I am giving a short review in English and Croatian / Kratak osvrt napisan je na engleskom i hrvatskom jeziku

Short review in English:

I happened to stumble upon this book in my local library (yes, I still go to one and I love it) and the title itself caught my eye. Since lately I have been thinking that quite a bit myself ('there are so many idiots around me') this title just resonated with me and I had to read it immediately. I had different expectations about what this book is about but this turned out to be quite an entertaining read even though I expected a more humorous read.

This book is about the four types of personalities, red - yellow - green - blue. It corresponds with the four temperament theory by Hippocrates. Red ones are dominant ones rushing to the goal, yellow ones are quick to act dreamers and talkers who don't see things through, green ones are reluctant to speak out and get noticed and they hate change, they prefer stability and known and then there are the blue ones, the calculated quiet stoic perfectionist types who might not get the job done but the process which they have undergone to get it done will be perfect.

After each title and an explanation of the chapter we have each type listed and it is explained how they see it or how others see them in this or that situation and how best to approach them or resolve an issue with that particular type. Some individual amusing stories might be involved in the process but not always.

This book is very simplistic and will bring nothing new to the table if you are already familiar with personality types and studies. If you are not, this might be a good introduction to them. But if you are you will keep reading thinking: "...okay, when will the revolutionary part come on". Meaning, you will be hoping for something more than the basic general knowledge. And you won't get it. Because this is bare minimum that you need to know about personality types. Also, I did not much care for those amusing stories being made up stereotypes about each colour. I wish the stories showed more diversity and how most people are a mix of more colours which makes all of us unique and intriguing and much more complicated than the author would have you believe.

I will say this though, reading about the author's education and work experience, I definitely admire his work results and his skills. But he emphasises his greatness in almost every chapter of this book which definitely makes him seem like a big show-off. And I am not sure he has that much to show off in this book because it is so simplistic and repetitive with clearly made up examples to serve the purpose that you cannot help but feel like you knew all of that already and that you have just wasted some of your time even though he does write in an easy to read and understand style so it is not a hard sit.

With that being said, I do not hate this book, I enjoyed some parts and by some parts I was thoroughly bored by. Plus, I could not figure out in which stereotype category to force myself in. I displayed characteristics of all four colours and the author states that in his 20 years of work he has never met someone with all four characteristics and that people just lack in self-reflection so I must just seriously lack in self-reflection. Or I am just a complicated human being whom he cannot so simply throw in one category and move on.

Kratak osvrt na hrvatskom jeziku:

Na ovu sam knjigu naišla posve slučajno u mojoj lokalnoj knjižnici (da, dobro ste pročitali, još uvijek odlazim u knjižnicu i zaista je volim), a njen naslov je bio taj koji mi je odmah privukao pozornost. Pošto u zadnje vrijeme često mislim kako sam okružena idiotima, u tom sam naslovu i autoru prepoznala istomišljenika. Smatrala sam da će to biti lako ljetno štivo prožeto humorom i anegdotama no ispalo je ponešto drugačije što nije nužno loše no nije niti ono čemu sam se nadala.

U ovoj se knjizi predstavljaju i objašnjavaju četiri tipa osobnosti koje su predstavljene kao crvena - žuta - zelena - plava. One odgovaraju četiri tipa temperamenta koja je predstavio Hipokrat. Crveni su dominantni i žure ispunjenju svog cilja nauštrb pogreškama, žuti su također brzi u poduzimanju nečeg, osmišljavanju i kovanju velikih planova no često ih ne završe već radije započnu novi veliki plan jer im je bitno da je nov, kreativni su i obožavaju pričati, zeleni su oni koji izbjegavaju sukobe, pokušavaju svima ugoditi, teško im je reći ne i ispuniti će svoje obaveze no nikad neće preuzeti inicijativu ili žuriti ili učiniti nešto spontano i kreativno, oni vole stabilnost i stagnaciju, plavi su hladni i proračunati, šute i kalkuliraju, uvijek provjeravaju sve činjenice više puta što ih čini sporima, ali točnima, ne vole se oslanjati na osjećaje i rade sve po pravilima.

