Your personality colors how you think and how you behave. It influences how you respond to different situations and how you perceive the world, make decisions, and live your life. That particular pattern of responses, perceptions, and behaviors makes up your personality. It makes sense that anything that affects how you live your life is going to affect your career satisfaction and success. It's easy to figure out that a passive introvert would likely shrivel under the scrutiny required by a career as a politician or that a gregarious person might be a good fit for a career in sales or service. But don't let such stereotypical thinking limit your own career possibilities. The purpose of personality studies isn't to pigeonhole you or anyone else. You might be an outgoing person who happens to love working with numbers. In that case, you could still thrive in a solitary accounting job, but you would have to find other ways to feed your sociable side, such as through leisure-time activities or hobbies. If you are so reclusive that the idea of initiating cold calls makes you sweat, remember from Chapter 3 that cold calling is a skill. Such skills can be learned, and you can learn to be more comfortable doing tasks that might seem almost impossible now. If you love the career, you'll find ways to make it work.

The most important thing to remember about personality in the workplace is that people are different. Those very differences are what make life and work so varied and enjoyable. You've heard the expression “Variety is the spice of life.” Would you want to live and work only around people who are exactly like you? Probably not.

Those personality differences are also the things that can make a particular working situation intolerable if you don't learn how to recognize and adjust to them. You may come to find that your boss isn't mean after all; she's just so detail-oriented that she finds your fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants work methods disconcerting.

The more you understand about your own personality themes and those of others, the better able you will be not only to find a career that suits you, but also to understand and work with the other personalities you find there.