Customer Reviews

Follow Your True Colors to the Work You Love: The Popular Method for Matching Your Personality to Your Career with Cards

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Book Review by Jack Falt. Kalil, Carolyn, Follow Your True Colors to the Work You Love: The Popular Method for Matching Your Personality to Your Career, BookPartners, Inc., Wilsonville, 1998, 200 pp.

As far as I know, this is the first book published that is based on Don Lowry's True Colors™ personality system. And Carolyn Kalil's book is an excellent one to become acquainted with this system. An additional bonus is that her book contains the four temperament cards and the word cluster ranking system used to determine one's true colours. The scoring produces a hierarchy of colours for each person from one's strongest to weakest colour. (The weakest colour is like the Inferior Function in MBTI.)

The developer of True Colors was Don Lowry, an entrepreneur and student of David Keirsey. He used Keirsey's four temperaments as the basis of the True Colors system. By using four colourful cards depicting clowns performing colour related activities, Lowry developed a system that can be used with all ages from kindergarten children to multinational company executives. The four colours are: Orange - Sensing Perceiving, Gold - Sensing Judging, Blue - Intuitive Feeling, and Green - Intuitive Thinking.

Kalil's book is written in a very personal style with lots of anecdotal material. She describes her own life and how her first True Colors workshop with Lowry was so tremendously helpful in understanding herself and enhancing her own self-esteem. As an educator she has used the system extensively, and has utilized this experience as the basis of her book.

Kalil concept of career education is based on the theory that you can't know what you want to do until you know who you are. She describes each of the four colours in separate chapters, looking at basic colour personality, goals and ideals, and how men, women, and children of that colour behave. An added feature is how each colour acts when one is out-of-esteem (or what MBTI calls being-in- the-grip).

Having described the four colours, Kalil then applies this to the world of work. She looks at the basic needs of each colour and describes the path to best satisfy these needs. She also looks at the values, natural gifts and talents, and most suitable career choices for each colour. She urges the reader to tie it all together in a mission statement, and has a exercise to help you to do this. These careers are just suggestions and she does not imply that anyone is limited in any way.

Recognizing how our upbringing can be a negative influence, Kalil has a chapter on facing the past and being aware of our negative programming. She includes an exercise on how to rewrite your life script. She also concludes the book with a chapter on harmonizing the four colours in our world. Each of the four colours has a useful function to perform.

I found the book an interesting book to read, and felt it would be useful for late high school age to adult, and wish I had had it available for my Grade 11 Personality Development and Career Planning course when I was teaching. People unaware of MBTI or Temperament will find it easy to understand and will likely discover it gives them a boost to their self-esteem. No matter what stage of life you are at, this book could be an eye-opener in your career quest. For some, it may give them the courage to make needed changes in their lives, and for others, help them explain why they chose the career they did.

Jack Falt (INFJ and a Green) is a retired Guidance Counsellor. He is trained in both True Colors and MBTI. He leads an ongoing group called Appreciating Differences which studies how type and temperament apply to all aspects of life. He is also the Membership Director for the Ontario Association for Application of Psychological Type. He can be reached by e-mail: jfalt@trytel.com, snail mail: Box 701, Almonte, ON K0A 1A0 or tel.:

Thank you. Your book has truly changed my life. Family and friends have always stated "you think to much", "Don't analyze me", and "You have a hard time getting in touch with your emotions". I have always been a perfectionist at work and have been hard on myself. I have to be competent in what I do and I love a challenge. Once I was able to recognize my true colors I was able to understand me!

When I read Chapter 6 on Green Personality - Knowledge is Power- I saw myself. My true color. What I represent in actual writing. Reading that chapter helped me to understand who I am. Something I often question. I have to accept I am green to full accept myself and that is deep. I have to realize my strengths and weaknesses.

I see how my weaknessness have caused problems in my work, family, and relationships. I have to work on these weaknesses to have inner peace.

