My Characteristics Chosen from the Four Types {2^nd choices, lower case/italicized}

Strengths: People-oriented (B); Critical thinker (C); Task oriented (D); Compassionate (D) Very organized (D); Good listener (D) {Not easily discouraged (A); Prepared, organized (C) Fair, dependable (D); thoughtful (D)}

Weaknesses: Procrastination (B); Uncomfortable with constant change (D)

Motivations: Problem-solving (C); Stability (D) {Security (D)}

Common words/phrases: “Help others in need.” (D) {“Tell me more about _____.” (C) }; “How does that work?” (C)

Turnoffs, dislikes, fears: Pushy people (D)

Likely jobs:  administrator (D); teacher (D) {Social worker (D)}

1^st choice Characteristics from:         2nd choice Characteristics from:

A: Director –   0                                  A: Director  –   1

B: Socializer  –2                                  B. Socializer –   0

C: Thinker  –   3                                  C. Thinker –     3                                           

D: Supporter – 9                                 D. Supporter – 4

*85% of both 1^st and 2^nd choices came from C and D.

COMMENTS AND OBSERVATIONS:

The first and most obvious observation is that I was unable (or unwilling?) to follow the set of guidelines that I, myself, had proposed in the previous blog, i.e. (a) I exceeded the number of characteristics (8-12) that I had rather arbitrarily suggested to be chosen from the four Personality Types—I had a lot of trouble limiting myself even to 14—and therefore, (b) I included in my summary 8 traits that I had “demoted” to 2^nd choices—but was unwilling to ignore—from my original list in order to get down even to 14!

Lessons to be learned: (a) the originator should work through assigned tasks to determine that guidelines are workable and reasonable before imposing them on others; (b) if you are a reader and choose to “play the game,” you should feel free to adapt suggested guidelines to your own needs and interests—no one is “keeping score,” I suspect, even if you choose to make your own results available to other readers through comments on the blog site or in FB posts.

So much for correctives and “loosening” the guidelines. The rest of what follows are my own personal reflections on the traits I chose and what they might mean—and, maybe, explain—about my life choices, along with some reminiscences that might also clarify—or in some cases, perhaps, mystify—my life experiences.  We’ll see as we go.

