Despite the reliability of the Myers-Briggs test, we know that all people are going to be highly individual in how they express their personality types. Not everyone in a certain personality type is going to be the same in terms of ways of how they act, what they are motivated by, etc. 7
To better analyze someone, you need to be aware of that person’s perceived strengths and weaknesses. Let us find out what these are.
Perceived Strengths
Your perceived strengths are the qualities and strengths you want people to see in you. For instance, if you are good at dancing and are a humble person, you exhibit your dance skills in front of people and are always humble because that is how you want people to see you. Similarly, your target has some perceived strengths. Knowing your target’s strengths helps you encourage and boost your target’s confidence. This helps you easily communicate with and influence them.
For instance, if you meet someone whose biggest strength is designing clothes, you can boost that person’s confidence by appreciating his or her work and giving him or her the confidence to exhibit his/her talent to the world. This will cause the person to like you and gradually consider you a confidant worth listening to simply because you admired the person’s personal prowess.
To determine your target’s perceived strengths, spend time with the target; analyze what he or she is good at, how he or she sees him or herself, and how he or she wants the world to perceive him/her. For instance, if your brother constantly talks about how helpful he is to his friends, it means he wants people to perceive him as a helpful person. If your father never stops talking about his bravery, it means he wants you to perceive him as a bold and courageous person. In addition to analyzing your target’s strengths, you also need to understand his or her weaknesses. Let us explore this further:
Perceived Weaknesses
Your perceived weaknesses are the shortcomings you want to hide from the world or shortcomings you feel the need to compensate for or be compensated for. Similarly, the people you wish to analyze has some perceived weaknesses. For varied reasons, it is important to be aware of your target’s perceived weaknesses. First, it allows you a chance to help your target get better or overcome weaknesses, thus causing the target to trust you, which then makes persuading such a person easier.
Secondly, knowing your target’s perceived weaknesses helps you influence that person and cause him or her to pay heed to your advice in certain situations. For instance, if your marijuana-addicted friend refuses to lend you his car, you may understand that it is because he does not want others to know of his habit, not because he doesn’t trust you with his car. Moreover, it is also important to know of your target’s primary motivations.
Primary Motivations
Another important factor that helps you understand people well is their primary motivation(s). Primary motivations are the ultimate desires, ambitions, and wishes that drive your behavior and influence you. For instance, if you are passionate about singing, your primary motivation is singing since you aspire to become a renowned international singer.
To get better insight into people, you need to know about their primary motivations so you can know what drives and inspires them. Your target’s perceived strengths and weaknesses help you understand the target’s primary motivations.
A person’s perceived strengths and weaknesses often serve as the motivating factors behind that person’s primary motivations. For example, if someone wants others to perceive him as a generous person, then he will give donations and collect funds for helpless people. On the other hand, someone perceived as being poor may aspire to become incredibly rich at some point in his or her life.
Additionally, look for your target’s fears. This will mostly relate to your target’s perceived weaknesses. Your target’s fears help you know what scares him/her so you can use that information to improve your communications. If you want to improve the target’s self-confidence, you can help him/her move past his fears. For example, if your sister lacks confidence, she may be scared of speaking publicly. If you see her behaving strangely in a crowd or in front of a complete stranger, you can easily identify her fear and will be better able to talk with her and give her the confidence she needs the next time she has to speak in front of people. In addition to this information, knowing someone’s birth order can help you to effectively analyze people.
Birth Order
You may not think that birth order is of great importance in predicting the behavior of adults, but in fact, determining a target’s birth order can yield great insight. The role someone plays while growing up will continue to have an impact on how that person looks at the world even as the person grows to become an adult.
The treatment accorded to you in your childhood determines your personality and your perception about yourself and of the world. For instance, if you are the first child, it is likely you received the most attention from your parents, which is why you are more confident than the rest of your siblings. Let us study the characteristic of different birth orders so you can know how to dig a little more into your target’s personality.
First Child
During the birth of a first child, parents are more attentive and concerned about the child’s health, upbringing, and the activities the child is involved in. The extra parental care and attention is likely to turn the first child into a `perfectionist’. The following are the common characteristics that can help you identify firstborns:
• Firstborns are trusted to be very reliable because in their parent’s eyes, they are perfect.
• Firstborns are highly motivated towards success.
• They like taking charge of the situation and try their best to please their parents
. • They are highly confident and determined.
• Their body language is mostly strong and shows their self-belief.
Second Child (Middle Child)
Most parents raise their second child in a more relaxed manner. The attention given to the second child competes with that given to the first child. Middle children are often the opposite of the first child.
The following are the common characteristic of the second child:
• Lack of attention given to the second child makes the child insecure and secretive.
• Second born children are attention seekers.
• They are more independent because they do not rely on their parents or elder siblings.
• They are rebellious and have “I have my own life” attitude.
• Second born children are peacemakers because their birth order allows them to see all sides of a situation.
