Talk:Please Understand Me

message: I found the book, Please Understand Me, enormously useful for personal use. As a university instructor, I assigned it as a text book.
My favorite part of the book is its appendix that gives a high-quality - even compelling - thumbnail sketch (profile) for each of the sixteen personality types. Readers who take the personality inventory questionaire, early on in the book, should use the results as a 'suggestion' of what their personality might be. However, readers should consult the profiles to determine which personality a person self-identifies with most. Often, a particular personality profile will leap out to the reader with surprisingly strong resonance, leaving no doubt that this particular type is the one that describes the reader.
Most of the profiles are excellent: insightful and useful. Perhaps the weakest profiles are the ones for ESFP and ISTP. The profile for ESFP seems to focus too much on superficial characteristics, like tending to dance in social environments or to keep a cluttered personal space while multitasking among many different projects. The description lacks insight into the deeper personal motivations which might explain such characteristic behaviors. The result is cartoonish, almost offensive, and there is a sense the book failed to 'Please Understand' the ESFP. Regarding the ISTP, the book essentializes the ISTP as racecar drivers and fails to recognize their technical expertise and their punctuality. In fact, many of the best computer technicians are ISTPs, but the book wrongly assigns many of the corresponding aptitudes to the ISTJ. Generally, the descriptions of the SPs are weaker, and there is a feeling the methodology that generalizes them into the same temperament of the 'Artisan' is distracting the authors from more precise descriptions. Despite these critiques, the profiles are excellent overall.
I assigned Please Understand Me as a textbook because self-awareness is valuable. Also, the book gives a strong example to communicate the concept of how people can be extremely different from eachother - with extremely different needs - and still be equally valuable to society as a whole.
--Haldrik (talk) 16:56, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Personal Review 

message: We used this book to help us understand our professional colleagues who are required to work together as a board of directors.  We'd been having conflicts that were difficult to undo.  This book and the Myers-Briggs profiles, helped us to understand how conflict was arising.  According to the participants, the personality descriptions were very accurate.  Bushcutter (talk) 06:04, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Another Personal Review 

message: which one should be read? the first or the second one? Twipley (talk) 04:57, 5 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Comparing to PUM II 

message: A more realistic description would be to assign all EJ to the Choleric type, IJ to Phlegmatic, IP Melancholic, and EP to Sanguine type. I do not remember if Keirsey actually explained four classic types in his book. Certainly,  Phlegmatic, Melancholy, Sanguine, and Choleric types do not correlate with his four basic groups, NT, NF, SJ, SP. Look for example at the explosive ESFJ type! That is choleric! I do not think Keirsey would classify ESFJ type as melancholic.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 149.69.116.27 (talk) 18:49, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:   Phlegmatic, Melancholy, Sanguine, and Choleric.