Oh I have a personality all right

To follow my tradition of writing quasi-unrelated introductory paragraphs, I’d like to announce that I had quite a pleasant Sunday. I spent 3 hours outdoors scrimmaging at volleyball practice and 1.5 hours in the evening playing a tight softball game that had us crawling back in the game for an exciting win at the bottom of the last inning. I also watched The Fantastic 4 and had dinner with my volleyball friends. As exciting and complete a day as it sounds [and it was], that was not the most enjoyable part of yesterday.

I am not a morning person [statements do not come any truer], which is probably what made yesterday morning that much more pleasant. The weather was nice enough in the late morning to enjoy a cup of latte outdoors. If that weren’t fun enough, I had that latte while writing a test [I am not being sarcastic].

However, I am being slightly deceiving. It was a personality profile test [from the book Personality Plus] that uses four main groups to categorize your disposition: sanguine, choleric, melancholy, and phlegmatic. Here is a brief overview of each group:
Sanguine (popular) – lift of joy in times of trouble, word of wit when we’re weighted down, touch of innocence in a jaded era, lift of humor when we’re heavy hearted, creativity and charm to colour a drab day
Choleric (powerful) – firm control when others are losing theirs, cut of decision for foggy minds, grip of leadership to head us to the good, confidence to hold true in the face of ridicule, independence to stand alone and be counted
Melancholy (perfect) – depth to see into the heart and soul of life, artistic nature to appreciate the beauty of the world, ability to analyze and arrive at the proper solution, desire to do all things decently and in order
Phlegmatic (peaceful) – patience to put up with provokers, ability to listen while others have their say, compassion to comfort those hurting, will to live in such a way that even your enemies can’t find anything bad to say about you

Most people would have at least a little bit of each personality and may dominate in one or two. To determine your make-up, there are lists of adjectives you have to choose from to determine which most accurately describe you. You can then match those adjectives to the personality groups and tally how many traits you possess in each of those groups. The test pegged me at 20% sanguine, 35% choleric, 25% melancholy, and 20% phlegmatic.

I knew that I would score highest under ‘choleric’ but was surprised that my traits were as evenly distributed as they are. I expected something more like 10% sanguine, 50% choleric, 30% melancholy, 10% phlegmatic. This was confirmed when I read how the book described each of those personalities. The book seemed to be talking about me exclusively in chapters on ‘choleric’ and ‘melancholy’ while I had difficulty relating to those on ‘sanguine’ and ‘phlegmatic’.

Being the goal-oriented choleric and chart/graph/figures-loving melancholy freak that I am, I made a table listing all the traits that applied to me under each of the four groups. I then subdivided them in two subgroups: “things I’m proud of” and “things I’d like to work on” [I warned you that I was a freak]. Looking at the list today, I realized why I scored the way I did. If I took the test five years ago, I would have probably been deemed 75% choleric. As counter-intuitive as it sounds, I think it is my deeply choleric character that pushed me to be so well rounded today [now there’s a self-pat-on-the-back]. Choleric people are very goal-oriented. They think they are usually right and don’t have any weaknesses. But if they are convinced that there is an area that needs improvement, they will spring to action to better themselves. At one point, I realized how dominant my choleric personality was and made it my goal to develop the other personalities. Evidence of that is the time and effort I purposely made to become more friendly, creative, balanced, happy, and easy-going [all part of a sanguine and phlegmatic personality] this past year because I knew I needed to improve.

What made the test more fun [and it is hard to do because there aren’t very many things I enjoy more than constructive criticism] was doing it with someone else and seeing whether other people see you the way you see yourself.