Your book has helped me to realize a lot about myself. Your book gives me the guidance to explore my life and see what I am missing. I realize I have been missing a lot. I have always been hard on myself. I push and push myself. Everything I do has to be perfect.... I am so quickly to judge things around me that may not be perfect. I did not realize I have prided my 30 years on being perfect and having an answer for every question. Sometimes in life there ar no answers. I have been searching my inner soul and realize I must change to be truly happy. I realize I have let my critical self hurt me.

I want to thank you Carolyn Kalil for coming into my life. Your book has let me see where I need to go instead of where I am. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

My most recent college career planning class was instructed to purchase the book Follow Your True Colors to the Work You Love as well as the workbook. The students were given weekly homework reading assignments from the book. During class they completed individual and group exercises from the workbook. The book provided a framework for understanding the career planning process based on an individual's true color personality profile. The workbook provided an opportunity for the students to apply the principles learned from reading the book. In conjunction, the two books complimented one another and increased the students' understanding and application of the concepts.

During the course, several students approached me independently and commented on how much they enjoyed the readings and exercises they were assigned. Some individuals felt that the author was speaking directly to them and their circumstances. Other students were amazed by the author's uncanny ability to pinpoint their personality traits and characteristics.

However, I had no idea until I read the finals submitted by the students at the end of the class how universally these two books had impacted people. Even students who were initially skeptical about the usefullness of this class and its approach to career planning were quite pleased with the insight and information they had learned about themselves. Overall, students benefited greatly from reading and using these exercises for self discovery and understanding presented in the book and workbook Follow Your True Colors to the Work You Love. These two books will definetly be required reading for my future students!

After reading "True Colors", I immediately surveyed roughly 100 people (some family members included). The results were astonishing. Nearly everyone's personality paralleled Carolyn's "colors inventory" with sure exactness. Many folk spend their valuable time making careers out of occupations that are simply perpendicular to their major purpose in life. This book, I found to be intelligent, realistic and a page-turner. It's quite enjoyable. Ms. Kalil's work is the nicest piece since Myers-Briggs.

An exceptional work that is a delightful "read". In a very friendly yet literate style, Ms. Kalil lays an easy foundation for finding harmony with our career focus and personality. The included card set is an amazingly simple way to find your direction and learn about your "True Colors". The book is truly informative, and very helpful.

True colors will break your kids down into 4 main personalities and a combination of sub personalities. This book will teach you the weaknesses, strengths, wants, needs, etc. of each kid. After reading this book you will learn how to read kids and deal with their personality. Also, it will help you pick the right mate to date or marry and to pick the work that will make you happy. After two days of students in my class, I can tell the "orange" students in my class and my career advice to them is "Never take a job that is behind a desk or stuck in a room all day." Years later, students always tell me I was so right. So true colors does work! Buy it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

After reading "True Colors", I immediately surveyed roughly 100 people (some family members included). The results were astonishing. Nearly everyone's personality paralleled Carolyn's "colors inventory" with sure exactness. Many folk spend their valuable time making careers out of occupations that are simply perpendicular to their major purpose in life. This book, I found to be intelligent, realistic and a page-turner. It's quite enjoyable. Ms. Kalil's work is the nicest piece since Myers-Briggs.

This book is really helpful in figuring out your own personality type as well as other people's. It teaches you how to interact with other personality types and gives you an accurate description on what kind work you should be doing according to your personality. It not only helped me to figure out my dream profession, but also encouraged me to go for it!

This book was excellent in describing attributes of each personality type and was well-matched to my personality and what type of career suits me.

I first used this book at the career center of the community college I was attending. The questions and the activities, as well as the four color-coded cards (green, blue, orange, yellow), really put my goals into perspective, and helped me understand why I was having so much trouble fitting into any of my jobs. Despite the present economic downturn, I am working toward my degree in anthropology (minor in English) to pursue a career as an Archivist. For all you professional misfits out there, this book is definitely for you.