Knjiga je podijeljena na poglavlja koja se orijentiraju na određene situacije te iza svakog kratkog uvoda imamo zastupljena sva četiri tipa osobnosti i njihovo reagiranje u danim situacijama ili objašnjenjem kako drugi te tipove vide ili kako bi se mi kao suprotne ili iste boje trebali odnositi prema toj konkretnoj boji. Ponekad su uz boje navedene i šaljive priče koje bi trebale demonstrirati tu boju u stvarnom životu.

Ova je knjiga vrlo jednostavna te ne zahtijeva nikakvo predznanje o ovoj temi. Toliko je jednostavno napisana da se ponekad čini prejednostavnim. Autor želi dočarati ovu temu svim čitateljima pa polazi od činjenice da većina neće imati mnogo predznanja o ljudskom ponašanju i tipovima ličnosti što može dovesti do toga kako neki od čitatelja mogu osjećati da im se autor obraća svisoka odnosno smatra ih manje inteligentnima. U nekoliko sam se primjera i ja tako osjećala kad sam čitala njegove izmišljene priče koje je dao kao primjer u određenim situacijama jer su izmišljeni ljudi u tim pričama bili toliki stereotipi neke ljudske karakteristike da bi bilo pravilno usporediti ih sa shvaćanjem 'viceva o plavušama' potpuno istinitim i neupitnim. I to ne samo za tu jednu 'plavušu' u pitanju već o svim ženama rođenima s plavom bojom kose. Ljudi nisu primjer samo jedne te boje, ljudi su komplicirana bića koja su kombinacija tih boja i svaka od boja dolazi do izražaja u nekoj situaciji.

Autor ove knjige, Thomas Erikson, ima impresivan život iza sebe, visoko obrazovana osoba sa raznolikim radnim i životnim iskustvom i nadasve iskustvom rada sa mnoštvom različitih ljudi što je nešto zbog čega ga cijenim i vrednujem njegovo znanje. No, imam osjećaj kako u ovoj knjizi često i on sam to napominje i to malko previše jer ispada poprilično egoističan i sveznalica.

Nakon detaljnog čitanja ove knjige i istraživanja ove teme te samog autora ja još uvijek ne znam u koju bi boju trebala strpati sebe. U različitim životnim situacijama pokazujem karakteristike sve četiri boje i ni jedna po ovim stereotipima koje je on prikazao mi nije dominantna. To me poprilično razočaralo. Posebice zato što je autor napomenuo kako ni jednom nije sreo osobu sa sve četiri boje i kako smatra da nije vjerojatno da one postoje. Vjerojatno je onda stvar u činjenici da nisam dovoljno osviještena o samoj sebi, mom karakteru i mojim osobinama. Bilo bi mi drago kad bi autor koji tvrdi da toliko zna i da u jednom razgovoru može raspoznati kojim bojama osoba pripada, malo približi i nama samima kako da to otkrijemo za sami sebe, a ne samo za ljude koji nas okružuju. No, to bi bilo očekivati nešto više od ove pojednostavljene verzije već postojećih tipova osobnosti.

Importance of a positive attitude towards team leaders

Leaders, who are achieving lasting success, are those leaders who have a positive outlook on life. To be an effective team leader, it is important that you have a positive view on your life.

A positive attitude not just decides your level of satisfaction it additionally impacts how others interface with you.

A Positive Attitude is a Choice

As a team leader, you ought to never wait for another person to inspire you. Do not let the circumstances dictate the way you think. No matter what may have happened yesterday, your attitude today is your decision.

Your Attitude Determines Your Actions

Success isn't generally the result of a high IQ or exceptional talent. Your attitude is always more significant than your aptitude. A positive attitude is important because your attitude will decide your activities.

Your Team is a Mirror of Your Attitude

A team leader can not be have a poor attitude and at the same time the team members are expected to be positive. A leader's positive attitude not only fuels the leader but also encourages the team to continue until they succeed. As a team leader, one of your objectives ought to be to pass on your positive attitude to your team.