• So let’s start with one of my “Weaknesses”—Procrastination—a characteristic chosen from “B,” because I like the following story that affirms that I “own” it. For most of the years that I served as Vice President for Academic and Student Affairs at Mars Hill College (an Administrative position to which I’ll return later), I was blessed to have Jeanette Proffitt as my Administrative Assistant. She had been the Secretary in Cornwell Hall when I was Chair of the Division of Humanities and was so incredibly efficient in serving the needs of the two dozen or so faculty with offices in the building that when she applied for the Administrative Assistant position and I hired her, I thought the faculty were going to ambush me! She became the person who served my needs intuitively before I knew I had them and, as I often said, “kept me between the white lines.” She was, of course, fully aware of my tendency to get buried in the “tyranny of the urgent” and put off important things—such as, for example, my annual address to the faculty at our Fall Convocation—resulting in too many “all-nighters.” And so, in her “subtle-but-gotcha” style, on my arrival at the office one morning, I found carefully placed at the center of my desk an article from the back page of The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “How to Procrastinate and Still Get Things done.” I read it, felt like I was reading a should-be-autobiography, and thanked Jeanette for it. It was a valuable lesson for me and she and I still laugh about it to this day!
• Moving to some of the “Strengths” I chose, the first one I’ll comment on, from “D,” is  “Critical Thinker.”
  • My early life in a fundamentalist church, and even in my public education through high school, did not involve anyone—at least in my memory—impressing upon me the value of critical thinking. I do have a sense of being led to think critically during my college years, primarily through two required courses in my Psychology Minor– Abnormal and Clinical Psychology—taught, ironically enough, by an adjunct instructor who was a practicing clinical psychologist.
  • But it was my introduction to philosophy, initially by an elective philosophy course whose professor, Gregory Pritchard, pressed me to “think for myself” for the first time in my life. Bit it was when that was reaffirmed during my basic seminary studies, and even more strongly as I moved into my doctoral program, that critical thinking “came alive,” as I discovered that virtually every idea or claim—with regard to how we know, what we can know, on what criteria we make ethical choices—is challenged by one or by multiple alternatives. Even understanding the contested positions, much less embracing one of them, called for the sine qua non of critical thinking. And so it has been during a lifetime of continued “reflections at the borders” of the philosophical issues that are endemic to a world view.
  • Interestingly enough, when I became involved in the mid-1970s with acting, playing a variety of theatrical roles over the next three-plus decades, critical thinking emerged as a necessity—e.g. how and what does this character think and feel? how am I to make him “come alive” on the stage? how does he deal with the conflict that is central to the plot of any play that can capture and hold any audience’s attention? I remember vividly struggling with such “critical” thoughts in twice playing the role of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, particularly as the script has him  say, as he struggles with a variety of issues, “On the one hand . . .,” “but on the other hand. . .”.  Fortunately, I had a number of insightful and experienced Directors, especially my long-time friend, Jim Thomas, who was skilled at pressing these issues and helping me, as an actor, portray a character who wrestles with conflict.
• A second strength I chose, this one from “D,” is being “Task-oriented.” I am a list-maker! Of course part of that is being a visual learner—I need to “see” it—and as I’ve learned, especially as I’ve gotten older, “if it isn’t written down, it doesn’t exist.” Whether at the office during my working life, or in my study at home since my (final) retirement five years ago at the tender age of “two-months-shy-of-80,” the List was/is always there. And once I start a task, I tend to become obsessed with completing it—this particular blog post being a case in point. There are a number of other things I should be doing—farther down the List—but I have little doubt this will dominate the time I have until it is done and posted! And that commitment to “getting it done” is what has enabled me to post a blog every week to ten days for exactly three years now, for a total—when/if this one is completed—of 82 posts.  There are certainly times when such an “obsession” could be called a fault rather than a strength, but certainly in my working life, I believe it was important to completing assigned or promised tasks, especially when not doing so would have been harmful to the institutions or to individuals that I served and to whom I was obligated.
• Although I am a bit “torn” to pull away from the list of strengths I chose, I will comment on just one more: it may seem more than a little egotistical, perhaps, to call oneself “Compassionate,” but that is what I have done. In order to distance myself a bit from such apparent arrogance, let me talk about how some developmental and, at the time, devout concerns led my thinking in this direction. At a fairly early point in my now long and thoughtful spiritual journey, I found myself considering the “nature of God” and among the things that occurred to me was that the “omnipotence,” the all-powerfulness, attributed to God meant that God was self-reliant—does not “need” anything. So how was I supposed to serve a Being who does not need anything from me? And the answer that came to me from reading and thinking—perhaps that’s what a “revelation” is—was that I could only serve God by serving what God cares about, namely “the Creation”, including nature itself, but, as I thought then, primarily human persons, especially those who “needed” something I might help supply. Thus, my “need” to serve God began to take the form of “compassion” for persons in need, especially such as homelessness and hunger and, later, oppression/discrimination on the basis of color, nationality, disability, and, eventually the nearly universal need for “learning,” which is part of what led me to see teaching as a “calling.” And while my approach to the nature of “knowing” and “believing”—as I have written a number of times on this blogsite—has taken me some distance from my earlier understanding of a divine being, what has not changed at all is that “Help others in need” (D) was, rightfully, one of the three “Common words/phrases” that I chose. And it is the reason I am so grateful to be able to serve now on the Board of Directors of Hands and Feet of Asheville, a non-profit that hosts young adult volunteers annually who are placed with other organizations in our area that serve the needs of homelessness, hunger, and discrimination.

Take a deep breath . . . . only two items to go!!

