In a quest to better understand myself and what motivates me I decided to hit the internets and do some research. You won’t be surprised by this course of action after I’ve explained myself…. Bare with me.
There are two types of things that motivate people: external and internal factors. Your personality type determines which factors and how much they influence your choices. According to Gretchen Ruben, author of the Happiness Project, there are 4 categories of personality:
Upholder—accepts rules, whether from outside or inside. An upholder meets deadlines, follows doctor’s order, keeps a New Year’s resolution. I am an Upholder, 100%.
Questioner—questions rules and accepts them only if they make sense. They may choose to follow rules, or not, according to their judgment.
Rebel—flouts rules, from outside or inside. They resist control. Give a rebel a rule, and the rebel will want to do the very opposite thing.
Obliger—accepts outside rules, but doesn’t like to adopt self-imposed rules.
She has even created a quiz to help you self-identify:
The Four Tendencies Quiz
I was not surprised to discover that I am a Questioner.
“Questioners question all expectations, and will meet an expectation only if they believe it’s justified—they’re motivated by reason, logic, and fairness. They decide for themselves whether a course of action is a good idea, and they resist doing anything that seems arbitrary or lacks sound purpose. Essentially, they turn all expectations into inner expectations.
Because Questioners like to make well-considered decisions and come to their own conclusions, they’re very intellectually engaged, and they’re often willing to do exhaustive research. If they decide there’s sufficient basis for an expectation, they’ll follow it; if not, they won’t.
However, the Questioner’s appetite for information and justification can become tiresome. Questioners themselves sometimes wish they could accept expectations without probing them so relentlessly. A Questioner told me ruefully, “I suffer from analysis paralysis. I always want to have one more piece of information.”
This explanation fits me to a “T”. It’s fairly easy for me to stick to goals as long as I see justification in my actions. I can quickly become obsessively addicted to something; spending hours researching, writing, mapping, applying, and practicing; approaching the goal from every possible angle. The tricky part comes when the end-goal no longer justifies the sleepless nights obsessing; the all-or-nothing attack; or the loneliness when everyone else has peaced-out, tired of my singular conversations and imbalanced lifestyle.
