Self-Awareness – Which Bird are you?

“Look outside and you will see yourself. Look inside and you will find yourself.” — Drew Gerald, Author & Coach.

Are we products of nature or nurture?

This is a perennial question that people often debate about an answer. The answer, to me, is so obvious that I wonder why the others do not see it because. You see, if we are products of nurture, then all siblings would behave the same since they are nurtured the same exact way. But we know that even twins do not behave in the exact same manner, leave alone other siblings. So by that logic, we are definitely products of nature.

Nurturing only inculcates a culture in you and that is why you find a certain family has a certain family culture, which includes their religion, customs, believes, and so forth. These elements add and lead to a clan culture, then a community culture which then forms a tribe culture. A true feature of culture is that it is dependent on the environment. As soon as you move from your family or community and shift far away, that family/community culture slowly starts to wane and you adopt the culture of your new environment. Look at how people who have immigrated to other countries change behaviours. This is the reason I say that there is nothing like tribes, they are just temporary cultures that are ingrained in us by our communities. Let us say your parents are Kikuyu but you are born and raised in Luo Nyanza, you would grow up more Luo than Luos born in Nairobi.

Having now agreed that we are products of nature, it means that we are each wired differently, by nature. It is therefore of paramount importance that you should what your nature is, meaning, know which personality bird you are, what makes you, what is in your make up, how are you designed by nature?

In a nutshell, psychologists researched for hundreds of years and discovered that no matter your race or gender, there are only four types of personalities that nature created. As an individual, you do not necessarily have only one personality type, you will have the predominant personality and secondary personality. Some people even have three personalities and those are the ones people refer to as multiple personalities. What matters is what degree of the personality type makes you, where do you fall in the DOPE assessment, on a scale of 1 to 19. Before you open your eyes wide and wonder about all things DOPE, we do not mean the street slang.

DOPE in this context is the world-famous Psychological personality test likened to the four birds; 1. DOVE (Phlegmatic) 2. OWL (Melancholic) 3. PEACOCK (Sanguine) 4. EAGLE (choleric)
The DOPE personality test as you can see above has many other labels but the bird personality is the most straight forward and applicable in all situations including among illiterate people, because anywhere you are in the world, there are the four birds and everybody in that community knows how the birds behave. You will discover, to your surprise, that even the people who are of those personalities behave exactly like those birds.