8000+ Hours Assessing People Taught Me These 6 Lessons About People
So let me tell you the reader a bit about myself and how I can write about the subjects I do.
I have worked in private corporations and government. I am certified in Situational leadership and have worked in leadership and mentoring jobs all my life.
This is some of my experience from all this work.
Lesson 1: How do you feel?
I started my first two years in my government job asking how the client felt.
I got the tip from one of the educators in that job. Since I am a researcher I like to validate things in real life and so I did. What I learned from this is that people are suffering every day. Having someone ask them how they felt is like saying “I care about you!”.
Yes, that led to many tears from them and me and taught me all about human empathy and how to listen.
Lesson 2: No matter how much you suffer….
Everyone suffers in life every day all over the world.
It is called neuroticism aka the pain circuit. We all have it and it raises our blood pressure and destroys the heart. Being happy aka extroversion helps in that.
What I experienced was being honest and humble with them and guiding them in what they could do pragmatically, step by step, worked the best.
It gave them control and therefore it got rid of their anxiety.
Lesson 3: There are bad people out there
Since I met so many thousands and thousands of people, you can imagine that some were bad apples, and that is correct.
But the good thing is that most people are good people, in that they are honest and humble. They just want to be seen as humans. But the bad people do stand out. They do want to eliminate you if they do not get what they want or believe they deserve.
I have had many trying to cancel me in my job which is Female indirect aggression. I mean both from co-workers and clients. There are more mentally ill people who are sub-clinically bad in that they cannot be diagnosed but have some of the behaviors.
As an example Cluster B personalities.
Cluster B and C personalities are:
- Narcissistic Personality Disorder
- Anti Social Personality ASPD
- Psychopathy (ASPD-P) is a sub-category of ASPD
- Histrionic Personality Disorder (Amber Heard was diagnosed with this during the Amber Heard Jonny Depp trials)
- Borderline Personality Disorder
- Avoidance Disorder
Lesson 4: People are lazy
Most people give up because they are low to medium in conscientiousness.
So this is a trait fostered by fathers as the research shows or the lack of one. It is done by the father's bedtime routine with the child and not the mother on average. A human is pre-programmed to save energy so all humans are predisposed to be lazy to conserve energy.
Only trained individuals or genetically predisposed humans will work hard in any given situation.
Lesson 5: Open-minded individuals always prevail in life
During all those years I was always honest and direct with my clients.
It made me fall asleep every night knowing I did not hide anything from the client and that they got the most out of the meeting with me. As you know, there are different people in the world. In my experience. Those who leaned forward towards me when I gave them honest feedback on their way of thinking, strategy, and work.
We're the ones moving on for the better.
One of those individuals was a taller woman. She told me she had ADHD. I questioned that straight away since I know how people love to label their normal personalities to get control over their lives.
By being Honest and Humble with her, I managed to calm her down and reduce her ADHD.
Yes, she was just everywhere all the time and therefore she interpreted that as having ADHD. With that definition, all women have ADHD which they do not.
The second time we met she sat down and said.
“I read The Happiness Trap by Russ Harris as you told me. I did the exercises and now I understand the problem in my life.“
I could see the difference in her as she greeted me and sat down. She started speaking to me in a more poised and relaxed manner.
Not everything is a diagnosis.
Lesson 6: You Need To Have An Open Mind
The Government agency worked with the Big 5 personality test when evaluating clients.
The government psychologist did that work for me since they have the license to do that work in a government position. That doesn’t exclude your teaching in understanding the client's personality. You only need to have a legal license to write an official diagnosis after you do the required tests to prove it is so.
Those tests are free online and readily available.
When looking at people and the Big 5 test. There are over 243 combinations of the five major traits. But each has six categories so the correct number of combinations is 205,891,132,094,649 Trillion different types of personalities.
I think you get my point, that to understand people from their point of view. You need to be able to think conceptually. That means you need to be high in openness to exploration.
Which is the fifth personality trait of the Big 5 or HEXACO model. People are such dynamic individuals with different types of personalities depending on the emotion.
In short. You are the emotion you are having in that the system in your brain blocks any other information in your memory other than those enforcing the emotion you are having.
Remember that we are all that stupid when emotional!
- How you Think is how you Act!
- How you Act is how you Feel!
- How you Feel is how you Think!
These are some of my takeaways from all my years working with people. There is more to come down the line.
Please stay tuned for more!
P.S. (I’m so grateful for your support!)
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