128 Part II: Winning Friends and Influencing People
Suppose that you want to emulate Richard Branson, the founder of the
Virgin group of companies. You can do so the hard way by trying to imple-
ment the processes that you think he uses. Or, with his help, you can do so
more quickly and easily by modelling him; and part of the modelling process
requires that you understand and use his meta programs.The later sections in this chapter describe the behaviours and preferences
associated with the different meta programs that we offer you in this chap-
ter. By being able to recognise the meta program that people are prone to
operating in a given setting, you can begin to match people’s meta programs
in order to become more like them and get your message heard more easily.
By trying on someone else’s model of the world you may gain a different per-
spective and add to the options available to you in other areas of your life –
an added bonus.A short history of meta programs
Humans have been trying to understand
personality types since time immemorial.
Hippocrates defined four temperaments based
on his observations of fluids in the human body
as long ago as 400 BC. He called these tem-
peraments melancholic, sanguine, choleric,
and phlegmatic. Although the Hippocratic clas-
sifications fell by the wayside, others are used
a great deal.
In 1921, Carl Jung published Psychological
Types. This book was based on his work with
several hundred psychiatric patients and was
his attempt to categorise his patients in order
to be able to predict their behaviour from their
personality. Jung defined three pairs of catego-
ries in which one of each pair would be used in
preference to the other:✓ An extrovert is energised by interacting
with the outside world, whereas an intro-
vert recharges their batteries by taking time
to be on their own.✓ A sensor takes in information through the five
senses, whereas an intuitor relies more on
instincts and intuition to collect information.✓ A thinker makes decisions based on logic
and objective thinking, whereas a feeler
makes decisions based on subjective values.
Jung’s personality types form the basis of the
Myers–Briggs Type Indicator, which is one of
the most widely used profiling tools today. In
the early 1940s, a mother (Katherine Briggs) and
daughter (Isabel Briggs Myers) team added a
fourth category: a judger attempts to make their
environment adapt to suit themselves, whereas
a perceiver tries to gain an understanding of the
external world and adapt to fit into the world.As George Bernard Shaw said, ‘Reasonable
people adapt themselves to the world.
Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the
world to themselves. All progress, therefore,
depends on unreasonable people.’