Understanding Character

Understanding Character

Chuck Johnson

Tamara Johnson Matheus

Johnson & Johnson Matheus

Copyright © 2018 by Charles Johnson Associates, Inc.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Cover design: Sumner McKenzie, Inc

Interior design: Charity Chimni Author Services

In Memory of Claude Everett Johnson who planted the original seeds for Understanding Character.

And to our many friends at Harmons, thank you.

Contents

Why Revise?

Personal or Professional?

PART ONE

Understanding Character Explained:

An Unconventional Approach to Understanding People

Understanding Character:

What is it?

Understanding Character:

What does it achieve?

Understanding Character:

Understanding Cause & Effect

Three Days

Successfully Competing

PART TWO

The Concept of the Three-Legged Stool

A Character Reasonably Congruent with the Life We Are Leading

Happy & Fulfilled

The Process That Forms Character

(We do Not Know but Will Share Our Thoughts)

The Ability to Cope with Stress

Four Different People

Exceeding One’s Character

PART THREE

The Second Leg: Technical Expertise

Lee the Bakery Manager

A Good Worker is Over-Assigned

PART FOUR

The Third Leg: Broadened Horizons

How We Broaden Our Horizons and Increase Depth:

Pepsi Cups

Under-Assignment & Lack of Broadened Horizons:

How it Interfered with Roxy’s Happiness & Achievement

Who Is In Charge?

More about the The Third Leg of the Three-Legged Stool:

The Significance of Broadened Horizons

Broadening Horizons - Chuck

Broadening Horizons – Jeanelle

Broadening Horizons – Tamara

PART FIVE

Dean Peterson

Bringing Understanding Character to Harmons & my Personal Experience

Real Conversation

Discussion with Dean about why communication is difficult

Members of the Harmon Family

Doreen, Bob, Amber, and Corrine

Paulie Felice

Open & Trusting

Frank

It’s All About Relationships

Laurie

My Understanding Character Journey

Aimee

I learned I can lead

Tamara Johnson Matheus

Learning about myself and gaining my understanding of character

Hearing from those we no longer see

Drew

Theresa

Lori

Those who are helped by

Understanding Character are helpful to us

Chuck Johnson

The Development of Understanding Character

Learning how to productively use a survey

Meeting and Working with Harmons

About the Authors

Contacting Us:

Why Revise?

We began this book a long time ago and finally published it in 2019. We are not authors; we are people who provide helpful information – called Understanding Character – to our clients and guide them through the process of productive application. That being said, we felt we should attempt to put what we know into book form. At the time, we sought input from individuals we either currently work with or had worked with. Those people helped us a lot and we appreciate it. But, after publication, we realized that the book was written for readers who already understood a lot about Understanding Character.

In 2020, we decided to revise the book and create a manuscript that (we hope) makes sense to an audience who are not already acquainted with Understanding Character. We did not change the content of the book; we changed the order of the text and are providing additional perspective. Now, with the revisions, the book takes the reader through the material much the same as a student going to Understanding Character classes. The information in this book covers what a student gains when attending both the Basic and the Intermediate levels of Understanding Character class. (There are five levels of classes: Basic, Intermediate, Advanced, Senior, Philosophical. Philosophical classes are discussions that continue without end. Classes begin with more information being given from the instructor and evolve into more group discussion as students gain an understanding of character.)

We emphasize the concept of our three-legged stool throughout this revised edition. This concept helps the reader with how the information in Understanding Character all fits together and can be applied.

We have always said and continue to say that Understanding Character is designed to be helpful – that’s all. It will help you think about people in a different way, and shed light on why people behave the way they do. It is meant for everyday life and focuses on those of us who are living day-to-day, regular lives that include work and family and social activities. If you have to lead people, relate to people, organize people – Understanding Character will help you see the differences in people and why they are significant.

The stories in this book are true; we personally experienced them. Some of the names have been changed.

Personal or Professional?

When we began to write this book, we felt we needed to pick a lane; we needed to determine if our book would be a personal growth book – Understanding Character is centered on personal growth – or if our book would be a business book. We provide Understanding Character for our business clients; they are operating companies and we help them with decisions and development regarding people.

But choosing a lane, we realized, was impossible. Understanding is both personal and professional.

Understanding Character is information that allows each person to better understand themselves as well as others. It is a very individual experience. This journey makes Understanding Character a personal growth experience.

In the workplace, this personal growth results in calmness, clear thinking, more efficiency, and more productivity. This – as a whole – allows the business to improve. It creates an edge over the competition. Understanding Character is a professional experience.

Understanding Character is both personal and professional; one lane is inextricably linked with the other.

PART ONE

UNDERSTANDING CHARACTER:

THE OVERVIEW

Understanding Character Explained:

An Unconventional Approach to Understanding People

What do we mean by the word character? We need to be clear about our definition. Summed up, we define character as the person we truly are.

