Relationship Skills: A Quickstart Guide to Temperament Judging & Perceiving

Good morning everybody and welcome back to the fourth part of our series on temperament. Today we're going to be talking about judges and perceivers. I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. I want to welcome everybody who has tuned in today. I appreciate you being here. I know Mondays can be kind of difficult. So, you know, I'm really glad that you're here. And please feel free to ask questions about temperament or relationships or, you know, know all things mental health in the comments and I will respond to them as quickly as possible. So in the past four days we've talked about different dimensions of temperament. Now remember, temperament occurs along a continuum. One side's not worse or better than the other, they're just different. We talked about extroverts and introverts and remember I conceptualized that as kind of how we prefer our environment, whether we want to be around a lot of people or a few people and you know, in a big way, you know, kind of how we think. Extroverts tend to think and talk at the same time. Introverts tend to be more reflective. Then we move down to sensing and sensing and intuitive. And that dimension is really how we conceptualize process, information, problem solve, whether it's bottom up or top down. Then Friday we talked about where people's motivation comes from. Thinkers tend to drive their motivation and view the world through a lens of true or false based on rules and structure. Perceivers, or I'm sorry, not perceivers, feelers tend to derive their motivation from what's going to make the most people happy and promote the most harmony. Again, neither one is right or wrong. They're just different. And the beauty, as I've talked about before, the beauty of both sides is that they bring a different dimension. We can't live in a world that is based solely on facts. But we also unfortunately can't live in a world that's based solely on love and harmony. We have to have some melding. We have to take the mix, the science with the heart, so to speak. So today we're going to be talking about judging and perceiving. And in general, I conceptualize this dimension as the time management dimension like we've done in the other videos. I'm going to talk about each one as we go and how it may apply to relationships, work environments and recovery. So let's start with judging and perceiving. Judgers like to plan ahead and I am, you know, this is one of those dimensions I am like pegged out on the judger side. I am not spontaneous at all so I will give you some examples there. My husband on the other hand tends to be a lot more spontaneous. He may not be way over here, but he can handle drop back and punt a lot better than I can. So. And, and our kids, well actually both of our children tend to be much more on the judger side, much more on the structured side than than he is. So it's kind of interesting in our household. But judgers, we like to plan ahead. We're the ones who go into our Google calendar and have repeating events for the next six months and everything is color coded and that gives us a sense of order, that gives us a sense of calm in some ways we know how our time is allocated so we know everything's going to get done and you know, we don't have to worry about will I have time for this. Perceivers adapt as they go. They tend to be the ones that on Sunday night may make a to do list for the week and they may have 15 things on the to do list that they got to get done. But you know, there's no hard and fast time that it needs to be done. It kind of goes on a spurt of energy. Well, let's talk about relationships with this and I'll give you the perfect example. When my husband and I were newly married, I was working on my dissertation and he was working midnight shift and I remember one day I was sitting in my office and I was working on my dissertation, just you know, typing away and he got up, he woke up, it was like, I don't know, one o' clock in the afternoon and he came into the office and he sat down and he started to talk to me. And I found this very frustrating because I was in the middle of working on my dissertation. Remember we talked about in the ei, I am one of those people that's one of my introvert to mentions is I don't deal well with interruptions. But I also, you know, at that point we didn't have kids. I was still very structured almost to the point of obsessive compulsive personality disorder structured. And I wasn't, you know, dropping what I was doing and, and giving him my 100% full attention. And he got a little bit offended. He said do I have to schedule time in to talk to you? And I'm like, well this is dissertation time, you know, at 3 o' clock I'll be done and we, we can talk. And I very quickly learned that that was not the way to marital harmony. But you know, judgers we, we have these time blocks and we like to stay in our time blocks. Just like this show. I do it every weekday morning at 9:30, not 9:45, not whenever I get a moment but 9:30 and that is how I like it. Helps me know what to anticipate. When perceivers are much more adaptive so they, they do better at handling kind of whatever comes up. Judgers are self disciplined and purposeful. We do what's on our schedule and we do it with purpose. We don't schedule in things that don't need to be there. So we do, we may have open blocks but we, we tend to be very disciplined. If I'm, you know, with the gym, I go to the gym every morning 5am I'm there. You know, you can pretty much set your clock by what I do. Perceivers tend to be much more flexible and tolerant. So in recovery this is, can be a stumbling block for people. Judgers tend to get thrown for a loop when life does not go according to plan. That, that really, you know, is not a great thing. Perceivers don't mind, you know, things don't go as planned, they can drop back and punt. They got no problem with it. So in recovery it's important for judgers to make sure