Type Eh?

Kerry Crofton, PH.D., authored a book in 1998 aimed at encouraging Type A personalities to find balance in their life. The book is called, The Healthy Type A, Good News for Go-Getters, and I think it was her way of helping traditional Type-A's avoid a future of emergency-room visits. You know the type I'm talking about – impatient, often over-bearing, control freaks that jack up the office stress-level until it reaches an unbearable intensity.

I found Kerry Crofton’s book as I was browsing through the stacks at my local library earlier in the year. I had just left a highly stressful position for the second time in a row, and was becoming painfully aware that I am the common denominator in my history of punishing positions. Before I committed to a new employer, I needed to be sure that I would not condemn myself to repeating a cycle where I over-extend myself for an employer that rewards good performance with more work.

Step 1, Crofton suggests is to “Take Stock of Your Style.” On page twenty, she provides a tidy little chart to help you plot your behaviours and distinguish where you fall in the range between Unhealthy Type A and Unhealthy Type B. She asks you to consider the following (I'm paraphrasing here):

• Are you a quick-tempered war-monger or do you avoid conflict at all costs, even if it means eating your lunch in a bathroom stall?
• Are you fiercely competitive or do you prefer to keep your ambitions modest such as getting out of bed in the morning?
• Do you live by the clock or do you lose track of time to the point where you worry you may be suffering from a multiple personality disorder?
• Are you the alpha-male (or female) pack leader or are you a tail-wagger that prefers to get an enthusiastic belly rub from your loving owner?
• Are you the best thing since sliced bread or do you carry a mirror so you can confirm that you are not invisible even though people act as though you are?
• Do you embrace change with reckless abandon or run screaming in the opposite direction when someone asks you to try something new like, say, a stoned-wheat cracker?

I am honest enough to realize that where I appear on this chart could change from day-to-day so I made allowances that would let me see my high- and low-ranges for each of these answers. Imagine my surprise when I learned that my basic personality style was actually a Healthy Type B.

I’ve run with the Type A crowd for so long that I just assumed I was one of them. I put in the overtime, I sneered at the “clock watchers” with them, I networked with them after work, and I defended their unrealistic demands and expectations to my peers. I remember enjoying a 15-minute break only once when I was 18-years old and working at a food kiosk in the Kingston Shopping Centre. In 1993 I got married on a Saturday and was back to work the next week attending a Board Meeting that could not be rescheduled. The last time I took a sick day, I was refused access to my office by the staff nurse after she took my temperature, handed me an N95 surgical mask and referred me to the local emergency room. How could I be anything other than a Type A?

Even as I recall these morsels of irrational behaviour, I recognize them for what they are…distorted perceptions of self-importance inflated by arrogance. My mother warned me, “Nobody is indispensable.” But when you get caught up in building your own empire, you forget that even Caesar fell. As your empire grows, you benefit from the rewards of praise and appreciation and you may even revel a little in the envy of your peers. You are rewarded with more important projects that consume even greater amounts of your time and energy. Yes, you have arrived. People listen when you talk and nod in agreement. It’s a splendid feeling, made sweeter perhaps by the knowledge that it is fleeting.

The realization of its end comes suddenly, I think. Invariably, you find yourself locked in a moment where you are forced to choose between the empire you built and the citizens it safeguards; you must choose between the privileges of power and your very purpose for being. In that flash of honest self-examination, you look in your heart and acknowledge those things that are truly important – your health, your family, your spirit, your humanity. It was in one such moment that I understood I would rather be a great mother and a good employee than the reverse.

Is that why I am, at this very moment, a happy-go-lucky, unemployed Type B personality after more than 15 years of Type A behaviour? Could this be the reason I felt as though I wasn’t a “fit” before? Could I have been intuitively aware that my style was spectacularly different from those with whom I worked? What now? What career should I consider if I genuinely wish to protect and maintain my healthy Type B personality – store mannequin, washroom attendant, wine-taster, senator? If I return to full time employment will I slip back into my old, destructive patterns? More questions. Always more questions.

I’m going back to the library stacks to see if I can find some self-help materials written for and by Type B personalities. Perhaps I’ll find a tidy little chart in that book that will expose me as the Type A worker I always understood myself to be. Then again, I wonder if I’ll be able to find such a book. After all, what is the likelihood that a book has ever been written by anyone other than a Type A?