The definition goes something like this: the person we are, our true, unique, core person; being in accord with a person’s usual qualities or traits.

Common usage for the word character often includes reputation. Sometimes, because of a person’s behavior, people say, that guy is a real character. As you read, you will see that we are not using the word that way; we are not discussing reputation.

When we use the word character, we are describing who a person truly is.

Understanding who a person truly is allows us to relate to others much more effectively. Our work is primarily with those who are responsible for leading teams within client companies. In the context of leadership, we know that a person who is leading needs to understand not only his or her own character but also needs to understand the character of those they are leading. When leaders understand character, goals that seemed difficult or perhaps even impossible become attainable.

As we go along, we will explain the relationship between character and behavior, and we’ll explain that every person will behave based on the character they have. This will help you understand why people either do or do not accomplish things the way you expect them to.

Most information regarding people relies on the conventional thinking that any person can be trained to behave differently. For example, any person can learn to be self-confident or persistent. Conventional thinking is that every person can – if they try hard enough – learn to behave in a given fashion; we know that is nearly always not true.

Understanding Character is unconventional. Through Understanding Character, we learn that every person must behave based on their character. An aggressive person will be pushy; an unassertive person will be quiet; a hesitant person will not jump in; a non-persistent person will give up. Asking or encouraging someone to be someone they are not – long term – is futile. This concept of character is somewhat complex, and we will explain it in depth.

Conventional thinking also includes that any person can learn to do anything – any task or job. This thinking, too, is nearly always not true. We will explain why successfully training (successful in the long-term) a person is only achieved when the goal of the training is reasonably congruent with the person they truly are, their character.

It is true that most people can be taught to do something on a technical level – milk a cow or do math problems or enter data on a computer or drive a car or make a pot of coffee. Even more complex examples could include learning to fly an aircraft or complete the equations necessary to calculate the trajectory to the moon. But only the person who is doing something that is a reasonable fit for their character will be able to do that thing with long-term success.

As we explain Understanding Character, we will include that there are a good number of tests, assessments, and surveys available that work towards helping understand a person. We have found that many of them are reasonably accurate but that they need a way to be practically applied. Using Understanding Character, there is a way to achieve useful, practical application of those tools.

Understanding Character:

What is it?

Understanding Character is a process – an education if you will – that includes a combination of formal classes, discussion groups, one-on-one conversations, and retreats to expand the student’s horizons. This process provides an opportunity to gain an understanding of character. You can deeply understand your own character (who you are as a person) as well as understand the character of others (who they are as persons).

The process helps us learn the importance of each person as a different person; different from one another. Nearly all of us has a mom or grandma or teacher or dad who told us, you are unique, no one else is like you as we were growing up. Most of us have heard these words, likely many times over. However, it seems that many people do not register much significance when they hear those words; it turns out that these words are very significant.

We find the significance in the cause and effect relationship that exists between character and behavior. Think about it this way: character is the cause; behavior is the effect. Often when we are interacting with another person, we make observations based on their behavior without understanding the cause of that behavior. Not understanding what is causing the behavior often leads to incorrect assumptions and other difficulties.

In a class, we draw the above rectangles on a board to illustrate the cause and effect relationship between character and behavior. Character – the cause – is on the bottom because it is the foundation, similar to the foundation of a building. It is solid and is the unchangeable source of our behavior

Understanding Character is a method which allows application of the information that some assessment tools, some with reasonable accuracy, reveal. There are seemingly endless tools that attempt to help us understand a person, understand who they are; however, what we do with that information seems very vague, and often as not, it ends up in a drawer and not used for any real purpose. It turns out to be less helpful than it could be.

Understanding Character:

What does it achieve?

Understanding Character allows us to understand the cause – the character – (and the resulting behavior) of a person and, therefore, to understand and accept both ourselves and others for who we – and they – truly are. An understanding of the cause of behavior decreases friction between people and allows for barriers to be broken down. When there is an understanding of character, people communicate better. Simply put, when we understand character, we all get along better.

Understanding Character creates a personal comfort; when we deeply understand and accept the person we are and begin to see better how we fit with others – the likenesses as well as the differences – we feel more comfortable. An understanding and acceptance of ourselves creates a calmness, an improved ability to pause and reflect, a sort of smoothing out of the rough edges.

William James said, Whenever two people meet there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.

He was right about that, and it creates confusion. It is too many people for effective communication – we get lost in it and relating to one another can be very difficult.

With Understanding Character, we can decrease that number. With a deeper understanding, we can simply be two people being who we truly are; we can get rid of the other four perceptions. That allows for more productive and comfortable communication. We can relate to each other better, understand why we feel the way we do, and even better understand how the other person feels. We understand the differences between our feelings and others’ feelings.

