The Fourteen Major Steps

Every businessman who has attained success has learned, usually the hard ways, all about the Fourteen Major Steps to Winning Personality. He has learned that honesty and integrity are still in style and are the-top essential qualities. He knows that enthusiasm, attitudes initiative, human relations, and all the other pertinent qualities are vital links in the chain of success. Here are the Fourteen Major Steps:

1. Character
2. Enthusiasm
3. Grooming
4. Personal Habits
5. Attitude
6. Friendliness
7. Intelligence
8. Aggressiveness
9. Imagination
10. Initiative
11. Thinking ability
12. Human relations
13. Spiritual values
14. Personal magnetism

A Winning Personality Part 2

The personality road to success. Haven't you heard phrases like the following, and agreed with them?... "There goes a man with real personality"..."That singer always makes, a hit because of her terrific personality"... "With his leadership personality and his winning smile, that boy will go places."..."That fellow's magnetic personality is going to help him get the breaks." The man or woman with a naturally interesting or impressive personality has already traveled much of the distance to success.

We must remember that, like an iceberg, much of an individual's personality is the reflection of submerged qualities. The part that shows above the surface is the outward attitude , pleasantness, enthusiasm, and aggressiveness. But the subsurface qualities are just as important, if not more so-such as intelligence, honesty, integrity, knowledge, and the continual desire for self-improvement. The surface part is merely the reflection of the vital subsurface qualities. It is the latter that makes it possible for the former to command attention.

The most difficult part of getting to the top of the ladder is getting through the crowd at the bottom. That's where a good personality performs yeoman service. Good personality means business. It is the magic ingredient of good business. As a group businessmen have excellent personalities. It is only natural that they should, for it is a man's personality that helps him to work his way up until he is head and shoulders above the crowd.

A winning personality in business enables one to set his foot on the first step of the ladder, moving upward regularly and steadily. Most of our modern business executives reached their position because of their many good personality attributes, and because they understood the value of good personality traits in getting ahead.

it has been said that the greatest source of waste in business and industry is people's failure to live up to their potentialities. As an example of the value of good personality traits in business, Jack Lac, America's most famous sales trainer, says,

"To get ahead in business today, you must have a favorable personality; you must be honest; you must take care of your health; you must be optimistic and observant; you must be able to think and talk; you must have ambition; you must have courage; you must develop a reasonable amount of intelligence; you must have enough imagination to figure out in advance what is likely to happen; you must have a certain amount of determination; you must be be tactful and considerate of other people's feelings; you must be capable of becoming enthusiastic about any ideas you like; you must be sincere so that you will be loyal; and you must be thorough in everything you do. None of these qualifications is difficult to develop. If you desire to be successful, you can develop them; and if you do, you are certain to enjoy a reasonable degree of success."

A Winning Personality

A popular cache of our time is: "It takes all kinda of people to make a world." Probably because it is so true and so obvious. Every time we hear a friend make that statement about some other personality we automatically agree. But do we ever stop to think-and wonder-whether anyone ever says that about us?

While it is true that the man with a winning personality more easily breaks the ice of cold contact, it is also a fact that individuals with a neutral or indifferent personality are just as important in life as those who sparkle. Naturally, not everyone has a favorable personality, and every few individuals have a personality that is outstanding. If you are not one of the so-called "personality boys," don't despair. You cannot be blamed for the personality you brought into the world; you can only be criticized for failing to do something about it later on. And there are those who, even after they make the effort, may still consider themselves left behind in the personality race. But even those few are not entirely at a loss; they can always average up their apparent deficiencies by making the best of the good qualities they do possess, such as graciousness, courtesy, intelligence, friendliness, smartness and tactful aggressiveness.

Of course, there are many who are naturally reticent and reserved. These are probably the hardest deficiencies to overcome, yet one must force oneself to overcome these handicaps by moving deliberately in the opposite direction. If you are inclined to be a wallflower, make it your business to become more aggressive and more interesting, a little at a time.

