional forces behind them. The variety of emotions that a different profile can induce and their divergent meanings to each type make for a rich human experience while creating challenge. Hopefully, we now understand that such a challenge offers the chance for growth.  And it’s time to take action.

Take Action to Grow in Relationships

Understanding each other in terms of how emotions drive us is the way to lay a solid foundation for the enjoyment of a relationship, and relationships are the result of emotional bonds. Perhaps we have also given more meaning to how emotions, more than reason, fashion who we are and how they can give us appeal to others or can initiate judgments not in our favor.

An Additional Chance for Growth when You Take Action

We must now understand the combination of two letters that describe the four temperaments and drive to the core of who the types are.

Do not let another day go by where your dedication to other people’s opinions is greater than your dedication to your own emotions!
~ Steve Maraboli

Answer me, you who believe that animals are only machines. Has nature arranged for this animal to have all the machinery of feelings only in order for it not to have any at all?
~ Voltaire (Francois-Marie Arouet)

For almost two and a half millennia, the four temperaments have been our most useful, accurate, and user-friendly means of understanding each other. We can identify those four temperaments by the letters, SP, SJ, NT, and NF in the letters of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and all the temperament key’s that use them. Almost 2,500 years is a “compelling story”, as David Keirsey put it.

The Challenge of Knowing Your “Type” Provides More Opportunity

Temperament is our InnerKinetics®, as I like to call it.  And it has revealed to us the core of our immaterial make-up, our inner strengths. Inside that core are the driving forces of emotion that shape the use of our strengths. This mix of temperament and its drives, powered by emotions that fashion our drives, makes for an almost infinite possibility of variances in human personality.

The remarkable thing is that, given this infinite uniqueness of each human psyche, we are still recognizable in four distinct groupings. Each grouping (temperament) reveals a set of strengths that show distinct patterns of preferences.  These patterns of preferences result in typical, but not identical, behavior for that temperament. Similar emotions appear in each temperament, driving its strengths and further fashioning its behavior.

Having Similarities to Others Dose Not Put You In a Box

Some people hate to be categorized or asked to identify their temperament. “Don’t put me in a box,” they scream. We all understand the appeal of being different.  But are we being told by these people that we have no similarities that group us? Physically, we do.  And psychologically, we act in ways that bare great similarities to how others act. If this were not so, psychology would not be able to study human behavior.  Our differences would mean each would have to be studied with no reference to how another might act under the same circumstances with the same environmental conditions. What a weird concept to suggest we are in no way similar to others.

Think of Temperament as illustrated here:

• I am looking out my window and I notice that the grasses on the hill all have leaves, but not all leaves are the same.  And although the specimens of one species are not identical, they certainly show identifiable similarities.
• Love is recognizable as love even though its forms are infinite.  This is true of all our emotions. Therefore, with good reason we will talk of the groupings of strengths and emotions in what we call temperament (“four boxes”) and study their patterns in humans (one big box into which the four smaller boxes fit).

Each of the four temperaments is represented by two letters that condition and affect each other. To read the emotions of the temperaments (as we have just done in the previous articles) as simply a sum of each letter loses a great deal of information. Moving forward, it behoves us to  look more closely at what the combination of the two letters (and the temperament they reveal) tell us about emotion. The four temperaments will be your best method to quickly understand yourself, your child, or your significant other. Isn’t that enough to make it worthwhile to take action?

It’s Time to Take Action

Looking back, we’ve seen how rich our lives can be when we experience emotion.  We know from experience, however, that emotions can be destructive.  After all, a chainsaw in the hands of a monkey is destructive.  But a chainsaw in the hands of a skilled workman can be productive to a workday and even creative in the art arena.  The same is true when we do not have an understanding and appreciation of emotion (both our own and those of others).  It’s time to learn to benefit and enjoy this wonderful, God-given characteristic that only humans possess because they are created in God’s image.

If you haven’t already done so, it’s time to get your copy of INNERKINETICS, Your Blueprint to Excellence and Happiness and discover who “the real you” is.  Then, you can benefit even more from Intelligently Emotional as you delve into the emotions of each of the temperaments in depth following our cursory introduction in the previous articles.  Links for each of the books are below for you convenience.  Take action to understand and delevelop who you are and then enjoy the ryour emotions.

Final Thoughts

I leave you with two quotes from the movie Chariots of Fire. Eric Liddell defended his devotion to running by telling his sister, “God made me fast, and when I run, I feel his pleasure.” When do you feel God’s pleasure? When do you look up into the heavens and say “I was made to do this”?

Elsewhere in the movie, Eric Liddell said, “Everyone runs in her own way, or his own way. And where does the power come from, to see the race to its end? From within.”

SEE YOU NEXT WEEK WITH THE BEGINNING OF A NEW SERIES!