Your Personality Type Part I
When you’re working with the mind and people’s beliefs, which hypnotherapy does, you’re working with personalities.
Personality is one of those fundamental things and no amount of hypnosis is going to change that.
If you have, say, a sanguine personality, then you aren’t going to be able to change to a choleric temperament, even if you want to, or vice versa.
Each personality type has its strengths and each has its weaknesses.Â
No one personality type is better than another, although some types are suited to certain jobs, roles and positions than others.Â
Some people are purely one sort of personality type, while others are a mixture of two (or even more!), with the proportions of the types varying from individual to individual.
It’s unclear how people end up with their unique personality type.
Numerous theories have been put forward in the past, with astrology, body chemistry (both using the old theory of humours and the new theory of brain chemistry), birth order and genetics all being suggested as playing a role.
It’s all a bit of a mystery how we end up with our personalities and nobody really knows exactly what causes one person to have a phlegmatic temperament and another person to have a melancholic temperament.Â
You can get siblings – twins, even – with totally different personality types from each other and from their parents, so who knows?
Different sets of labels have been put on the different types. The traditional labels were coined in the Middle Ages or in the Renaissance, and were based on the theory of the four humours.
According to this theory (which isn’t held to these days – hormones are held responsible instead), the four basic humours or bodily fluids were blood, bile, black bile and phlegm.
Whichever predominated in your body gave you your personality, giving us the names sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic respectively.
These names aren’t very appealing, so others have been coined.Â
One popular one uses animals to symbolise the different types, such as a lion for the choleric personality, a beaver for the melancholic, an otter for the sanguine and a golden retriever for the phlegmatic.
Under the four elements classification, sanguine corresponds to air, choleric to fire, melancholic to water and phlegmatic to earth.
Oddly enough, our language seems to support the use of the four elements to describe personalities – both the good and the bad side.Â
We instinctively call melancholic people a wet mess or a puddle of emotion on their bad days, but reflective on their good days.Â
Similarly, a sanguine person can be an airhead, or they can be bubbly and breezy. Â
Phlegmatics are rock-solid or they are stubborn as bricks. Cholerics are hottempered and fiery, or they are ardent.
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