Don't wait for someone to ask you a question-volunteer the information in advance, cheerfully and briskly. Exercise your initiative; don't hesitate to make yourself part of a group; step forward and take your place as if you belong as indeed you do! Don't be afraid to be considered an "interrupter"; occasionally you must take such chances and make such advances if you are to pull yourself along.

You are not being forward when you join with others in their activities. You are considered so only when you interfere in a group where you don't really belong-and there are very few of these. Most of the time you do belong-merely think you don't-and the way to prove it is to act as if you do.

It is easy to prove this for yourself. Next time you are on the outer fringe of a circle of friends or associates in business, move yourself gradually forward until you are in line with everyone else. Then smile at the opportune moment and make an appropriate remark, or volunteer some needed information, or suggest an idea, or join in the laughter . You will be surprised to see how quickly you are accepted.

Wishing for success-and having the will to go ahead and win success through your personality-are two entirely different things. It is the difference between wishful thinking and dynamic planning. Here is what Peter Bove, Commercial Training Supervisor, New Jersey Bell Telephone Company, has to say on the subject:

Anyone with basic intelligence can rise above the average. It is such a simple thing to do! Yet so few command the will power for this goal. Perhaps it is due to a feeling that "it can't be done" -or again it may be a false impression that "everything seems to be against me."

After training and analyzing more than 20,000 men and women in the selling profession, I find one factor that seems to stand out and that distinguishes the average men from those who are above average, the leaders. Is it the WILL TO SUCCEED.

The will to success is more than just a desire to get ahead. It is a sincere urge to accomplish a mission. The preacher has it when he delivers an inspiring sermon; the lawyer, when he pleads his case for a client he knows is innocent; the salesman, when he sells a product he knows has definite advantages for his prospect; the teacher, when she is trying to stimulate her students to great effort. It is a sincere desire to get others to accept one's views-to their advantage. This same desire is the driving power that makes missionaries and explorers undertake task that are fraught with danger-and makes mediocre men attain new heights in the world of affairs.

Obstacles to success are about the same for everyone. The man without the will to win knows that someone will overcome them and it might as well be he. He tries-and attains success.

Social and Cultural Factors Affect Personality

We learned that our personalities are greatly influenced by biological and environment factors. In addition there are the social and cultural factors in personality.Our relationships with other human beings involve what is called social interaction. Social interaction is the give-and-take process through which human beings affect one another's behavior. This process is well illustrated when We play a game or carry on a conversation. One person's move-the batter in baseball making a hit, for instance-may star chain of reactions in others, whether players in his team or in the opposing team as well as among the spectators. A nasty remark from one among a group in conversation will set another chain of reactions.The resulting interaction may involve many persons and affect their behavior patterns. To learn why one reacts as he does, one must understand the social interaction process, through which he has learned his ideas, habits, and attitudes.

The social interaction process is clearly seen in the development of one's idea of "self." The idea of self starts developing as the infant learns one thing after another in the world around him. The members of his family exert a great influence on his idea of self. As a child grows older, he gains experiences and learns to make definite responses to the attitudes of others, particularly attitudes that praise or blame. He learns to play the role expected of him. This pattern of behavior expected of one in any particular relationship with others is called social role.

How different is the social role of student from that of teacher, or of a carpenter from that of an office executive, a farmer from that of a businessman. But once we know how others see us, react to us, and expect of us, we can begin to see how to play our own role. We can decide how we should act to obtain the best possible adjustment to the situation . We learn to play our role or roles in one group as well as in different groups. Consider that in one day you may have played the roles of son, student, athlete, customer, errand boy, churchgoer, and visitor.

As time goes on and you mature, you play more and more roles. Your idea or concept of self enlarges as you gain experience in understanding the attitudes of other people and their reactions to you. There is no completeness to one's idea of self. New experiences continually present new opportunities to "see ourselves as others see us" and to revise all early ideas of what we are and what we can do.