This level of understanding takes time. When working with a group of participants in Understanding Character, we encourage all participants to think of the information as if it were a big bowl of fruit sitting in the middle of a table. Some might take a banana; some might prefer oranges or grapes. As classes and discussions progress, each person will take from the bowl what seems right, what makes sense. Sometimes, a person may not take anything at all which is perfectly acceptable. Each person tends to get something a little different from the other person; over time, most tend to assemble the information for themselves in ways that make sense to them. Each person reaches a given level of understanding for themselves. Education works like that and Understanding Character is an education.

That is how it works. No one person will end up understanding about character the same way another person understands – it is an individual process. We encourage every person to do what seems right for him or her. In the end, nearly everyone understands the information. While individuals take different routes, gradually there is an overall and similar understanding for all: character is the cause; behavior is the effect.

We have included information in this book about how Understanding Character came to be. While it was being developed, we realized that we need to make sure that no person who was participating was required to obtain a specific goal. We decided that There Are No Requirements. For all the years when we were assembling the information, we stuck to that theme and to this day we say those words in each class. We do not require that any student gain any particular knowledge or understanding. There is no test. Not having requirements allows the student to have freedom; each person will consider the information being presented and decide whether it seems reasonable and useful. Each student can absorb it or discard it. There Are No Requirements.

We adopted this approach because we think people need to be able to figure out for themselves if, when, and how their understanding develops; we know we cannot just tell someone to understand or to accept – it is too conceptual, too intangible, for that. Each person needs to be able to go at a pace that suits him/her and, in the long run, figure it out. We have always known that people don't like to be fixed by others. The average person living in the real world is intelligent enough to fix themselves providing they understand character.

Always keep in mind that Understanding Character is not a conventional approach. It will help if you put everything you know about people – about leadership development, about self-improvement, and the like – on the shelf. When immersed in trying to understand character, having those things you already know put away for a while will tend to help you make sense of the information more quickly and with more ease. It is best if you try not to assimilate it with other information because simply put; it will not assimilate.

Understanding Character allows us to understand and accept others for who they truly are; this allows friction to decrease and barriers between people to be broken down. Deeply understanding and accepting that each of us is a different person, has a different character, helps us to get along better. Understanding this person is not like me is a powerful asset.

Understanding Character:

Understanding Cause & Effect

An example of the concept of cause and effect is gravity. If we are holding a five-pound weight away from our body and we let go of it, it will fall down. So long as we are on planet Earth, it will never fall up. Why? Because of the physical law of gravity. It cannot be violated. If we try to violate it by, say, holding that five-pound weight for twenty minutes, we will pay a price. That price is our muscles will start to ache. No matter how strong we are, eventually, we will have to put it down (or drop it) — no way around it.

Similarly, our character and our behavior have an inviolable relationship. Long-term, we can behave only as our character causes us to behave. We can try to behave differently from our character, but that will only last a short while, and there will be a price; it will feel uncomfortable. We will, long-term, behave as the person we are — no way around it.

This cause and effect relationship is the backbone of Understanding Character and needs to be understood. Often, when we are interacting with others, we are making observations – and judgments – about their behavior. With Understanding Character, we can go deeper and know that whatever behavior we are seeing is being caused by the person’s character, who the person truly is.

Character is made up of a whole lot of feelings; it is our emotional base. It includes feelings like responsibility, decisiveness, tolerance, receptiveness – to mention a very few. That means that whatever our given level is regarding these feelings, we will behave that way. We can’t help it.

The character we have – the collection of our feelings – needs to be filled up. (Think about it like filling up a cup.) While we are living our lives, we are taking our character into the world and trying to find ways to fill ourselves up. We take our character out and try to fill up how we feel and since each person is different from every other person, we go about this very differently. Our behavior reflects the activities that fill up our person.

If a person is not responsible, then that person behaves in a way that is irresponsible. They let people down, they are late, and they forget things. For example, if they are assigned to pick up a child at school, they may forget. Or, when asked to bring something to the party, they may show up at the party empty-handed. It will tend not to bother them when they fail to do something properly; they tend to settle at good enough or, perhaps, even less than good enough. This fills them up.

If a person is very decisive, then that person behaves that way. The person will make decisions, even difficult decisions, quickly and sometimes without thought or enough input from others; there will be a lack of thinking through the decision, it will often be reactive. This person may be offensive to others because she does not include them in the decision-making process. This fills her up.

If a person is very tolerant, then that person will behave tolerantly. That person will feel a need to let others off the hook rather than hold them accountable. They look for opportunities to forgive others; they will let things slide. They have difficulty finding something they stand for and being firm about it. This fills them up.

If a person is very receptive, then their behavior is that they feel better when following someone else’s lead.