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Keirsey and Bates's Please Understand
Me, first published in 1978, sold nearly 2 million copies
in its first 20 years, becoming a perennial best seller
all over the world. Advertised only by word of mouth, the
book became a favorite training and counseling guide in
many institutions -- government, church, business -- and
colleges across the nation adopted it as an auxiliary text
in a dozen different departments. Why?
Perhaps it was the user-friendly was that
Please Understand Me helped people find their personality
style. Perhaps it was the simple accuracy of Keirsey's portraits
of temperament and character types. Or perhaps it was the
book's essential message: that members of families and institutions
are OK, even though they are fundamentally different from
each other, and that they would all do well to appreciate
their differences and give up trying to change others into
copies of themselves.
For the past twenty years Professor Keirsey
has continued to investigate personality differences --
to refine his theory of the four temperaments and to define
the facets of character that distinguish one from another.
His findings form the basis of Please Understand Me II,
an updated and greatly expanded edition of the book, far
more comprehensive and coherent than the original, and yet
with much of the same easy accessibility.
One major addition is Keirsey's view of
how the temperaments differ in the intelligent roles they
are most likely to develop. Each of us, he says, has four
kinds of intelligence -- tactical, logistical, diplomatic,
strategic -- though one of the four interests us far more
than the others, and thus gets far more practice than the
rest. Like four suits in a hand of cards, we each have a
long suit and a short suit in what interests us and what
we do well, and fortunate indeed are those whose work matches
their skills.
As in the original work, Please Understand
Me II begins with The Keirsey Temperament Sorter,
the best selling personality inventory in the world, and
the most popular on the Internet. But also included is The
Keirsey FourTypes Sorter, a new short questionnaire
that identifies one's basic temperament and then ranks one's
second, third, and fourth choices. Share this new sorter
with friends and family, and get set for a lively and fascinating
discussion of personal styles.
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