Professional: whether if you're in a bad mood, when you're asked "how are you?", you tend to hide your emotions and make yourself look all right
Expressive: it'd be difficult for you to hide your feelings; why bother? people would notice anyway...
Assertive: in a group, you're the one who likes to give ideas, like where to go for lunch, etc.
Passive: in the contrary, you are the one who doesn't speak out loud, even if you do have some thoughts in mind
You probably think you're expressive when you're with friends and professional with those you're not familiar with, but here we're talking about most of the time what kind of person you are. for example, even if you're an expressive person, you can't be laughing at a funeral just because you'd like to.
According to what you've chosen, let's see which group you belong to:
A (Professional+Assertive): Controller
B (Professional+Passive): Analyzer
C (Expressive+Passive): Supporter
D (Expressive+Assertive): Promoter
and we discussed about the following questions within the group:
1. what do you like?
2. what you dislike?
3. are you task-oriented/relationship-oriented?
4. what are your strong points?
5. what are your weaknesses?
6. are you a fast-paced/slow-paced person?
It's really interesting that people from the same group do have lots in common, and how different we are when we share answers with other groups. Take our group "Supporter" (expressive+passive) for example:
A1: we like to eat good food, listen to music, watch movies, spend time hanging out with friends, in a word: enjoy our lives as much as we can.
A2: we don't like deadlines, pressure, making decisions, being questioned or being given too many details about how we should get things done.
A3: relationship-oriented
A4: easygoing, easy to work with, high-adaptability, efficient, multitasking.
A5: easy to hesitate, easy to get distracted, can be emotional sometimes
A6: sometimes fast, sometimes slow, it depends (if no one else is involved, we can be really slow; if we're asked to move faster we're willing to do it, because that person said so).
Please click here for more information on these personality quadrants.
Of course, there can't be only four types of people, it's usually a mixture of all these four, just one or maybe two of them is more obvious than the others. The purpose to find out who we are is to help us better communicate with each other by knowing what kind of person we're dealing with. Besides, we also need to learn to make good use of our strong points, but not emphasizing too much on them, or it may turn into the weaknesses (ex. multitasking can be the reason why Supporters get distracted easily)
Believe or not, God also wants to know us better by learning from the authors of four gospel books: Mark, Matthew, Luke and John. Each of them represents one personality. For this part, I'd recommend an article ("Temperament Theory" by Ed Vasicek) for those who're interested to read further. Thanks to His only son Jesus who made the best example showing the four personalities in a perfect balance - being right in the middle of everything, and switch from these four personalities in order to stay tuned with whoever he's getting along with.
What I learned from this class is that although "controller" sounds more like a leader to me, we can all be leaders. We just lead in different styles. In fact, when someone needs some advices from a leader, he/she may turn to a supporter rather than a controller, because controller probably can't stand sitting there listening to people's problems, but wanna jump directly to the solutions, which they think are the best but not necessarily the most suitable ones. This idea inspired me a lot, cause i really doubted how can a supporter be a good leader. but now i know the answer is positive and a supporter is as irreplaceable to Him just like the others!
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