Kroeger Otto - Type talk : the 16 personality types that determine how we live, love, and work

A Dell Trade Paperback

Published by

Dell Publishing

a division of

Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

1540 Broadway

New York, New York 10036

TYPEWATCHING is a registered trademark of Otto Kroeger Associates. MBTI and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator are registered trademarks of Consulting Psychologists Press, Inc., Palo Alto, California.

Copyright 1988 by Otto Kroeger and Janet M. Thuesen

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address Delacorte Press, New York, New York.

The trademark Dell is registered in the U.S. Patent and

Trademark Office.

eISBN: 978-0-307-83343-3

October 1989

BVG

v3.1

Several weeks before the first publication of this book in 1988, someone we know well told us, Get ready. Your life is about to change. We didnt believe her; we simply couldnt understand what might possibly be so different about being authors. After all, we were a mom-and-pop operation that was doing quite well, training people about personality types. We already were touching the lives of hundreds of people a year from around the United States and even a few foreign countries.

Little did we realize how prophetic and insightful our friends words would be. Over the past decade, this book has enabled us to reach more people in more places than we could ever have imagined. Thanks to the book, which has been translated into six languages, we have helped bring the powerful lessons of Typewatching to a global audience. It has allowed us to exchange ideas with people from different cultures, and it has confirmed the universality of personality type. We regularly receive letters and e-mail messages from around the world, offering new insights and ideas about how to apply Typewatching in the home, at work, and in everyday relationships.

Whats been most rewarding and gratifying about the whole experience is hearing the stories of how Typewatching has helped individuals make breakthroughs, both large and small. For example, during a book signing at a Denver bookstore, a sixtysomething woman approached Janet and said, Your book saved my marriage.

Flattered but somewhat disbelieving, Janet responded with a heartfelt Thank you. Thats great to hear.

The woman persisted: You dont understand, it really saved our marriage. She went on. You see, my husband and I were already separated when I heard you talking on a local radio show.

I purchased your book and in no time determined my type and my husbands type, which was very different from mine.

I laughed, I cried, and mostly, I saw so much of our marital struggles through the years that I finished the book and sent it to him, saying, Read this before we go any farther, and then lets talk. He did, we did, and this year well be celebrating our forty-sixth anniversary.

We certainly cant guarantee those kinds of results. In fact, the beauty of Typewatching is that it helps us effectively come to grips with the countless relatively small personal and interpersonal challenges each of us encounters daily. The fundamental gift of Typewatching is the ability to manage yourself more effectively by understanding yourself more completely in any situation. While its undeniably fun to psych out other people (and sometimes we do it with amazing accuracy) thats really not the point of this book. The real test is in being able to manage yourself when:

youre in the express checkout line, the sign says 10 Items or Less, and it appears that the person in front of you cant count;

the very thing that attracted you to your partner or spouse is presently driving you apart; or

your boss has assigned you to work with (or for) someone whose style you find anywhere from mildly irritating to downright infuriating.

In each of these cases, its you, not the other person, who is having difficulty with the situation. While you cant change them, you can understand themand understand why you react to them the way you do. That paves the way for any number of healthy responses: You can grin and bear it, defuse the situation with a few well-chosen words, or laugh at the situation and move on. In any case, you are freer to take charge of yourself and be in command of the situation, rather than having the situation control you.

For every marriage weve helped save with this book, there are thousands of far less dramatic (but no less important) relationship-saving stories that have been shared with us about lovers, mates, bosses, subordinates, children, parents, teachers, friends, neighbors, and many others.

This book is only one part of a growing worldwide movement around personality types. Over the past decade, weve seen the emergence of two international organizations of individuals who use and train others in personality types. The principal tool used to determine personality type has been translated into more than thirty languages. The number of people trained to administer and interpret it has grown tenfold, to roughly thirty thousand individuals. Typewatching has truly become a global phenomenon.