Product Description

Part of the Understanding Yourself and OthersTM Series

Character and Personality Type will change the way you look at personality type and development.

Contains Dr. Nardi's long awaited 64 character biographies-4 for each type with illustrations-gives you a new look at the differences within personality type.

This book provides the user with . . .

* a brief overview of temperament
* an introduction to Dr. Nardi's Life-Themes
* an interactive process to help individuals discover differences within their same type.
* worksheets to help individuals better understand themselves and others.
* 64 Character Biographies with Cartoon Illustrations
* a snapshot for each type pattern
* appendices for a brief overview of the Essential Qualities of the 16 Type Patterns.
* frequently asked questions with answers.
* notes for the facilitator using the MBTI, MBTI Step II, and the Strong Interest Inventory (SII).

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #355654 in Books
• Published on: 2000-01-07
• Binding: Paperback
• 76 pages

From the Back Cover
"There is a vitality,
a life-force,
an energy,
a quickening that
is translated
through you
into action, and
because there is
only one of you
in all of time,
this expression
is unique and if
you block it, it
will never exist
through any
medium and will
be lost . . .
the world will
not have it."
-Agnes De Mille

Just as there are many kinds of trees and soils for growth, so too are there many meanings of character--personality, life-themes and stories, and morals and ethics.

Like a tree, there is more to us than our external appearance. On the outside, a tree's bark gives the tree a sense of character, weathering the seasons of life. But there is more to the tree than its bark. On the inside, the tree's genetic blueprint gives the tree its potential and its instrinsic character. In the larger picture, the tree plays a role and serves a purpose within the larger system. The interplay between its intrinsic nature and role and purpose in its environment shows in the tree's bark. The bark is our uniqueness.

The self-discovery and personal self-leadership process outlined in this book is not about just making a one-time decision on a career, or "fixing" a current relationship. This book is designed to give you tools and some important organizing principles so that you can generate and maintain a life that offers sufficient choices, resources, and flexibility for you to respond to demands and opportunities over a lifetime.

About the Author
Dr. Dario Nardi, Ph.D.
Dario is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Mathematics at University of California, Los Angeles, in the department's Program in Computing. He is the author of Character and Personality Type, Discovering Your Uniqueness for Career and Relationship Success and co-author of The 16 Personality Types, Descriptions for Self-Discovery and has authored several papers on type research with students. He has been working with type and temperament since 1992, and has been intimately involved in innovative product development with the Temperament Research Institute for seven years. Dario received his degree in Systems Science from State University of New York at Binghamton's Watson School of Engineering. His background in systems thinking, linguistics and artificial intelligence, undergraduate curriculum design and writing has led him to breakthroughs using multiple methods and models for getting at the "true self," as well as for restructuring academic courses to suit all learning styles.

Excerpted from Character and Personality Type, Discovering Your Uniqueness for Career and Relationship Success by Dario Nardi. Copyright © 2000. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
From section Discovering Your Uniqueness

The Roots of Character

Character has many meanings, and a broad philosophical perspective of character asks us to believe that we all make decisions and try to develop in the best way we can, given our inherent nature, life background, current resources and future potential. Sometimes this process seems difficult and possibly painful. More often, given a push in the right direction, small day-to-day decisions about how we lead our lives amplify into lasting effects. In this sense, character becomes a particular pattern of characteristic choices and changes as opposed to a simple linear scale or static set of either/or options.

Customer Reviews

Fresh New Perspective on Personality Type
Dr. Nardi provides the reader with a fresh new perspective on personality type. He leads the reader through a process of uncovering your "whole type" rather than using the individualized letter-introduction of the type "code" ( although he uses the code for reference which is of great benefit to those of use who have been using the Keirsey test for a long time). Dr. Nardi begins by helping the reader identify which of the four temperaments you are by understanding four "intelligences" as well as understanding our "core needs" and "stressors and antidotes for stress" as they relate to our temperament. Immediately following he introduces us to his eight "Life-themes"-8 archetypal, universal perspective from which we all can come from - integrating them with the temperament theory. He then presents the reader with a page of 16 short descriptions with the assumption that by identifying your temperament and life theme you can quickly differentiate your personality type by reading the four descriptions within your temperament. He doesn't stop there though. To help the reader decide on their type and for further explanation he uses the page of descriptions as a bouncing off point to read his monumental "64!" character descriptions. I found the character descriptions in my type did not describe myself, but it helped my see the larger issue that there are a lot of different "types" within my "type"- ENTP. Anyway, I recommend that anyone interested in personality type should have this book. It contributes a healthy new perspective that strays out of the mainstream "box" that everyone seems to be stuck in.

Character and Personality Type: Discovering Your Uniqueness
This is another booklet in the Understanding Yourself and Others series developed by Temperament Research Institute. Dario Nardi co-authored a previous booklet, The 16 Personality Types, with Linda Berens. In this booklet the author is looking at the many expressions of Temperament and Type, giving numerous examples to use to compare with our own journey.

The author has us consider eight life-themes: Physical and Creative (Artisan-like themes), Establishment and Community (Guardian-like themes), Academic and Entrepreneurial (Rational-like themes), and Political and Growth (Idealist-like themes). In each he gives a specific example showing how these can overlay a specific temperament. Each of us has access to all the temperaments, and we often focus on an aspect of another temperament that is not our own. Each life-theme is accompanied by a description of possible pitfalls, showing how being rigidly caught up in the theme can have negative consequences. These are also excellent vignettes to use when clients complain that Temperament and Type just put people into pigeonholes.

The next section devotes two pages to each of the sixteen personality types. Four short biographies of each type are given. These are based on actual people who are very confident of their Type. Often when we think of a type and its components of preferences, we get caught in viewing them in a stereotypical manner. These vignettes show how varied people can be and still express their True Self. The emphasis here is on the various flavours of a specific Type rather than emphasising the underlying Temperament or Type Preferences.

The readers are asked to integrate all that they learned about themselves so far in terms of their temperament, life-themes, best-fit type pattern, and the biographies that matched. Then they are asked to look at the flavours of style. Are they participative or independent? Do they have a local or global perspective? Have they a soft or hard demeanor? Is their attitude mainstream or counter-cultural?

With this information you should be able to locate yourself on your career map: What are your aspirations? How have you actualized your skills? How committed are you to the long haul that may be ahead? Will what you do make a contribution to others?

The topic of relationships referred to in the title is given directly on two pages, but is referred to throughout the booklet. There is also a relationship map with key questions to answer: Is the relationship more than chemistry? How compatible are you? How do you balance intimacy with needs to develop the self? How strong is the commitment to accept the other person as he or she really is?

There are appendices that review some of the basic Temperament and Type theory, as well as answers to some frequently asked questions.

The booklet is useful to people who have gone through the temperament-type process as developed by the Temperament Research Institute. It is a resource booklet meant to be used by a facilitator leading a group or an individual through a career development process. It may help those who are still unsure of the Best Fit Type. This booklet goes beyond the usual way of looking at Type. It will be interesting to see how people respond to these very dynamic descriptions.

Very useful and informative
Character and Personality Type was extremely useful in furthering my understanding of personality type. The life themes are a nice addition to the Temperament piece as to explain the variations within the types - especially because I was deciding between two similar types - or so it seems. The character cartoons really add flavor to an otherwise stale subject, they helped me get into reading a lot of the descriptions-there are 64! I recommend this title for anyone who has read Please Understand Me.