How These 4 Different Personality Types Find Motivation

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Re: Character Development

From Fast Company:

People fall into one of four distinct tendencies: obliger, questioner, rebel, and upholder. Each impacts how you become motivated to accomplish things.

. . . .

If you’ve ever wondered why some people get more things done, it may not have anything to do with their supply of willpower. They’re probably tapping into inner tendencies that motivate them to act, says Gretchen Rubin, author of The Four Tendencies: The Indispensable Personality Profiles That Reveal How to Make Your Life Better (and Other People’s Lives Better, Too).

. . . .

OBLIGER

Obligers easily meet outer expectations. They deliver projects on time when someone else is counting on them, but they struggle with inner expectations, such as setting personal resolutions. They become discouraged when trying to adopt new habits because they’ve tried and failed in the past.

“Obligers need outer accountability to meet inner expectations,” says Rubin. “They do well with deadlines and team supervision. Workplaces have that all over the place.”

Link to the rest at Fast Company

4 thoughts on “How These 4 Different Personality Types Find Motivation”

  1. People are more than one thing. Behave more than one way. Change behaviours when environmental factors change.

    Confusing a tendency and making it prescriptive is quite frankly pseudoscience.

    This is just another variant on the Meyer-Briggs personality type, which has also been discredited. If I could one thing, it would be teach writers that psychology has moved on from theories that have been disproven.

    • I like to think of things like this as mental models, with the same sorts of limitations in comprehensively describing reality as maps.

      If a person finds the model useful, excellent! If they do not, then it’s easy enough to disregard – like choosing between a topographic map and a road map. Neither type of map is intrinsically better, but depending on your goals and obstacles, one might be far more useful to you than the other.

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