The pattern of living of a group called culture. Patterns of living differ in different places within the same country. All over the world people have developed different patterns of living. Differences in culture explain why there are different ideas about the "proper" ways of doing things. These patterns of living are not inherited. They are learned from generation to generation as the young are taught and trained by their elders. They are modifiable patterns that have been tested and improved upon for ages. Culture helps decide our social roles. In addition, culture sets certain limits on these roles. For example, culture sets a pattern of behavior for your role as a student, a son, or a daughter. Culture sets a pattern of behavior for you as a leading or supporting participant on the stage and even as a listener or onlooker among the audience. You do not do as you please but behave as you are expected to behave.

There are times when there is a conflict between the roles you are called upon to play. At such times, you must make sacrifices to adjust to the situation. A member of a basketball team or of an orchestra may, for example have to forego the pleasure of going to a movie, a party or an excursion for he has to spend long hours practicing with his teammates or the rest of his band. The adjustments made in response to conflicts in roles can cause changes or develop new behavior patterns in one's personality.

Your goal in personality development is a well-rounded personality that can help you meet situations in life successfully. You have learned the different factors at work in personality growth. By now you should be able to improve your own behavior patterns and make the best adjustment to those of others.

Bear in mind the fact that what you are going to be you are becoming now. You have the power to direct what you want to become. Use that power!

Personality Development Continues in Secondary Group

Sooner or later, a majority of young people have to shift from the primary group to the secondary group. Usually the shift is attended by difficulties in adjustment. This is so because contacts in the primary groups are warm, close, and have a sympathetic and sheltering influence while those in the secondary groups are cold, impersonal, and usually cruel and competitive in nature.

The shift from the primary to the secondary group may occur when the family moves from one neighborhood to another. Perhaps the young child leaves his town to enter high school in the provincial capital, or leaves the farm to seek work in the city.

The individual who leaves his home and neighborhood is suddenly exposed to a larger world peopled with strangers. In the smaller world, the child is conditioned to a well regulated behavior. In the larger world, his personality is reshaped, because the secondary group forces him to question the patterns he has formed through group experience. Essentially he may not change much for he remains faithful to the habits, customs, and traditions of his family, neighborhood and community. After the child matures in the primary group he usually moves to a secondary group where he continues to learn to fit better in a social world.

In our modern society group life is continually. The relative influence of the primary group is declining. Slowly but surely, our social participation in secondary groups are increasing. Besides, leaders in some secondary groups attempt to personalize the members to make the individuals more loyal to the group. In urban areas; groups are becoming increasingly more specialized. They are devoted to specific purposes and have activities limited to those purposes.

Personality Formation Starts in Primary Groups

Primary groups are characterized by intimate face-to-face association and cooperation. The chief primary groups are the family, the playmates, and the neighborhood friends. To these groups may be added the school, the church, and other small social units. One knows personally all those in the primary groups of which he is a part. He meets directly all their conditioning influences.

In the family the child first learns ways of thinking, acting, and relating oneself to others. Parents use various ways to teach these things. The child learns largely in two ways. He realizes that he is either rewarded or punished by his parents or his older brothers and sisters, depending upon whether he does or does not comply with their wishes. He imitates the people around him particularly if their behavior seems to gain the approval of others. Through imitation he learns many things his family does.

Our religious, moral, and political ideas are for the most part those of our parents. The Christian brought up in the Christian home sees the world with the mores or standards of good conduct of the Christian. So, too, would the Muslim brought up in the Muslim home, or the pagan brought up in the pagan home.

We learn that in our culture we have to act in a certain way. The roles we play are either of two kinds: assigned or acquired. Assigned roles are those we have no control over. We find ourselves already assigned to play the role of boy or girl, the role of member of a particular family, and of a certain nationality or race.

In acquired roles we have a choice. A child of three, for example, must be told by his mother or someone else that he must not take things that do not belong to him without the owner's permission. When he is old enough, he tells himself that he must not take anything from another person's desk or locker. No other person needs to tell this to him if he has learned the rule well as a young child. A child is not born honest, but he can be taught to be honest. If he were dishonest, his conscience as well as society would punish him.

