How to Find Your Temperament: A Practical Guide

What did you do the last time somebody canceled an evening on you an hour before it was due to start? Did you reach for the phone and hunt for a replacement plan, or was there a small sense of relief somewhere in the back of your mind that the evening was suddenly free? The answer to that one question tells you more about your temperament than half an hour of wondering what sort of person you are.

You do not spot temperament in what you think about yourself but in what you do when there is no time to think. And those are situations most people do not even remember, because they are not worth remembering.

Four situations where it shows

The useful evidence is in small things, not in the big moments. The best raw material for self-observation comes from stress, unfamiliar surroundings, conflict and boredom. In all four, learned politeness drops away and what sits underneath steps forward.

An unexpected change. A plan falls through, an email arrives with a moved deadline, the car breaks down the day before a trip. Watch the first two minutes, not what you do an hour later. One person calls immediately and starts sorting it out, a second gets annoyed and decides on the spot, a third waits to see whether it resolves itself, and a fourth starts playing out everything that could come of it.

Unfamiliar company. You arrive at a party where you know two people out of twenty. Where do you stand, and how long does it take before you speak to a stranger? And above all: how do you feel after two hours? Whether you are charged up or wrung out is a difference that is harder to fake than an answer on a questionnaire.

Conflict. Somebody in a meeting shoots down a proposal you worked on for a week. Do you say so out loud right away, turn it into a joke, back off and replay it that evening, or withdraw and stop defending the proposal altogether? Reactions to disagreement are among the most stable expressions of temperament.

Waiting in line. The most ordinary test of all, and therefore the most honest. At the supermarket checkout the payment in front of you will not go through and you stand there for five minutes. One person moves their groceries to the next lane; another turns to the person behind them and makes a remark about self-checkouts. Somebody else takes out their phone and does not care, because time spent waiting is not something they think about. And the fourth silently recalculates how far this pushes back the evening.

One rule applies to all four situations: write the reaction down the same day. Memory rewrites us into a better version within a few days. Losing your temper becomes a factual remark, and an hour of procrastinating over a spreadsheet retroactively presents itself as considered preparation. A sentence typed into your phone in the evening is a nuisance, but a week later it is the only record you can trust.

There is a counterintuitive point here. Most people examine their temperament through big situations such as a crisis at work or a fight with a partner. But we have our crisis roles rehearsed: we know what is expected of us and we play the part. In the line at the post office nobody is watching anybody, so that is where you behave like yourself.

Why self-assessment misses so often

Ask five people what their temperament is and some of them will guess wrong. Not because they do not know themselves. The description of a character we admire simply reads better than the description of our own, and "sanguine" sounds like somebody everybody likes. "Melancholic" sounds like a diagnosis even though it describes depth and thoroughness.

Something else gets layered on top. We answer according to how we behave at work, because our work mode is the one we have described best. But behavior in a meeting and behavior at home differ quite a lot for many people, and what comes out of the questionnaire is often the style you have rehearsed, not the one that costs you the least energy.

Simine Vazire (2010) described this discrepancy rather precisely. Her research compared how well a person judges themselves against how well the people around them judge them. On internal matters, such as anxiety or what runs through your head before sleep, the person themselves was more accurate. On what is visible from outside, chiefly expressions of extraversion, other people were more accurate.

For finding your own temperament, that leads to an uncomfortable conclusion. You can estimate the melancholic component yourself quite well, because it happens inside you. Whether you come across as a sanguine or as a phlegmatic is something you have to learn from somebody else.

How to ask other people so they tell you the truth

The question "what am I like?" does not work. People answer with whatever they like about you, or with whatever they consider polite. You can rescue the answers by asking about behavior in a specific situation instead of about character.

• When I am annoyed, can you tell right away, or only from the fact that I am off with you for two days?
• Who in our group usually suggests where we go? And who joins in?
• When I am deciding something bigger, do I ask your opinion first, or do I bring you a finished thing?
• Do I come across as somebody who is rushing, or as the one everybody waits for?
• When did I last promise you something I then failed to do?

Ask three people from different parts of your life. Ideally a partner, a colleague and a friend you have known since school. If the answers diverge, that is not an error. It means you behave slightly differently in each setting, and the difference between how a colleague sees you and how your oldest friend does says something in itself.

Who is not worth asking? Somebody who depends on you, and somebody you happen to be fighting with. The first will tell you what you want to hear, the second will bill you for everything from the past month. The best source tends to be somebody who is fond of you and keeps a certain distance at the same time, typically an old friend or a former colleague. When you get the answers, watch whether the person can give you a specific story. If they cannot, they are talking about an impression, not about your behavior.

When did you last ask somebody for feedback and genuinely want to hear it? Most such conversations break down at the moment you start explaining. Stay quiet and just keep asking for an example.

One week and one notebook

Seven days is enough if you keep it concrete. At the end of each day write one sentence about a single thing: what irritated you most that day. Not what was worst, but what got under your skin.

A delay? Chaos in the brief? The fact that somebody keeps chatting while there is work to do? Or that nobody noticed how tired the team was? After seven days the same complaint keeps surfacing in your notes. It points to the temperament furthest from yours, because the people who irritate us most are the ones wired the opposite way. Yours then sits roughly on the opposite side.

Rachel, a project manager, was certain she was a sanguine. Happy among people, last to leave the company party, quick with a joke. When she kept notes for a week, it turned out that what wound her up most was rushed decision-making and four changes of plan in a day. Her colleagues independently told her she came across as a calming presence who never pushes anyone anywhere. In the end she came out as a phlegmatic with a sanguine streak, which fit exactly: sociable, but driven by inner calm rather than by a need to be constantly in motion.

When a test helps

Self-observation has a ceiling. You see in yourself whatever happens to be bothering you that week, and you have no yardstick for comparing the four components against each other. That is exactly what a questionnaire can do: it offers the same set of questions across all four temperaments and puts numbers on the differences between them.

Our temperament test has 24 questions, each rated on a five-point scale, and the whole thing takes about four minutes. The result is not letters but four scores on a hundred-point scale. The highest is the primary temperament; the runner-up counts as a streak if it trails by no more than fifteen points. So you get one of sixteen profiles rather than one of four boxes.

The questions do not give away what is being measured at any given moment, so that the name of a temperament does not pull you toward the answer you would like to have. It is best to fill them in quickly and by first reaction. Thinking at length about an item usually means you are already building a defense.

That leaves what the test is not. It is not a diagnostic tool and it is not something to hire by. Comparison with other people is approximate, and the result is worth having as material for thinking, not as a label for your resume. The difference between the innate base and what a person has cultivated is covered in more detail in the piece on temperament and character.

What to do with the result

The first use is naming a recurring problem. Once you know your lowest component is the choleric one, you stop accusing yourself of laziness every time you postpone an unpleasant phone call and start treating it as something you need a procedure for. For instance by putting the unpleasant calls at the start of the day.

The second use is in relationships and in a team. A difference in pace explains most small conflicts better than presumed ill will on the other side, and once you know a colleague needs time to think, you stop reading their silence as lack of interest. How two different components fight inside one person is shown in the overview of temperament combinations.

There is exactly one use that does not work: temperament as an excuse note. The sentence "I'm just a choleric" is a description of a default setting, not permission to shout at colleagues. The setting determines what costs you less energy, not what you are allowed to do. How much you can change about yourself and what stays is covered in the piece on whether temperament can change.

When you read your result, start from the lowest number. You usually have a sense of the top one, because you live in it every day, but the weakest number describes the situations where every step costs you more than it costs everybody else. And that is exactly where a small change of habit achieves the most.