The purpose of these materials is to assist you understand your style and the style preferences of others. The Friendly Style Profile provides important insights concerning yourself and others in both calm and storm conditions. With those insights guiding you, you are more able to understand, accept, and effectively manage yourself. People who understand, accept, and effectively manage themselves are happier and more successful than people who do not.
Style preferences emerge from a complex mixture of genetic programming, various child-rearing practices, infinite unplanned life-shaping experiences, a huge number of intentional learning experiences, social cultural variables, nutrition and exposure to chemical substances.
Style preferences appear to be well developed by the time a person passes through adolescence. They do not appear to radically change throughout the rest of a person’s life. It is possible to observe the beginnings of style in hospital nurseries. Controlled studies have shown that infants, only a few hours old, have preferences they are able to communicate. By the time youngsters are attending school, the primary style preference is usually observable.
Parents and teachers need to teach children at an early age to be interested in and pleased with differences in personality styles. Young people should be encouraged to accept their own particular style preferences and to become interpersonally skilled, regardless of their style.
There are no two people who are exactly alike including pairs of twins. There are as many different developmental histories as there are people in the world. It is no surprise that people perceive, think, feel, and act so differently. You could say that there are as many different personal styles as there are persons. However, if we group together perceptual habits and preferred coping patterns that seem to have common threads and themes, we can identify four clusters of perceptual/coping patterns by means of which style can be identified:
Four is an arbitrary number; we could have chosen five or three or sixteen or any other number. Four styles suited our purposes and allowed us to demonstrate both common features and unique features in the ways people perceive and manage themselves and their situations. We were amused to discover that what we still believe to be an arbitrary number of styles, parallels amazingly well the four cardinal humors of medieval wisdom:
Sanguine = Accommodating/Harmonizing
Phlegmatic = Analyzing/Preserving
Choleric = Achieving/Directing
Melancholic = Affiliating/Perfecting
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the four humors were originally (c. 1200) thought to be body fluids that determined a person’s health, disposition, and temperament. Later (c. 1700), these same fluids were believed to be responsible for a person’s character, style, sentiment, and spirit.
Of course, we know that experiencing an Analyzing/ Preserving perspective on one’s work and co-workers does not vary according to the degree of phlegm in one’s throat. Charging ahead in an Achieving/Directing manner is not dictated by the amount of yellow bile in one’s liver.
Style is anchored in the body in complex, but as yet unknown ways. We know that style is a hypothetical construct. As we discuss the four styles, it may sound as if we believe they actually exist, as do phlegm and bile. Please be reminded, we know that the four styles are only a way to think and talk about common and unique features among individuals. Hypothetical constructs should help us gain a better understanding of things that are abstract; they help an abstraction become more concrete. A hypothetical construct, such as style, may be real, but not exist in time and space, the way a map and a compass exist. Style differences among individuals are very real and very important, but they do not exist the same way tennis shoes and computers exist. You cannot take a photograph of style differences, but you will benefit greatly by gaining a thorough understanding of the differences between your style and the styles of others. Role is another hypothetical construct that does not exist, but is very real and very important to each of us. For some people, a change in role may result in a change in their style profiles, for example going from line worker to the boss, or from co-worker to intimate partner. Typically, when role changes occur, the rank order of style preferences remains the same, but the frequencies may change. Stability of style across settings, across time, and across role is the most common pattern; though rare, significant changes do occur.