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Reading People summary

Name: Reading People
Rating: 4.3 (200 reviews)
Author: Anne Bogel

Anne Bogel

How Seeing the World through the Lens of Personality Changes Everything

4.3 (200 ratings)

22 mins

Brief summary

Reading People by Anne Bogel is a guide to help improve relationships by understanding personality types. It offers insightful suggestions on how to communicate and empathize with different types of people based on their behavior and personality traits.

Topics

Personality

Table of Contents

Reading People
Summary of 8 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 8

What’s in it for me? A peek into the world of personality types.

We live in an age of viral personality quizzes. Whether on Buzzfeed or Facebook, every day, millions of us click through questionnaires about everything from Harry Potter to our favorite foods. But how much do these tests really tell us about our personalities?

Not much, it turns out. If you really want to find out who you are, you need to do more than check a couple of boxes in an online quiz.

That’s where Anne Bogel’s study comes in. It provides a clear overview of the most important personality frameworks, such as Myers-Briggs and the Enneagram. As you’ll see in these blinks, these approaches can yield fascinating – and life-changing – insights about every facet of life from relationships to spirituality and work.

Along the way, you’ll also find out

what introverts and extroverts have in common;
how to say “I love you” in five different languages; and
why changing your behavior, not your personality, is key.

Your personal struggles can shed light on your personality type.

There’s nothing easier than repressing an unpleasant thought or ignoring an awkward situation. Humans are so good at this that there are even cases where women only realized they were pregnant as they were giving birth! Ignoring truths, it seems, is a natural part of the human condition.

No wonder, then, that we struggle to determine our personality types. Take personality tests. Oftentimes, we respond to questions about our character by talking about who we would like to be rather than honestly assessing who we actually are.

This is something the author noticed herself when she sat a Myers-Briggs test – a self-assessment report that analyzes different personality types. The test results said that she was a so-called architect. In the Myers-Briggs schema, architects are highly analytical and critical perfectionists.

Now, the author had always been something of a bookworm, so these traits seemed plausible enough, and she accepted the categorization. There was just one problem: this information wasn’t helping her get a better handle on herself. Why was that? Simple – the test results were wrong.

In the end, it was the author’s conflicts with her husband that helped her shed light on who she really was. These conflicts always seemed to come down to the emotionally raw way in which she expressed herself during clashes. Because her husband, Will, didn’t respond in this manner, she assumed he didn’t care, and this upset her even more.

This was a clue. Maybe she wasn’t an architect but an idealist, that is, someone who expresses themselves through emotions. Will, by contrast, was a rationalist, someone who is less emotional and more “cerebral.” Once the author realized this, she could see the issue more clearly. It wasn’t that Will didn’t care or wasn’t listening – it was just that he had a different way of thinking about and dealing with conflict.

And that just goes to show that struggles are often more illuminating than personality tests when it comes to understanding yourself.

Introverts and extroverts have one thing in common – they need coping strategies to deal with life.

As a child, the author was very shy. This was something her mother, who often tried to convince her to say “hello” when running into acquaintances at the supermarket, struggled to understand. But the simple reason was this: the author was an introvert, whereas her chatty mother was an extrovert.

So what does that mean? Well, although the idea goes back to the psychologist Carl Jung’s work in the 1920s, it was first popularized by Susan Cain’s 2012 book Quiet and her TED talks about the power of introverts. Today, we’re beginning to understand that the differences between these two personality types come down to the way in which the brain is wired.

Sensitive types react strongly to sensory stimuli and need some peace and quiet.

When her children were young, the author often spent her Thursday mornings alone with them. Looking around, she’d see littered surfaces, over-excited kids rushing around, and the family’s barking dog. This was extremely stressful for the author, although she couldn’t quite explain why. It was only later that she realized what was going on – she’s a highly sensitive person or HSP for short.

Highly sensitive people are often mixed up with introverts, but these labels describe different personality types. Introverts find excessive social interaction draining. HSPs, by contrast, suffer when they are overstimulated by their environments. Excessive noise, visual clutter, or smells are all types of stimuli that can overwhelm an HSP.

There are five languages of love; understanding them helps relationships.

For many years, regardless of the occasion, the author received greeting cards from her mother-in-law. She wasn’t the only recipient of these small tokens of affection. Whether it was a small or large occasion, virtually everyone in her mother-in-law’s address book got a card. The author, on the other hand, never wrote a single card in her life – until she discovered the five languages of love.

This concept comes from a book by Gary Chapman called The Five Love Languages. Let’s take a look at these languages.

The Keirsey Temperament Sorter can help us adjust our expectations about other people.

The author once ran into a problem with one of her children. As someone who is naturally spontaneous, she would often book last-minute holidays and trips. Her child, however, preferred planning ahead and wanted to know if anything out of the ordinary was happening months in advance.

This had all the makings of a conflict until the author realized that she and her child simply had different temperaments.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is based on four dichotomies, helping you to see your strengths and weaknesses.

The gold standard in personality testing is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. It was created more than a century ago by mother-and-daughter team Katherine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers. The schema they developed is based on four dichotomies.

The first is between introversion and extroversion. Introverts prefer turning their attention inward toward the world of ideas and imagination. Extroverts, by contrast, prefer engaging with the outside world.

The Enneagram details nine personality types and helps us understand behavioral patterns.

Writing, as any author will tell you, is an arduous business, which is why very few authors enjoy the process itself. Once they’ve finished writing, however, they feel great. The same goes for the Enneagram: using the system is tough, but it’s worth it in the end.

The term Enneagram is derived from the Greek words for “nine” – ennea – and “drawing” – gramma. And that’s what it is: a “sketch” of nine personality types. This schema was popularized by the Armenian philosopher George Gurdjieff, though its exact origins remain unclear. Let’s take a closer look at these nine types.

People can change a lot over time because behavior is flexible even if personality type is more stable.

People who spend their entire lives in the same small town know that personalities tend to remain a constant down the years. The loud, boisterous teenager often becomes a loud, boisterous adult. But it isn’t always this way – in fact, people can change a lot over time.

Take it from the author. She once met one of her old high-school classmates at a local farmers’ market. Back then, this friend had been a troublemaker who rarely paid attention to teachers and who had been expelled time and again. At one point, she had even called all the boys in their class and pretended to be the author. Luckily, one of the boys saw through the ruse and blew her cover!

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What is Reading People about?

Reading People (2017) is a study of the different lenses you can use to understand personality – both your own and those of others. It sheds light on concepts like introversion and extroversion, as well as introducing readers to famous personality type indexes like the Myers Briggs Type Indicator.

Best quote from Reading People

Its difficult to clearly see yourself for who you really are.

—Anne Bogel

Who should read Reading People?

Psychologists and coaches
Career counselors
Anyone who wants to understand personality better

About the Author

Anne Bogel is a writer and the mind behind the popular blog Modern Mrs. Darcy. Bogel is also a fiction curator and the creator of the podcast What Should I Read Next? Based in Louisville, Kentucky, Bogel is a trendsetter with an ever-growing following on social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

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