that they have a plan B and maybe even a plan C so they can adapt if something happens. Maybe they need to go to a support group meeting and they have to work late. Oh my gosh. So how am I going to get that meeting in? Well what could you do? Is there another meeting? Could you go online? You know, what are your options should your initial plan get thwarted in some way? And it's really important for judgers to be able to problem solve when they encounter, when they encounter challenges. And distress tolerance skills are super important here because when a judge's schedule gets thrown for a loop it tends to put us in a fight or flight sort of stage. And it's hard to think when you're in that emotional mind, when you're in that fight or flight threat sort of place. So it's important to practice distress tolerance skills then step back and go okay, what are my options here? It can also be helpful for judgers to have friends, significant others who are perceivers, who do better with spontaneity and drop back and punt. Because then when something doesn't go right and we can't seem to figure out how to react at that point we can call them and go okay, this is what happened, what do you think I should do? And perceivers tend to be able to, you know, brainstorm really quickly. So that's good. You know, thinking of different ways to make that work. Now in relationships, judgers are great because they keep everything on task. The judger is going to, you know, pay the bills the same time, the same day every single month. And they are the ones that are, you know, on task, if you will. Perceivers aren't quite, they'll, they'll pay the bills at some point, you know, before the, before the 5th of the month or whatever it is. But judgers can be good at help, helping keep a relationship or a family on task with the important things. Perceivers are the ones that are really good when something happens. Like, you know, it's winter here and this weekend our heat wasn't working and that was not scheduled. We did not have something in the schedule for dealing with a heat outage. And so try brainstorming. Okay, what are our options here? Well, thankfully we have two heating systems, so the upstairs heat was working. But perceivers are great at saying, all right, we got to get creative here. Judgers thrive on order, where perceivers thrive on spontaneity. When you have a judger and a perceiver in the same relationship, perceivers can get really bored and feel really hemmed in if everything has to be scheduled out and structured. You know, back to my husband and I again when we were dating. You know, once we had kids, I learned to be much more flexible because I had to. But you know, when we were dating, he knew that because just the way I'm wired, if he wanted to go out on the weekend, he needed to tell me on Wednesday or something so I could work that into my schedule and I wouldn't schedule anything over it. So I didn't have laundry or studying or something scheduled in and that worked for me. So when you're a perceivers in a relationship with a judger, they need to be respectful or cognizant of that, that person's need for advanced knowledge. A judger often if you call them up on Friday and you say, hey, I'm bored, let's go out, they may not even have anything else to do, but they'll probably say no because they hadn't planned it out ahead of time. And doing something that's not pre planned is very stressful to a lot of us. So even recognizing that in your friends, if you've got friends who, you know, need to plan a couple hours or a day in advance, recognizing that with one of our compromises when, you know, we were first dating, Was, you know, we would want to go out on the weekends. And like I said, Chuck tends to be more spontaneous than I am. So instead of forcing, planning everything out where, you know, there was no room for spontaneity, I just knew, for example, on Saturday that we were going to be spending the day together and I didn't have to know exactly what we were doing. I just knew my time was blocked off for that at that point. So the time and the day were set aside. But what we did could be a little bit more spontaneous and that was a reasonable compromise in recovery. It is important, for example, for some people who work the steps, do 90 meetings in 90 days. And spontaneity doesn't really cut it here because, you know, you, it's important to make those meetings. So there has to be some level of order there, knowing that you have to make a meeting today. But for the spontaneous person, they may not say, I'm going to go to the 7 o' clock meeting at XYZ Church every single day. They may say, I'm going to go to a meeting every day. Okay. So they don't feel quite as oppressed. Judgers tend to get things done early, plan ahead, and work steadily. In college, I was always petrified that if I waited until the night before a paper was due, my, I would get writer's block or my printer would act up or who knows, this was long before email was a big thing. So I always plan to have my papers done two days ahead of time. That way, if anything went wrong, I had plenty of time to try to figure out how to get that paper, paper done or, you know, whatever. Same thing. When I was working in community mental health and we had, we were writing grants. Love writing grants. However, you know, it was important to get it done early so I could send it to the people who would proofread it and make sure that I didn't miss any of those details because, y' all know, know I'm not a detail person and I had it scheduled out so I would know when things needed to be done. Perceivers tend to get things done at the last minute depending on a spurt of energy. Remember we talked about, you know, the, the judgers tend to schedule things out and the perceivers tend to have to do lists. All right, well, I'll give you another example. With community mental health. In community mental health or in counseling period, or even in medicine, you have to do case notes on your