• One of the two “Motivations” I chose, from (C), is “Problem-solving.” However the problems presented themselves—as obvious and solvable “hitches” on the one hand or puzzling and demanding obstacles on the other—I tended to be intrigued and energized by them. Let me offer two or three comments:
  • In my work life, both in the worlds of teaching and learning and administration, problems arose that required solving. Sometimes they were in areas of academic, financial, or employee regulations that “ran afoul of each other” and required untangling. Those were challenging but usually doable. The more difficult, but more important, problems were those involving persons, sometimes students, occasionally friends or colleagues, but more often someone who was in my area of supervisory responsibility.
  • At times the issue was someone simply choosing to ignore or deliberately violate a regulation or established norm with which they disagreed. These were resolved at best when the person was invited to a conversation, given a chance to explain their objections, or, in some cases, just “blow off some steam.” Given the situation, I might offer to be an advocate for change or compromise in the disputed rule or standard, or offer the person a “paved pathway” to bring the complaint to the appropriate committee or responsible regulator, and when necessary let them take their issue “upstairs.” Failing any of those options, I could suggest that the dissatisfied employee might want to take the “exit door” in hopes of finding a workplace with a more congenial set of guidelines.
  • But the most difficult personnel problem that demanded a resolution was when an individual needed to be removed from a position—e.g. a department chair, a division dean—for incompetence, unfairness, failure to carry out assigned duties, etc.; or someone was damaging another person’s reputation by spreading unfounded rumors; making someone’s life miserable by speaking to them privately in insulting, demeaning language;  denying someone a legitimate class assignment by using their seniority or control over part of a departmental curriculum—e.g. Spanish classes in a Modern Foreign Language Department. Deciding to make the appropriate decision in such situations—i.e. to solve the problem—is not necessarily difficult and it was not the part of problem-solving that intrigued and challenged me. It was how to communicate that decision in a “come to Jesus” session with the affected person without “becoming” that person and simply turning their unacceptable behavior back on them—that is, how to communicate the problem, and the decision that necessarily accompanies it, while trying to make the conversation a learning moment rather than simply a punishment.  The challenge and attraction in such problem-solving was trying to learn to say “No,” without being demeaning. Was I always successful? Oh, no! My reach often exceeded my grasp but I continued to be attracted to the task.
  • The final issue in problem-solving is knowing when you cannot solve the problem on your own—admitting when you need help. The example I offer is, I suspect, rather blatantly obvious. It has to do with behavioral problems we have had on two occasions with two different pairs of our dogs. In the first situation, we had two dogs who were littermates and approximately the same size. About a year after we got them, they started getting into fights that were in several cases so vicious that we were afraid one might kill the other. We couldn’t find a way to stop or control these incidents and so we turned to Heather, an animal behaviorist, who informed us that such violent interactions were not uncommon in litter mates and, after trying several attempts to alter this behavior, informed us that the only solution to the problem was to re-home one of the dogs. It was an agonizing decision to have to decide which of them to lose but, as the only way to solve the problem, we did.
  • The second pair of dogs that we have now are not littermates, not the same age nor the same size. The older and larger one—the one we kept from the former incident—is clearly the “alpha” and tends, without any cause we can discern, to bark at/jump at the smaller dog who, typically, rolls over on his back, exposing his belly. But occasionally this usually harmless behavior turns more violent and, while the “attack” has never done anything to draw blood, it will cause the little fellow to “yelp.” We have not been able to solve this problem, so guess what? Heather will be receiving a call!

• Finally—really, finally!—the two first choices I made in the “Jobs” category were destined to be unavoidably obvious:
  • The two occupations, each of which comprised close to half of my forty-five year career in higher education, were, of course, “Teacher” (for twenty years) and “Administrator” (for 25 years). I won’t take you farther down this already long road by naming more of my choices,  but I do think that many them—both first and second—are somewhere from excellent to reasonably good fits for these jobs that dominated my work life.
  •  And even my second choice—“Social Worker”—is a position I held for two years while doing my graduate studies, working with single men in downtown Louisville—mostly alcohol or drug addicts, or men recently released from veterans hospitals, mental institutions, or prisons. This seems an obvious place to restate one of my chosen Strengths—“Compassionate”—as well as a chosen Common Phrase—“Help others in need.”

With that, having gone on too long, I will add no conclusion or summary and let what has been said stand or fall on its own.

I promised in the previous post to offer my plan for the completion of this topic, Knowing Oneself, along with an announcement of interest.  If you’ve read this far, however, enough is enough. So I will fulfill that promise in a really brief post in a day or two.

I hope you’ll stay tuned.