What is a people person?

[french frank]

I also discovered that the entire promotion and advancement structure was aimed at promoting extroverts, of various kinds, to the top as managers

I understand everyone is supposed to be partly extrovert and partly introvert, but in varying degrees; though I did do one of those tests with about 70 questions where I ended up 100% introvert which impressed me (not in a good way, though )

One question that interested me was whether you found it easy to shout. I can't shout and when I worked in an office I had a colleague in the next room. We both kept our doors open, and when she wanted to say something to me, she just shouted. But I always had to get up and go round to her door and answer in my usual voice

[Conchis]

A 'people person' is a gregarious person, someone who only exists in the company of others and feels that time spent alone is time wasted.

Such a person is not naturally reflective.

I once read that the ultimate 'people person' was....Josef Stalin.

[gurnemanz]

This reminds me of reading about psychological personality types in Riemann's "Grundformen der Angst" years ago. According to this, as I understand it, a people person would be motivated as much by fear of isolation as by an urge towards involvement with others.

This neat summary comes from his Wiki entry:

'In 1961 Riemann published a book called Grundformen der Angst [Basic Forms of Anxiety] in which he developed a typology of personality. He postulated that every person had two pairs of conflicting needs, each coming with their own form of fear or anxiety.

The first pair was the need to be an individual vs the need to be part of a group. The corresponding fears were fear of love and commitment and fear of loneliness and self-actualisation. The second pair was the need for constancy vs the need for change. The corresponding fears were fear of insecurity and change and fear of confinement and constancy.

Riemann stressed that everybody experienced all of these fears, to varying extents. However, if one of the fears became so dominant within a person that it eclipsed the other fears, the person was mentally unhealthy. Each fear thereby came with its own type of disorder: when the fear of love was dominant, Riemann spoke of schizoid people; when it was the fear of loneliness, he spoke of depressed persons; fear of change corresponded with obsessive characteristics; and fear of constancy brought out "hysterical" personalities.'

Needless to say, the best and most mentally healthy place to be is in the middle, nicely balanced between the centrifugal and centripetal forces operating on us - like the planet we live on, both revolving on its own axis and tied to a fixed orbit.

[gradus]

I've known several people who having spent their working lives managing people, as opposed to say the companies, services, goods or systems for which they were nominally responsible, couldn't wait to stop and spend more time with simpler things in life, people being notoriously difficult to cope with even for one who might originally have thought of him/herself as a 'people person'.

[cloughie]

Oh I know you didn't, so no problem.

Not so sure about seeing facial expressions on internet forums though.......

l

ts, I'm with you there - like the Archers' cast none of us probably look like we imagine.

[Lat-Literal]

I'm most definitely not. I took one of those Myers Briggs personality tests (administered by a qualified psychologist) on the last management course I attended at work, and came out as a pronounced INTJ, which explained a lot - I also discovered that the entire promotion and advancement structure was aimed at promoting extroverts, of various kinds, to the top as managers. Another classificaton system allocated people to colours, but it was the same thing. I was always happiest working with ideas, planning, analysis, that kind of thing. One small detail: my type (INTJs) are supposed to find role play difficult if not impossible. Every management course I ever went on, and I went on several, included role play. At last I had a perfect excuse for saying "I don't do role play". But at this stage it scarcely mattered.

I'm INFJ which is similar. The feeling and thinking are balanced 51-49 but I'm 72% judgmental, 84% introverted, 94% intuitive and 100% turbulent. I don't like role play. I don't often shout and will mainly use reason for 23 hours and 59 minutes of a day. However, if I haven't got a deal in that last minute, which tends to happen as people seem to think I am a soft touch, there can be the nearest that anyone is likely to witness in another person to a nuclear explosion. Even if there are 27 other people in the room, they will all run like crazy, eventually talk about it among themselves as uncharacteristic, and then gang up on me so that I as they see it lose. However, the disturbance among them is such that while they know they have won they have an uneasy feeling that they haven't won. At this point, I may well point out that I would be happier living in a gutter than to be any of them which triggers a brief, if milder, version in them of what has just happened because it comes across as entirely believable. Which is wholly justified as deep down I myself believe it. Forever.

INFJ - Less than 1% of people - Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, Alanis Morissette