Linked: A Quick Guide to Personalities

Linked: Maximizing Life Connections One Link at a Time. A Quick Guide to Personalities

by Linda Gilden and Linda Goldfarb. 

BOOK REVIEW by Patricia Tiffany Morris

The back of the cover of Linked states, “Relationships Matter—Especially Yours!” Do we believe that? Some days, it’s tough to wrangle courage to relate and converse with others.

Life would be so much simpler if we could just do everything, the way we’d like. And wouldn’t relationships be easier if others would just agree with us and let us get on with the key issues of life? Because we are unique in our temperament and personality, conflict is bound to occur. The authors have brilliantly created a concise, compacted resource to aid life connections in a positive manner.

The premise of Linked is simple and profound. We learn who we are, what we value, and how to improve our personal and professional relationships by understanding our natural personality and tendencies to speak and act. A convenient assessment key and lists of positive and negative tendencies for each of the four personality types, creates a quick analysis and forms the basis for understanding personality types and relationships with others. 

Linked Quick Guide provides concise names with easy to remember qualities. The Mobilizer is the “get-it-done” person. The Socializer helps all of us understand “life-of-the-party” kind of individuals. The Stabilizer supplies the “keep-it-peaceful” temperament. And the Organizer displays an “Everything-in-order” type of personality. These four categories are common to many profiles such as Hippocrates personality types of choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic, and melancholy.

I knew I was melancholy, and the assessment questionnaire for Linked, found my personality category as Organizer. Organizer scored three times the number of both Mobilizer and Stabilizer points. I was actually surprised the socializer gained even 2 points. But I’m trying to become more social in my introverted life.

Most helpful portions of the book? All of it. I devoured the book in one setting—an hour of careful reading—with an extra hour to analyze some older personality tests I had taken through the years. 

One of the more creative uses of this book might be to answer the questionnaire for your protagonist and main characters of your next novel. Find out more about your character’s personalities by “letting them” take the test and create well rounded personalities to form the basis of believable players in the world of fiction.

Photo from authors’ website.

Book Review Written by Patricia Tiffany Morris