The child who steals was not born dishonest. Either he did not learn the rule well or, for certain reasons, he did not obey the rule he knew. Perhaps he grew up among people who did not value honesty. He might have been told by his parents that honesty is the best policy" but the same parents would boast to the child of shady business deals or of shoplifting at the store when no one was looking. The child learns the behavior of the people around him.

Other acquired roles or behavior traits are illustrated in one's recreational preferences or in one's habits. You may refer basketball to other sports because your own father was a popular player in that particular game. You may even say, "I'm proud I've chosen basketball for it outshines all other sports." Likewise, you may say "I do not smoke because it wasn't practiced in our home."

This process of learning how to behave according to socially accepted is called socialization

From the homes and family, socialization moves on the circle of one's playmates in the neighborhood, and then the school and the larger community. The interests of one's play group determines his recreation habits. If the gang plays "patintero," he plays it also. If the group goes for playing "school" or "housekeeping," one does, too.

Since families in a neighborhood tend to be similar due to economic circumstances and occupations, the neighborhood children with whom one plays probably come from families with similar standards to those he has learned at home. His association with them strengthens his conviction that his ways is right. The play group gives lessons of great worth in fair play, loyalty and other basic virtues.

When the child goes to school, the patterns of thought and behavior developed in him are largely those of the teachers and classmates he admires most. The attention, approval, and affection of other people become as nearly important to him as the satisfaction of his physical needs.

As the child grows in age and experience, his contacts grow and include other groups within the community such as the church and certain clubs and teams. The habits, attitudes, interests, aspirations, customs traditions and mores of the primary groups make the child conform to the accepted social behavior of his community.

If the child comes upon a minority group that does not believe and act as he does it may not affect him very much. While the group may have different standards of behavior, his own concept of what is right as learned from his own family and friends will help him act properly and with confidence.

It is only when the child finds himself in the minority that he finds that some of the things he has learned make life difficult for him. Take the girl in the province, for example, whose manner of speaking is so different that it is criticized by her teacher and made fun of by her classmates. Her speech patterns may have been affected by the speech characteristics of her own region of origin. It may take this girl some time to speak like the others.

The boys who has learned from his parents that "good little boys don't fight" may become miserable on the playground until he learns to give and take in a little boy's world of the school ground, or the neighbor's backyard. But by and large, if he has learned well the rules taught at home, he will still feel that his way is right and abide strongly by those rules.

Environment Also Exerts a Strong Influence on Personality

A child's behavior is also learned from his environment-the people and things around him. At birth, the new-born baby has no understanding of the proper way of behaving in this world. He has to learn to eat, to walk, to talk, to develop honesty and fair play which are accepted behavior patterns in his social environment. The people he comes in contact with have much to do with personality development.

The group in which we live may be classified into two-primary groups and secondary groups-each of which has to do with personality building.

Heredity Is a Strong Factor in Personality Development

We know that a new individual develops when a male cell (sperm) combines with a female cell (ovum). Soon after the sperm penetrates the ovum, the head of the sperm divides and releases twenty-four small bodies in the nucleus of the cell (chromosomes). These chromosomes pair with those of the ovum which also number twenty-four. The new individual, therefore, starts life with forty-eight chromosomes, each different from the others in shape and size. Through a process of division and redivision, each cell in the new individual eventually has an exact duplicate of the original set of chromosomes. This explains why a child resembles his father's family in some respects and his mother's family in others, for the chromosomes carry the characteristics of the families concerned.

Each chromosomes is made up of small elements called genes which are inherited from the parents. Each pair of genes, one from the father and one from the mother, is responsible for a particular aspect of a child's development. Each pair determines some physical feature of the child.

