I did this personality test as a part of a team building activity at work. It looks at five proclivities which supposedly indicate which elements of your job energise you and which elements can start to wear you down. The idea is that every team needs a good balance of all five these personality types to have the best creative outcomes.
You can look at your distribution of personality types and use it to analyse how to best create harmony in your team. This works in my company because:
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There aren’t many of us
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We want to work well together
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We all have a common goal
I couldn’t help but think about this on a worldwide capacity. It made me realise that to a greater extent, none of these things are true. One would have thought that we as a human race would have a common goal of peace, harmony and happiness. Everyone claims that they want this. The problem is that it is far too subjective. There are so many of us that it is impossible to attain these goals for everyone because happiness, peace, harmony looks different for everyone. This doesn’t even have to be on an international level: national or even local levels, we all have our own ideas about what a perfect world would look like.
I think back to movements like women’s suffrage, black civil rights – great pressure movements of the past where real change was made. They had one common goal, they had unity of that. Leaders like Emmeline Pankhurst/ Malcolm X complemented leaders like Millicent Fawcett/ Martin Luther King because despite their stark political differences, they were unified by one desired outcome. That just isn’t the case today.
The key theme of today’s social justice is catering to the individual and not the community. What does feminism mean to you? What does personal expression mean to you?
Ironically, within that, there is unity in what feminism should not mean to you, what personal expression should not mean to you. There are ideologies which have been blacklisted. The rest? If they fit certain criteria will be accepted and revered.
So instead of being unified in a positive change, in something which would enhance the freedoms of everyone, there is unity in hate. In what you shouldn’t be – not in what we should be working towards.
People are lying to themselves, taking on mindsets which don’t ring true to them just so they can mould themselves into what they believe society perceives to be the perfect, self-loving individual. I mean this on both sides of the political spectrum.
I’m not saying that we should accept obviously bigoted rhetoric – obviously. Most people aren’t bigots. At least that’s what I like to believe. The issue is that people exist in their echo chambers. So are too quick to shut down when having a discussion with someone who has a different perspective. They cling onto the one statement they deem unacceptable stop listening to the rest of the argument.
In an arbitrary way it brings me back to that personality test.
It's easy to criticise – very difficult to create.
People seem to be caught up in criticism instead of creation. Perhaps if we looked at our natural proclivities towards creation, the world would be able to come together and create positive change instead of whatever we seem to be suck on at the moment.
This is your regular Central Point reminder to listen to people.
Look for the good in people and be open minded even when it challenges everything you know to be true.
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