Maintain a Positive Attitude

If you already have a positive attitude, it is significant that you take a shot at looking after it. Maintaining a positive attitude is better than trying to regain one. If you struggle to expect the best of yourself and your team,  recall you can transform it since you can pick your attitude.

How Team Leaders Can Improve Their Attitudes

Feeds on a sustainable diet of positive and inspirational material. Begin feeding yourself with a regular diet of motivational books and talks. The more negative you are, the longer it will take to change your behavior around you. A steady diet of positivity will change you into a positive thinker.

Achieve a goal a day. If team leaders feel that they are not making progress, it might make them fall into a rut of negativity. Team leaders can overcome this by setting achievable daily goals for themselves. A pattern of positive achievement will help build up a pattern of positive thinking.

Put up reminders of positivity. Put up reminders in your work area and home to keep your thoughts positive. You can put up awards, inspirational posters or positive letters you received. Discover something that will work for you.

Published by personality development course in Chandigarh

We discuss here some tips for enhancing one’s personality :

• Smile a lot- Nothing works better than a big smile when it comes to connecting with people around. Do not forget to flash your trillion dollar smile perfectly generally. A smiling face wins even the hard soul. Wear your smile while connecting with others. Smile not only helps in increase an individual’s personality but also winning other’s heart.

• Think positive- It is actually important to think positive. Commemorate there is light at the end of every dark tunnel. Do not always resolve negative as it not only operate as a demotivating aspect but also makes a particular dull and frustrated. Do not get confused over minor things. Be flexile and always look at the broader attitude of life.

• Dress Sensibly- Dressing sensibly and smartly go a long style in honing one’s personality. One require to dress according to the occasion. How would a female look if she wears a sari to a bar? Apparently impossible ! No matter how expensive your sari is, you can not wear it to a nightclub or a pub where everyone is dressed in smart casuals. Price has nothing to do with smart dressing. A particular who is well dressed is respected and liked by all. No one would take you seriously if you do not wear sufficient clothes fitting with occasions. Do take care of the suit  of the dress as well. A particular should wear clothes as per his/her body type, height, physique and so on. Someone who is heavy would not look very impressive in body hugging clothes. It is not imperative that something which looks good on your friend would also look good on you. Wear the right makeup. You do not have to apply loud makeup to look good and glamorous. Even minimal makeup, if applied supposedly can actually make you stand apart from the rest.

• Be soft-spoken- Do not always find blunder in others. Fighting and quarrelling lead to no solution. Be polite with others. Be very attentive of what you speak. Avoid being rude and short tempered.

• Leave your ego behind- An individual require to hide his ego everywhere he goes. Be it office or workplace you need to leave your ego behind if you wish to win appreciation from others. A particular who is good from within is loved by all.

• Avoid Backbiting- Backstabbing and criticizing people are negative manner which work against a particular personality. Learn to appreciate others. If someone has done some extraordinary task, do not forget to provide a pat on his/her back. Believe me; the other person will speak immense of you alike when you are not around. Do not spread needless rumours about someone. A particular should not try to interfere too much in someone’s personal life. Dishonesty, cheating, lies harm your image and people start avoiding you in the long run. If your friend is seeing someone, you have absolutely no right to make his/her affair national news.

• Help others- Do not always think of inconvenience others. Share whatever you know. Remember no one can steal your knowledge. Always help others.

• Confidence- Confidence is fundamental to a positive personality. Give off confidence and positive aura wherever you go.

• A Patient listener- Be a patient listener. Never interrupt when others are speaking. Try to imbibe good qualities of others.

If you want to learn more about Personality Development Tips then English Speaking Course in Chandigarh Sector 34.

