Customer Reviews

Personality Compass: A New Way to Understand People

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I have always been into Myers-Briggs Typology, and I generally love books that involve self-awareness quizzes. As such, I bought this book as soon as I saw it. This sytem is different than Myers-Briggs, and in many ways it is easier to use and takes less effort to identify your "type." What I really like is that it is so much easier to accurately identify friends, coworkers and acquaintances with this system than with Myers-Briggs. As another reviewer noted, the distinctions between the four types are well defined enough that I didn't find two of my friends who are radically differnt were the same type, as happened with Myers-Briggs.

What I especially liked about this book is that the authors suggest that all four types are valuable, and the book gives suggestions as to how to develop the parts of you that are not as strong. As well, it is better than Myers Briggs in giving tips for how to deal with people of various types. The Do's and Don'ts are great, and I found them very accurate for myself and my friends.

Being an afficionado of Personality and Typology I approached this book with gusto. I have read and studied many typology books and this is one of the simplest and best I have seen. Apart from the arbitrary classification of "peoples of the world" being from North, South, East and West having different personality traits it was extremely accurate. Currently I am typifying my friends using the behaviours section of the book, and I have found it to be the most accurate in grouping like people. (Something I believe is important in "type" books is that when you've grouped people, you don't wind up saying, "hey, these two are in the same group but are nothing alike". This is one problem the Personality Compass DOES NOT suffer from.) All in all it is an interesting and informative book, it also gives plenty of tips on how to get along with the different types, and which particular types are compatible. Great Stuff!

The Personality Compass I recommend to my clients who are struggling with relationship problems, it empowers them, in an upbuilding way, and they understand themselves, and the world of people we all have to deal with.-Footsy, New ZealandThe Personality Compass: A New Way to Understand People

The authors present their personality typology as being based on the "classic" four personality types (or temperaments).

However, if you compare their "typology" with the standard definitions of the five factor model, the correlations are pretty obvious:

North = Extraversion
West = Openness to Experience
South = Agreeableness
East = Conscientiousness

(Note that the Neuroticism domain is not covered).

For me, this rules out the fact that you are one type, or maybe a combination of two, because Big5 says we have ALL FIVE domains present in our personality.

If you ever have taken a Big5 test (like for instance the NEO-PI-R), then this book might be useful to get another set of descriptions of four of the five domains.

I have been involved with mentoring couples in conflict resolution for many years. I have studied various personality concepts, categories, etc. and use various tools available for couples to determine their temperaments as the starting point for them learning how to resolve their conflict. This book, Personality Compass, basically boils down many of the theoretical materials into a simple and consise way of seeing how our personalities/temperaments affect how we intereact with all other human beings, whether spouse, partner, parent, child, peeer, co-worker, etc. It is a resource for them to delve beyond determining their temperament (through other tools) to how it can apply on a daily basis to their relationships.

The Personality Compass is a clever and fun way of using the typical four quadrants to describe the four personality "types". This excellent book uses what may be called personality "attitude attributes" (the attitudes that others read from our actions) to accurately describe the four personality types, as others have done in the past, myself included. This excellent book uses these attitudes to describe the interaction we have with others-HOW we react. This book doesn't indicate WHY we react the way we do, but that isn't the purpose of this book and if the reader wanted to know why, they need to read other books. This book addresses the RATIONAL-GENETIC aspect of personality very well, but falls short in describing the emotional-genetic, rational-learned and emotional-learned aspects of total human personality, which also isn't the purpose of this book. Even so, anyone who wants to truly know WHAT their genetic-rational personality is and HOW they interact with others, this is definitely the best book on the market. Readers must look elsewhere for WHY we react the way we do using the genetic and learned, rational and emotional aspects of our total human personality.

My above opinions are based on 27 years of research with thousands of normal people to define what will come to be knows as "Symbiotic Personality", which indicates WHY we genetically and learned, rationally and emotionally react the way we do with our rational and emotional brains to carry on each day.

I liked the idea of the simplified personalities as being as NORTH, SOUTH, EAST, and WEST. It is a fun tool to use on my friends. However, the idea of arbitrarily sterotyping people as being a personality type in their region didn't impress me. Also, some of the material repeats itself. Other than that, it was very good!

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