Character and personality ethics, Interpersonal communication skills

Character and personality ethics, Interpersonal communication skills

Looks at the pictures below, you can see two highlighted terms, Character and Personality. These are the two success factors of our life. Stephen R Covey in his book says, almost all the literature in the first 150 years or so focused on what could be called the character ethic as the foundation of success - things like integrity, humility, fidelity, temperance, courage, justice, patience, simplicity, modesty, and the Golden Rule. 

The character ethic taught that there are basic principles of effective living, and that people can only experience true success and enduring happiness as they learn and integrate these principles into their basic character.

But shortly after World War I, the basic view of success shifted from the character ethic to what we might call the personality ethic. Success became more a function of personality, of public image, of attitudes and behaviors, interpersonal communication skills and techniques that lubricate the processes of human interaction. The personality ethic concentrate more on techniques not on principle. 

Below diagrams also represent the character-personality differences. Character is, who we are and what we do when NOBODY is watching. Personality is, who we are and what we do when EVERYBODY is watching. On another word personality is how to “appear to be” rather than how to “actually be.”

When we are conversing with another person, there are actually six people involved in the dialogue. This is nothing but a basic interpersonal communication skills,

ME:

1. The real me.
2. The person I want to be.
3. The person I want you to think I am.

YOU:

4. The real you.
5. The person you want to be.
6. The person you want me to think you are. 

If we try to connect these different personalities with character-personality ethics, “The real me and The real you, i.e. 1 and 4 in the above” will fall into our Character ethic and all other personalities will fall into our Personality ethic. This means in-order to have good interpersonal communication skills, we need to understand “real me and real you”. We need to understand the real characters of both. We need to understand the principles surrounded by that person. 

Techniques are very important for personality development, we really need techniques to have good communication skills, good public relationship and good managerial skill etc. But when we use techniques to cover our own lack of character or principle, they become manipulative. So we really need to improve our character ethic, which is inside out approach, meaning we give our first energies to our own character development, there by understanding the “real me” and then work on these principles to understand other person frame of reference or “real you”. 

The relationship between character and personality can also be illustrated with an iceberg. The tip of iceberg (personality) is what people first see. Although image, techniques and skills can influence your outward success, the weight of real effectiveness lies in good character. Unless we work on character ethics we will not develop trustworthiness, trustworthiness is a combination of character and competency. 

So we need to return to character ethic to build trust…

Keep winning
~Your Madoo

Using our whole brain for two creations

In my last post I discussed about two creations, first creation or mental creation and second creation or physical creation and also problem space and solution space. How do we develop this?

A great deal of research has been conducted for decades on what has come to be called Brain dominance theory. The findings basically indicates that  each hemisphere of the brain – left and right – tends to specialize in and preside over different functions , process different kind of information and deal with different kind of problems. Additionally, people are said to prefer one type of thinking over the other. For example, a person who is "left-brained" is often said to be more logical, analytical, and objective, while a person who is "right-brained" is said to be more intuitive, thoughtful, and subjective.

Some of the abilities that are popularly associated with the right side of the brain include:

Recognizing faces

Expressing emotions

Music

Reading emotions

Color

Images

Intuition

Creativity

The left-side of the brain is considered to be adept at tasks that involve logic, language and analytical thinking. The left-brain is often described as being better at:

Language

Logic

Critical thinking

Numbers

Reasoning

In computer term, right hemisphere works as parallel processing and left hemisphere works as serial processing.

If we use the brain dominance theory as model, it becomes evident that the quality of our first creation is significantly impacted by our ability to use creative right brain. The more we are able to draw upon our right brain capacity, the more fully we will be able to visualize, to synthesize, to transcend time and present circumstances, to project a holistic picture of what we want to do. This is basically working for problem space or for the first creation.

What Does All this Really Mean?

When it comes to improving our visual thinking ability, we must always strive to activate our “whole-brain” learning system to help us solve problems, overcome obstacles and challenges, think more creatively and effectively under different conditions and circumstances.

Framework:

The visual thinking framework provides a platform that will help you to generate better ideas and allow you to solve problems far more effectively. The entire framework is built upon the principles of visual thinking as they apply to problem solving, creativity and idea generation. 

The framework is very much like an onion. You start peeling at the top layer and continue peeling until you reach the core of the onion. At the core, you will have a complete grasp of how to solve your problems and generate ideas using a large variety of visual thinking techniques, strategies, principles and tools.

There are some good videos in ted talk on this area, but I feel story of Jill Bolte Taylor is most touching one…

https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight#t-356155

Apart from these framework tool, there are many exercises that are great for stimulating the right hemisphere of the brain, few are below

1.       Have a bilateral conversation, means conversation between hemispheres –

For this exercise, take a pencil in your right hand (even if you’re left-handed) and write the question: “How’s it going?” Then switch to your left hand, and write whatever pops up. Your non-dominant hand’s writing will be shaky—that’s okay. The important thing isn’t tidiness; it’s noticing that your twin hemispheres have different personalities.

The right side of the brain, which controls the left hand, will say things you don’t know that you know. It specializes in assessing your physical and mental feelings, and it often offers solutions.

2.       Expand perspective

There are a number of ways to do this. Through the powers of your imagination, you can expand your mind, visualize in rich in details. Involve as many of the sense as you can.

3.       Practice Yoga to clear the Mind

Yoga is useful as it functions on three main points: exercise, breathing, and meditation.

And also you can browse on internet to get many discussions on this area.

~Keep Winning

Madoo