This book was a disappointment. I looked forward to it: I went through a phase of interest in the Myers-Briggs as a teenager, and so was eager to learn more about it. Unfortunately, after a fascinating introduction in which the author delves into the almost cult-like atmosphere of Myers-Briggs training (in an attempt to get access to Isabel Myers’s archives, the author was required to pay $2000 for a week of “re-education,” which was pretty much as it sounds), this turns into a dull biography of the test’s creators. Ultimately, I had to turn to the internet to provide basic information about the test left out of the book.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or MBTI, sorts people into sixteen categories of “personality types” based on their expressed preferences. This “indicator” (its devotees insist that it is not a test because there are no right or wrong answers) was developed by two housewives, Katherine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Myers. Though both were college graduates, neither was formally trained in psychology. Briggs, born in the late 19th century, was an amateur psychologist who developed a fascination with Carl Jung and his writings later in life. Myers later picked up where her mother left off, working during the WWII era to develop a test that would assist companies in finding workers who were the best fit for the job based on their personalities.

The book is mostly devoted to describing their lives, which unfortunately are too mundane to warrant this length, and Emre doesn’t quite bring them to life. But she’s far more interested in the lives of Briggs and Myers and than in the test itself. For instance, she writes about efforts to scientifically validate the test, but is entirely concerned with the emotional dimensions of these efforts (how the men doing the studies treated Isabel Myers, and how Myers felt about that) rather than the scientific ones (I finished this book not knowing what “validation” even means in the context of a personality test). And she promises more drama in their lives than is actually there: claiming in the introduction, for instance, that their personality-testing obsession cost both women their marriages when it did no such thing; at worst it sometimes irritated their husbands.

Information about the test itself is dropped haphazardly; she tells us that Jung meant something different from “introversion” and “extraversion” than we do today, but then never returns to that change or discusses the evolution of any of the other categories. She tells us that the creators thought the test was only really useful with more intelligent people and those of higher socioeconomic status (apparently the lowly didn't get personalities), but then follows up with no actual data about the less advantaged. I don't know about you, but I'm more interested in whether, and how, the test is racist or classist, than the obviously outdated views of its creators. But Emre only shares the latter, hinting that there might be classist issues with the test but never telling us what they are.

Likewise, the couple of sections that are more about the test than its creators focus on extraneous information or the author’s thought experiments. For instance, a chapter about a group of researchers who had prominent people spend the weekend together in a house to take a battery of tests focuses on subjects like how Truman Capote charmed the staff, and the career of a female researcher who happened to work there, rather than what was learned from all of this and how it fits into the history of personality testing. And at the end, rather than presenting real data or even real anecdotes about how the MBTI is used in the modern era, the author traces hypothetical women of different generations through their imaginary lives and where they might theoretically have encountered the test.

Emre is clearly not an MBTI devotee herself, but she declines to fully discuss the issues with the test, instead dismissing them as too oft-repeated, as if this made a criticism less worthy of attention rather than more so. In an interview, she stated:

I think even talking about validity and reliability sort of misses that point—because it asks whether these tests are really measuring what they purport to be measuring and whether they show the same thing over time, and those are questions for scientists, or psychologists. As a humanist I want to preempt those questions because even they are premised on assumptions that the systems and language that we use to describe people have some kind of basis in truth. I don’t think they do.

Which, first, what? I suspect most people interested in a book about the MBTI do think those questions are important, and are more interested in the facts than the author’s philosophical maunderings. (Unfortunately, she’s an English professor with a Master’s of Philosophy – not a historian, journalist or scientist.) And second, if the author’s point – as she suggests in the book, and as is even suggested by Katherine Briggs – is that the MBTI is a sort of religion for its devotees, rendering its validity beside the point, then why doesn’t she delve into that, introduce us to some of these people whose lives have been changed by it? Study the community of practitioners and the test’s impact on their lives? But no, we don’t get that either.

For those who are actually interested in the MBTI’s validity, here is a good scientific article about it, and here are several other relevant articles. What I learned that is not in the book:

1) A method for determining the reliability of a personality test is “test-retest reliability,” or whether people taking it more than once get the same result. Up to 50% of MBTI takers get a different result on a second test, even as little as 5 weeks later. (Its devotees insist, however, that type never changes, so these people must be doing it wrong.)

