Page 5 - GOODONE

-- 5 -

away on its hard drive. Thinking, in these emergency situations, takes up

too much time - it just gets in the way, and by the time you finally worked
out a plan of action, it's usually too late.

Let’s look now at those acquired behaviour patterns and fixed

attitudes that prevent you from seeing the world about you as it really
is. In the course of your day-to-day personal and business life, you're

bound to find yourself in contact with a widely varying range of people,
some of them, perhaps, of a different culture or background to your own.

They'll also have all kinds of different personalities. Now the word
personality originates from the Latin word persona, which means ‘mask’.
Every individual personality contains many different personas, each one

of which has a specific purpose. A good way to picture how the persona
works is to imagine it as being not just simply a collection of masks held

in front of your face, but also as part of a costume that covers your whole
body. If you take time out to look inside yourself and how you have

typically reacted to past experiences in your own life, you’ll begin to
realise that one of the many ways in which a persona can function is to

act as a shield that protects some of the more vulnerable bits of your
inner reality from the outside world. Once you understand this - once
you understand how each persona can function as an all-enveloping

disguise - you immediately gain a powerful new insight. A perceptive look
at any persona mask you may be facing in your one-to-one encounters

with other individuals will indicate for sure the presence of a set of fears
of anxieties, resentments and feelings of vulnerability, not a million miles

away from your own! Now, of course, in your own way, you're absolutely
unique. There's nobody in the world quite like you. But then the same

applies to every other person you meet! So what is it that goes to make
up the apparent difference between yourself and other people? The
answer is, of course, the complex personality structures - the collection

of personas that each one of us has created to deal with our various life
experiences so far. The personality becomes our identity, the way we

recognise ourselves and are recognised by others. So, personality and