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by: Keirsey Henry David Thoreaux wrote: If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. The following excerpts are taken from the work by David Keirsey in understanding our personality and what drives us to be who we are. If you do not want what I want, please try not to tell me that my want is wrong. Or if my beliefs are different from yours, at least pause before you set out to correct them. Or if my emotion seems less or more intense than yours, given the same circumstances, try not to ask me to feel other than I do. Or if I act, or fail to act, in the manner of your design for action please let me be. I do not, for the moment at least, ask you to understand me. That will come only when you are willing to give up trying to change me into a copy of you. If you will allow me any of my own wants, or emotions, or beliefs, or actions, then you open yourself to the possibility that some day these ways of mine might not seem so wrong, and might finally appear as right - for me. To put up with me is the first step to understanding me. Not that you embrace my ways as right for you, but that you are no longer irritated or disappointed with me for my seeming waywardness. And one day, perhaps, in trying to understand me, you might come to prize my differences, and, far from seeking to change me, might preserve and even cherish those differences. I may be your spouse, your parent, your offspring, your friend, and your colleague. But whatever our relation, this I know: You and I are fundamentally different and both of us have to march to our own drummer. The point of all this is that people are different from each other, and that no amount of getting after them is going to change them. Nor is there any reason to change them, because the differences are probably good. We differ from each other in fundamental ways. We differ in our thoughts, in our feelings, in our wants and beliefs, and in what we say and do. Differences are all around us and are not difficult to see, if we look. Unfortunately, these variations in action and attitude trigger in us an all-too-human response. Seeing others as different from ourselves, we often conclude that these differences are bad in some way, and that people are acting strangely because something is the matter with them. Thus, we instinctively account for differences in others not as an expression of natural diversity, but in terms of flaw and affliction, others are different because they're sick, or stupid, or bad, or crazy or perverted or kinky and our job, at least with those we care about, is to correct these flaws, much as the mythical sculptor Pygmalion labored to shape his perfect woman in stone. Like Pygmalion, we labor to remake our companions in our own image. After all, are we not ourselves, even with our flaws, the best models for how humans should think, feel, speak, and act? Remember the line in MY FAIR LADY (based on Shaw's lay PYGMALION) when Henry Higgins wonders why Eliza Doolittle can't simply "be like me?" But our Pygmalion Project cannot succeed. The task of sculpting others into our own likeness fails before it begins. Ask people to change their character, and you ask the impossible. Just as an acorn cannot grow into a pine tree, or a fox change into an owl, so we cannot trade our character for someone else's. Of course others can reassure us, but such pressure only binds and twists us. Remove a lion's fangs and behold a still fierce predator, not a docile pussycat. Insist that your child or your spouse be like you, and at best you'll see his or her struggles to comply - but beware of building resentment. Our attempts to reshape others may produce change, but the change is distortion rather than transformation. TEMPERAMENT THEORY: LOST AND FOUND That people are highly formed at birth, with fundamentally different temperaments or predispositions to act in certain ways, is a very old idea. Hippocrates first proposed it in outline around 370 B.C., and the Roman physician Galen fleshed it out around 190 A.D. The idea continued in the mainstream of thought in medicine, philosophy and literature up through the 19th century. Sigmund Freud claimed we are all driven from within by instinctual lust, and that what might seem to be higher motives are merely disguised versions of that instinct. Although many of Freud's colleagues and followers took issue with him, most retained the idea of a single motivation. In 1920 a Swiss physician named Carl Jung disagreed. In his book PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES he wrote that people are different in essential ways. He claimed that people have a multitude of instincts, what he called "archetypes," that drive them from within, and that one instinct is no more important than another. What is important is our natural inclination to either "extraversion" or "introversion," combined with our preference for one of what he called the "four basic psychological functions" "thinking," "feeling," "sensation," "intuition." Our preference for a given function is characteristic, he wrote, and so we can be identified or typed by this preference. Thus Jung presented what he termed the "function types" or "psychological types". At mid-century Isabel Myers, a layman, dusted off Jung's PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES and with her mother, Kathryn Briggs, devised a questionnaire for identifying different kinds of personality. She called it "The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator." Largely inspired by Jung's book, the questionnaire was designed to identify sixteen patterns of action and attitude, and it caught on so well that in the 1990s over a million individuals was taking it each year. The test had been around as a research tool since the early 1950s, and the Japanese became interested in it in 1962, the year of publication of Myers's book, THE MYERS-BRIGGS TYPE INDICATOR. Let us suppose that people are not all the same, and that their patterns of attitude and action are just as inborn as their body build. Could it be that different people are intelligent or creative in different ways? That they communicate in different ways? That they have different mating, parenting, and leading styles? That they desire to learn different things at school? That they will, if given the chance, excel at different sorts of work? Could it be that such popular sayings as "to each his own" "different strokes for different folks," and "do your own things" express something that can be put to good use in everyday life? There is much to be gained by appreciating differences, and much to be lost by ignoring them or condemning them. But the first step toward seeing others as distinct from yourself is to become better acquainted with your own traits of character. Of course, the best way to determine your traits of character is to watch what you actually do from time to time and place to place and in different company. There is no substitute for careful and informed observation. But self-examination is quite foreign to most people and so devices like this questionnaire can be useful in getting you started asking questions about your preferred attitudes and actions. Results of the questionnaire can be very useful in knowing the personality of submissives. It is a very interesting exercise that will confirm what you already know about yourself. The book is: Please Understand Me II by David Keirsey, The point of all this is Doms, don't try to make your submissive something she's not or anyone in your life, find out her traits and build on them, help her/him to develop into the person she really is. Celebrating the differences between you two. If you are interesting in taking the Keirsey personality test... click on the link and select, The Keirsey Temperament Sorter II (An online personality questionnaire) 
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