The genes contain the hereditary factors which determine eye and hair color and quality, height, shape of the head and facial features, skin color and other physical features. There are traits which are strong or dominant and traits which are weak or recessive

When a gene carrying a dominant trait is paired with a gene carrying a recessive trait, the dominant trait is transmitted to the child. This explains why a child, for example, has his father's height or his mother's nose. Other paired genes join to produce a seeming combination of both traits which explains a skin color somewhere between that of the father's very dark skin, and the mother's which is very fair.

Heredity also influences the nervous system and affects the child's mental development. Let us distinguish two important terms: aptitude and ability. Aptitude is a pattern of traits needed for learning a particular task. Ability is the power to do the task. Our abilities depend to a considerable extent upon our aptitudes. Aptitudes are inherited; abilities are acquired through practice. If you are an excellent musician, painter or sculptor, will your children be excellent artists, too? If you are a bright student, will your children also be bright student?

Aptitudes for the arts or for scholarship are inherited, but artistic or scholastic abilities must be built upon aptitudes through proper training and experience. Aptitude alone does not mean ability to perform the task. Aptitudes set a limit on ability, but training and experience will help determine how far you can develop your abilities. Abilities are developed; not inherited. Things that you do to improve yourself mentally or physically cannot be passed on to your offspring through heredity.

There are hereditary factors transmitted to the child by parents for traits they do not show themselves. This explains why a child may not resemble either parent but resembles relatives on both sides. The parents, of course, received their physical characteristics from the chromosomes of their own parents who in turn received theirs from the respective parents, and so on, as far back as we can imagine. This explains why members of a family do not always resemble each other as a result of the various combinations of the genes. You can also understand why these members of the family are at the same time more like each other than the people outside their family.

How is Personality Developed?

Our personalities are the products of many factors and conditions which we have inherited or which exist in our environment. No two persons, except identical twins, have the same heredity. No two persons react in the same way to their environments. Every personality is unique and makes the individual different from others.

Some people believe that heredity is the most important factor that decides what any person will be like. Other people believe that the environment is the most important influence in deciding the behavior of any person. For ages these two viewpoints have been expressed and the question as to which is more important has been discussed. Today scientists agree that the best approach to the problem of explaining behavior is a study of the combination of the two influences - heredity and environment.

Why Do We Need to Study Personality?

Consider the children of the same parents that you know. Note that these children, reared in the same environment, still differ greatly from each other and from their parents. While you may have fun with Benjamin who is as old as you are, you find it difficult even to start conversation with his brother Joseph. To you and to most of your friends, Joe, who is usually quiet, is a puzzle. However, another brother Bong talks a lot and plays the piano very well. He makes you feel at ease, and people like him. Still, you would rather be with Ben than with either Joseph or Bong.

In our day-to-day lives we come in contact with many kinds of people. Some we like, some we dislike, and some, for whom we have no particular feeling about. But we must get along with all these people. It is impossible to associate only with those we like. If we are to get along with others, we must understand ourselves first. These are the reasons why understanding behavior differences, that is personality differences, is necessary.

What is Personality?

An authority once said, "Every man is three men: the man he thinks he is, the man others think he is, and the man he really is." Do you agree with this statement?

Do you ever wonder why one person differs from another? Why do some of your friends always seem happy and friendly? Why are others often grouchy and not much fun to be with? How else does one differ from the rest? Does he differ because of the way he acts? thinks? impresses other people? Is it personality that sets him apart from others? The answer to these last five questions is "yes." William C. Menninger, a noted doctor, defines personality as "all that a person has been, is, and hopes to be." Ernest R. Hillgard, an eminent psychologist, defines personality as "the sum total of individual characteristics and ways of behaving which, in their organization or patterning, describe an individual's unique adjustments to his environment." Joseph I. Arnold and Harlan A. Philip think of personality as "the total of the behavior patterns of a person."

Personality, therefore, consists of your physical makeup and your thoughts, memories, feelings, motives, reactions, experiences and even your dreams and wishes for the future. Every individual personality is unique. This means that it is unlike any other because it is the sum total of different environmental factors. Every personality has its own way of reacting to these factors in a way that reflects behavior unique to the individual.