clients every time you see somebody. And that just makes for good practice. That's Wonderful. However, a lot of us really hate doing those things. I'll be honest, you know, that is not the part of the job that we like. We like helping people, not documenting at all. The judger will do things like do concurrent notes where at the end of session instead of having a 50 minute session and 10 minutes to write your notes, you have a 50 minute session and then the last 10 minutes of the hour, the two of you write the note together. So that could be one way that a judger may make sure that the notes get done. Or maybe they have an hour set aside at the end of the day every day to do their notes. Perceivers, yeah, they'll get the notes done at some point. Sometime today I'll do my notes. Unfortunately, especially in residential settings or intensive outpatient settings, there's often a lot of emergencies and stuff that comes up. So I would find that when we got to time for audits, a lot of times if I hadn't stayed on top of things, my staff would be way behind in their notes and they'd have to hurry up to get their notes written in order to have them done in time for the audit. And that has all kinds of problems anyway, you know, ethically we really need to do notes as it, as it happens. But so one thing that I learned was to tell my staff ahead of time, you know, we've plan on having an audit at the end of the month or I need to have your notes on Friday. If I knew that there was going to be an audit the following Friday and that would encourage them, that that would move up their last minute, so to speak and that would make sure that in reality things were done early. So I had time to spot check. Judgers define and work within limits. We know we've got eight hours to get something done and we pace ourselves and we're really good at pacing ourselves. Perceivers tend to want more information. They're like, okay, well we could do these things, you know, I've got eight hours but let me think about how all the different ways I could get it done and you know, they're trying to get more information about what is important in the task and what needs to be done. They may fail to actually ever get started. Judgers, we tend to be hasty in making decisions. We take what's in front of us and go, okay. All these factors considered, bada bing, this is my decision. Perceivers want more information, always think there's plenty of time and may fail to make decisions. Let's go to a relationship you're planning your vacation as a judger, I may say, okay, well, we're going to go on vacation the first week in June. It's going to be hot and the beaches are going to be completely crowded and you know, whatever factors into my decision, and I will make a decision about where we're going to go or where I want to go and you know, what I would like to do given all those factors that I have right now. Now, perceivers may spend a lot of time thinking, okay, well, first week in June we could do this or I wonder what the cruises are like at that point in time, you know, and I've never really looked into mountain cabins or what about going skiing in, you know, wherever there's snow in June. So perceivers tend to get caught up in maybe looking at all the possibilities and may actually fail to make those travel arrangements in a timely fashion. And you know, if you make travel arrangements, like six weeks out tends to be cheaper than if you wait until the very last minute. Judgers, as you've seen, are time and deadline oriented. And perceivers tend to think that, you know, people who are judging tend to be too rigid. And that's true if you're both on opposite ends of the spectrum, which is why it's important to appreciate what each person brings to the table. Perceivers really help judgers get outside the box and you know, look up and look at possibilities, consider possibilities and not be too hasty and too automated. Judgers, on the other hand, can help perceivers, you know, actually get things done and, and keep moving forward. Judgers are excellent planners, but they may not appreciate or make use of things which are not planned or expected so well and, and perceivers are good at handling unplanned events, but may not make effective choices among the possibilities because they just so overwhelmed with their possibilities. It is great in relationships, in recovery, in, in work to have on a team, whatever, family team, whatever you want to call it, to have judgers and perceivers. You need planners, but you also need people that are excited and, you know, deal, handle it well when things go a little bit awry and they can drop back and punt. So it is important to recognize those things. It's important to recognize what you need, you know, in terms of your temperament to reduce your stress. If you're one of those people who really does not like the unexpected, like me, working in an emergency room, for example, may not be your best place. Working as a cop may not be your best thing. You know, you want to try out different occupations, different careers, different Environments to find things that are not so spontaneous or so unpredictable that you are under a constant state of stress. I remember for me, when I was in undergraduate, I volunteered at a crisis hotline. Great experience. But I learned very quickly that that was a very stressful environment for me because I'd be there alone. And we had five lines. Okay, so just think about that for a second. Five lines, one person. And all five lines were for people who were in extreme crisis or suicidal, sometimes wouldn't get hardly a phone call. Other times I'd be there by myself and I'd have three or four people on the line who were actively suicidal. And that amount of unpredictability and not knowing if I was going to have extreme stress or a really quiet night was exhausting for me, which is kind of akin to an emergency room. I think emergency rooms never really have a quiet night, but. And I recognize that that was a bad