Personality Is Genetic

Where does personality come from? And why is this an important question when it comes to sales and persuasion?

Most people, if asked, will tell you that personality is learned behavior. And that seems to make sense, doesn’t it?

When it comes down to it, humans are a learning species. We learn to walk, we learn to talk. We learn to read, and we learn to do arithmetic. We also learn skills like how to ride a bicycle or how to do complex tasks like brain surgery.

Personality, in the eyes of most people, is simply a way of describing a consistent set of behaviors. Since ‘reading’ is a behavior (we do it over and over), and it is something that is learned, then it stands to reason that all behavior is also learned. Right?

I define personality differently. I go deeper than just a shorthand for behavior. What is behavior, after all? It is a set of consistent actions. If you do the same actions over and over, say like laughing, then people will say that you have a fun personality.

But where do your “actions” come from? The answer to that question is that actions come from our “decisions.” You have to make a decision to “laugh,” for example. But most decisions are made at the unconscious level. You don’t even know you make them.

So we need to go deeper, and ask the question: “where do our decisions come from?” Or you might ask: “What drives our decisions?” Particularly, on the unconscious level?

Do we have to learn what is funny in order to laugh often? I don’t think so. Something is either funny to us, or it isn’t. It isn’t learned.

We need to answer this question on where our decisions come from. And the answer is that they come from our “values.”

I believe that our values – or you might call them, our guiding principles, are not learned, but are imprinted in our genetic code. We are born with a set of values, and they are revealed by the decisions we make.

For example, compare the child that laughs all the time to one that is much more serious. Could they be in the same family? Yes. Every parent that has multiple children will tell you that each child has a different personality. But if personality is “learned,” then it would stand to reason that children in the same family should have identical personality because they grew up in the same learning environment.

The fact that chidden from the same family have different temperaments tells us that personality is NOT learned.

On the other hand, you may be thinking that if two children have the same parents, then they should have the same personality because they have the same genetic material. That would be a good assumption, but we all know that children don’t inherit the same exact traits as their parents. My father had brown eyes, and I have blue. 

So each child is going to inherit some personality traits, but not all of them from their parents. This is why each child is a little different personality wise from each other.

 Why is any of this important to us as salespeople?

Let’s take it two more steps. First, if we notice that two people have similar personality temperaments, the conclusion is that they have very similar “values.” If you’ve been reading my blog, you’ll recognize this as Customer Secret #1.

Values are important in sales, because prospects use their values to make buying decisions. We need to know our prospects values, because that will guide our sales presentations. In that I mean, we will show how our product/service aligns with their values. If it doesn’t, they will never buy from us.

The discovery of their values is simply the process typing their personality temperament. Once you know their personality temperament, you just can go to a look up table and read off what that their values are that they use as buying criteria. 

This chart of values of personality temperament is already created, and it FREE from my CustomerSecrets.com website. Yes, today you can get the free chart that links each of the four personality temperaments with their common values. 

Now how do we get a person’s personality temperament quickly? This is the second step that I wanted to talk about.

Remember, personality is written on our genetic DNA. We’re born with it. 

If this is true (and it is), then we can read the other physical clues that are also plain to see when we meet a prospect (or see their picture). For example, can you tell from what part of the world a person ancestors come from by simply looking at them? For instance, can you tell if they are more likely from an asian country, versus a Slavic country?

While we’re not looking for country of heritage, we’ll be doing a similar process when typing someone based on their genetic clues on the faces and their bodies. Once you are trained to know what clues to look for, it is possible to type someone (put them into the right personality temperament group) simply by looking at them.

This is based on science. There are A.I. computer applications that you can use right now that are remarkably accurate at typing a person’s personality temperament. Fortunately, you don’t need a computer program to do this. It can be learned. And if you’d like to know how to read the clues given off by a person’s physical attributes, I have a system that will show you the physical clues people give off at customersecrets.com

To sum this up in a step-by-step sales process.

1. You type a prospect’s personality temperament – you can use the physical genetic clues that they give off.
2. Once you know their personality temperament, you go to the look-up table to find out common values that people of that temperament hold to be their guiding principles.
3. You now have a roadmap on what to tell them during your sales presentation. You will show how your product/service aligns with their values. In other words, you’re telling them exactly what they want to hear.

Sales can be a step-by-step process if you know the customer’s secrets. Today’s secret about personality being genetic is powerful because you can type a person literally in seconds, even before they utter a single word. That will speed up the sales process and make it enjoyable for both you and the customer.