The Hindu Business Line : Ten personality dimensions that prevail at all times

Feeling stale, unchallenged, deflated, or downright bored? Perhaps, you have reached an impasse: “a necessary crisis when you have run aground… the only place from which you can define a new vision for your professional or personal life,” as Timothy Butler says in ‘Getting Unstuck’ ( www.tatamcgrawhill.com ). “Without it we cannot grow, change, and – eventually – live more fully in a larger world,” he comforts.

The cycle of impasse, as the book unravels, has six phases, beginning with the arrival of the crisis, during which only the creative ones manage to feel at home. How so? “They no longer expend energy in avoiding the experience of impasse and, most important, they no longer fear this experience.” They are able to say: “This condition, this feeling state is ‘something I am going through,’ rather than ‘something I am.’”

In the second phase, the crisis deepens into impasse and unresolved issues re-emerge. Impasse is a low place, but it is also a grounded place, reminds Butler. “You are closer to the centre of things that are important,” a coming back to your ‘truer’ selves. Throw away your outdated maps and plans, he urges; and “see the terrain ahead for what it actually is”.

Letting go, opening up, and suspending the current life model happens in the third phase. This is when you need information about what is missing, rather than a summary of what is already there, guides the author. A simple exercise he suggests is to set aside 10 to 15 minutes any time you feel the need to step back and, at least temporarily, suspend the noise and the narrowness of the current mental model. “Practising free attention is the art of being more fully present. It is much more than just relaxing.”

Phase 4 is the shift to a new way of understanding our situation, using ‘the one hundred jobs exercise’, and finding ‘words for things that have been important all along’. From the list of 100 jobs – which includes almost every occupation you see around you be it accountant or stockbroker, surgeon or statistician – Butler instructs you to select a dozen roles ‘you instinctively feel would be the most exciting, engaging, and meaningful’.

The next phase is ‘vision’, when you recognise deeper patterns of meaning and satisfaction – an important stage in impasse management, explained through four chapters.

Discover, first, your ‘basic interest dimensions’, out of the ten that the author lists, as follows: the engineer with an interest in application of technology, the number cruncher whose aptitude is quantitative analysis; the professor comfortable in theory development and conceptual thinking, the artist driven by creative production, the coach who is good at counselling and mentoring, the team leader with verve in managing people and relationships, the boss with an interest in enterprise capital, the persuader who likes to influence through language and ideas, the action hero who likes to solve problems hands-on, and the organiser with passion for ordering information.

These are our personality dimensions that prevail at all times and find different modes of expression at different times in our lives, explains Butler.

“Most of us have significant interests in more than one of the ten dimensions; some of us even have significant interests in four or more.” Throughout our lives, these deeply embedded life interests will remain wellsprings of meaning, he advises.

A book that throws light into the gridlock gorges.

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