fit for me. I do much better if I know that I'm going to have, you know, I'm going to teach certain hours, I'm going to have clients certain times. But at any point, if I've got a client, it's just one person and one person and me, you know, I can handle that. It's overwhelming to me, for example, to have three or four people who are actively contemplating suicide that I am trying to de. Escalate concurrently on multiple different lines. So, you know, I knew that that would not be a good sort of setting for me. Some people really thrive in a crisis environment. And great for them, you know, we need those people who can do that. I know that that's not me. And by the same token, perceivers who, you know, if. If you have somebody who's a perceiver who likes spontaneity, they are probably going to find working as an accountant, for example. An example, or working in retail or something else where there's not a lot of variability. Extremely tedious and boring and mundane. So they may find it. Find themselves very unhappy in those situations. There was a book that was written many, many, many moons ago called what color is your parachute? And it really talks a lot about finding work environments that conform to as best as. As best as they can to your temperament. The Kircy website, kircy.com if you go there, he talks about the four basic temperament groups and the different types of careers that are preferred by each temperament group. But it's important to remember that temperament permeates every single area of our lives, Our relationships, how we deal with our. How we raise our Children, how we go to school, you know, there's a lot more to temperament and, and even our recovery process and our health and wellness plans. So there's a lot more to temperament than just vocational placement. What questions do you have about judging or perceiving? And yes, before anybody asks people who are really far to the, to the left, if you want to say that on the judging dimension, you know, can have characteristics of obsessive compulsive personality disorder, but it's important to recognize that things that exist, characteristics that we have, often overlap with a lot of things in the dsm. But the crit, the important point is that it's not a disorder until it starts causing you significant distress in one or more areas of life. If you are, you know, a strong judger like I am, you know, very structured and you know, that sort of thing, but it doesn't cause problems in your relationships, it doesn't cause you significant emotional distress, it doesn't cause you problems at work, well then even if you have every single characteristic of, you know, a particular quote disorder, if it's not causing you problems, you know, it is within that what we call normative range. Perceivers can be procrastinators at times because they are getting things done. They're just kind of waiting on that spurt of energy. They're like, I know I've got to do laundry this weekend, but oh crap, I'm just not feeling it right now. And then all of a sudden at 10 o' clock at night on Sunday, they're like, well, that spurt of energy never happened. But guess what? I don't have any clean underwear for Monday, so I guess I need to do laundry now. So sometimes that spurt of energy comes from stress. When they've gotten to sort of the end of the line on that, on their time frame and the gotta kicks in instead of the want to. In terms of compromise. Now remember, there's nothing wrong with being extreme on the temperaments. It's just kind of how you are. But if it's causing problems in or adding stress in your relationships or in your world in some way, then figure out what dimensions are causing stress and then figure out how you can compromise. For example, planning ahead. If you're one of those people like me who has your Google Calendar set to send you push notifications, like pretty much every time you turn around that may be too structured. You're not leaving yourself any space. So looking back and identifying the things that have to be in there and then taking out as much as you can to leave yourself some open spaces, some wiggle room, so to speak. So if a friend does call you, you know, you have this open space on Friday afternoons that if a friend does call you and want wants to go out to dinner then or lunch then, hey, I don't, I actually don't have anything on my schedule at the moment. So judgers need to be extremely careful of not over scheduling themselves so they can take advantage of some opportunities as they arise. Recognizing that thriving on order and getting things done early is not a problem, you know, that's, that's a good thing. But thriving on spontaneity is also not necessarily a problem. It comes back down to what is important in your life and how do you want to use your energy. We talked, oh gosh, two weeks ago about psychological flexibility and purposeful action defining what is it over here that describes my rich and meaningful life and what do I want life to be like? Do I want to be following a schedule where every 15 minutes I'm being told to do something else by my push notifications? Does that make me happy or not? And if not, what can I change? What can I eliminate? So I've got a little bit more flexibility. Like I said, when my kids were born, it very quickly brought me a little bit more midline because I couldn't tell my infant son, well, hang on for 45 minutes until this time block is up and then I can change your diaper. You know, that's obviously not kosher. So once my kids were born, you know, they were much more important to me than my schedule. So it was important for me and my husband. By the same token, I needed to focus on, you know, let's look at some areas in this dimension where we're butting heads and how can we compromise? So I don't feel completely stressed out, but he doesn't feel completely bored and oppressed. So it depends on the dimensions. There's no easy way to say, just magically do this and you know you'll compromise. But