2) But perhaps a bigger problem is that human traits rarely fit into dichotomies, which form the foundation of the MBTI. Most human traits actually fall on a bell curve, with most people in the middle, and increasingly smaller numbers of people the further from the middle you go. The MBTI’s own data reveals a bell curve, or “normal distribution,” for its results too, but then uses a cutoff score to describe the results in terms of two distinct, non-overlapping groups. In reality, people aren’t divided between “introverts” and “extraverts,” any more than we’re divided into the short and the tall; someone who scores barely introverted has far more in common with someone who scores barely extraverted than with an extreme introvert.

3) And then there are the actual traits used, which haven’t been borne out in psychological research to be a useful or relevant way of describing personality (which is why psychologists don’t use the MBTI). Research backs up a different group of five traits, only one of which overlaps: extraversion, openness to experience, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism (i.e. emotional stability). You see why these are less popular though: few people want to be seen as sloppy, disagreeable, or emotionally unstable. This test would be far less fun.

4) Statistical analysis doesn’t support that the four MBTI factors are independent of one another, and there is no proven correlation between MBTI results and success in particular jobs or relationships. This is unsurprising to me, given what a rough measure it is. Something like “introversion” can come out in a wide variety of ways – I’m quite introverted in my personal life, but probably tilt extraverted at work – so a simple “E” or “I” tells you nothing useful about someone as an employee and can even be actively misleading.

At any rate, you won’t find scientific information in this book, nor learn much about personality testing, or even much about the MBTI itself. Go for it if you want an overlong, dull biography of two housewives who created a test that's never fully discussed, but otherwise, go elsewhere.

This one melted me...I use to be a real person but now I'm just a puddle of goo in my office chair.

To start with we have yet another crime for our intrepid couple to solve and this one is every bit as disturbing as previous cases. While we have the similarity of a father and son being involved that's where it all ends and the only clue that Mal and Seong-Jae have to help them solve their case is "he pushed me." not a lot to go on. As Mal and Seong-Jae begin their investigation a suspected suicide starts to look a bit suspicious as it looks more and more like their victim might have had a helping hand. Without fail I have been enthralled by each and every case that we've been presented with.

And as always in between the demands of their jobs and life in general there has been Seong-Jae and Mal exploring their relationship as both men admit to their feelings and their willingness to see where things can go. But of course this isn't going to happen without the usual banter and snark that flows between these two men as easily as breathing. I was honestly worried about how things would change once they became more involved and while it has changed especially with Malcolm it works...it works so wonderfully well. I think it's as much of a surprise for Seong-Jae as it was for me to discover that his 'old wolf' is  a cuddler and maybe a bit on the sappy side but it all seems to be such a part of him. If I was enamored of these two before they actually started being a couple it's only gotten better with this episode.

I know I've indicated in previous reviews that there's also a bigger picture story being woven throughout this series from episode to episode and it's still there and with each episode it's moving more and more to the foreground and in very surprising ways it's also becoming entangled with each episode's storyline as it draws the reader into a spiderweb that's threatening to trap everything that it touches. So far there have been hints of where this threat has originated from but the real mystery isn't where it's come from, but where it's going and how it's all going to end.

Ok, so I'm trying not to gush too much here but seriously I'm not sure how to refrain from this or how to explain just how incredibly hot these two men are...honestly, I've read entire stories that haven't been nearly as incendiary as one simple moment between these two men and I'm talking about moments that did not involve anyone getting naked...there have been simple moments of a hand straightening a tie, a kiss, a look that promises steam and heat and passion and then there are the promises...promises that speak of knowing each other of caring of never letting the other fall.

Criminal Intentions is by no means a conventional love story but these MCs are to say the least by no means a conventional pairing and at the end of the day it all works and just like a favorite television show I look forward to each new episode and finding out what unexpected surprises it's going to hold for me. 

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An ARC of 'Criminal Intentions: Cult of Personality' was graciously provided by the author in exchange for an honest review.