recognizing the situations in which you need to be more flexible, as you become more flexible for some of us, rigidity, if you want to call it that, structure is a way of maintaining control. And once as you start to realize that if you aren't in control all the time, guess what, the world is not going to fall apart, it becomes easier to loosen your grip on the reins a little bit and not necessarily have everything completely planned out. So part of being going more midline may also be looking at the motivations. Between about why do you feel like you have to plan everything out and maintain this much structure? What would happen if you just said, you know, throw caution to the wind, let's just see what happens today? And, you know, how would you feel about that? And when a judger. Well, when anybody, not just a judger, when anybody is thrown into an environment that is completely opposite of their preferences, it creates a lot of stress. So it's important to figure out, all right, what aspects of this situation can I deal with right now, can I actually plan on? And my son, when he was born, you know, the one that made me much more flexible, he had gastric reflux, and, you know, that's like colic on steroids. And he screamed and he cried, and I swear the boy never slept for the first three months until we figured out what was going on and got him on acid reducers. But it was very frustrating for me because I couldn't schedule. I couldn't figure out when there was a time to sleep. I couldn't figure out when there was a time to eat, when I could get my work done. And I felt like everything was just, you know, dissolving around me and I was losing control of everything. And it was really challenging at that point. And I had to start getting back some semblance of routine and figuring out, okay, what aspects of this can I control? You know, and there, there were certain things at that time I couldn't control until we figured out what was, you know, causing his. Him to be so miserable and unhappy, which just broke my heart. And that was another thing I couldn't control. It's agonizing for a parent to see their child in pain or in distress, especially when they're. When they're itty bitty and can't tell you what's wrong. So trying to figure out what aspects of this can I control. I could make doctor's appointments, I could, you know, I could set out a plan. So I could see that in, hopefully in three months, you know, things would be better and I would have that structure back again. And that can be challenging. I've. I know people whose parents have fallen ill and they've had to move in with their parents for a short period of time, or their parents have Alzheimer's and moved in with them. And that can be very chaotic because with a person with advanced dementia or Alzheimer's timers, you never know whether you're going to have a good moment or a bad moment. It's not even a good day or a bad day. It's a moment by moment thing. And that can be very stressful and exhausting for somebody who likes to plan. So it's important to figure out, okay, given my preferences, what is it that I need to feel okay to reduce my stress in this particular situation? And for somebody with a family member with Alzheimer's, maybe that means having a respite care worker come in three hours a day to give you a break. So you can actually, you know, that three hours is coming up and you'll be able to get your stuff, get your stuff done. You know, it just depends on the situation. But it is important to recognize that when you're not in a place that is meshing with your temperament, it's going to add stress and trying to look at that situation and say, okay, what aspects of this do I have control over and can I modify in a way that makes sense to reduce my stress levels? Are there other questions? These have been great questions and I really do love, you know, talking about temperament because I find it is so important. Oh gosh. Told you guys about this the other day. There's a book, and it's a really old book. It's called Effective Teaching Effective Learning by Alice M. Fairhurst and Lisa L. Fairhurst. It was published in 1995 and I think this was the only edition. So you can find it pretty cheap used on online or maybe even at your library. But it is shows you how to use temperament in the classroom. But you'll find when you read, read through it, there are a lot of great tips for how to use temperament in relationships and in parenting. You know, they don't spell it out that way, but if you read it through the lens of a parent, you know, how can I get my children to wrap their heads around this or learn what I want them to learn? You know, keeping a household going in many ways is very similar to keeping a classroom going. So there's a lot of really cool tips in this book. So again, it's Effective Teaching Effective Learning by Alice Fairhurst. One of my favorites, obviously, because I actually have it in hard copy. Of course, I'm one of those fuddy duddies who really prefers hard copy. I would love to have everything in hard copy, but we don't do that anymore. And it's much better for the environment to do PDFs and yada yada. But are there any other questions? Alrighty. So as usual, please let me know in the comments if there are particular topics you want me to cover because I am more than happy to add those to the list. And my list is not very long right now. So pretty much anything you asked me to cover, I'll either get to this week or next week. But I would much rather be talking about something that you guys are super interested in than just, you know, pulling stuff out of thin air. But I will be here every weekday at 9:30am to answer your questions about all things mental health. And happy holidays to you too, Nick. You see, I'm in my Christmas red this morning. I had to break out the the holiday stuff. I think this weekend we're probably going to put up our Christmas tree. So I'm looking forward to that. Everybody have a safe, happy and healthy day.