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Use of Time – The Curious Disposition: “My time is for solving problems!”

Different Dispositions use time in different ways. If you want to develop harmonious relationships with your family members, co-workers, students or others you interact with, you will want to know how they use time.

People with this inventive Disposition have an “Inside-out” view of time. They want their time to serve their needs for discovery, coming up with a better way to do things, getting to the root of a problem. For them, they see something that needs improving upon and they start tinkering and experimenting and rearranging things until they have a solution that makes life easier, more fun and/or more interesting.  What seems like “fiddling around with stuff” to others is a pleasant way of passing time to the Curious person. 

Curious Dispositions see clock time as too rigid for their desire to explore and invent until they have a solution. When they are lost in their discovery zone, it’s easy for them to forget entirely about clock time and arrive late for appointments or not at all. Having to stop doing something they are deeply involved in means putting off the feeling of accomplishment they get when they find a solution or a new way forward.

For people with this Disposition, time spent experimenting and discovering is more important than daily responsibilities – this is the “absentminded professor” trait – they can even forget to eat when involved in a project! They like open-ended projects without strict due dates, so they can take all the time they need to solve the problem at hand. Curious Disposition people have an internal sense of when their project is finished, and they resist being rushed by schedules and external deadlines.

Others might think of them as anti-social, inconsiderate, uncooperative, overly serious and hyper-focused.

They make great team members when you want a genuinely solution-focused person to spend hours getting to the bottom of issues in novel ways.

If you have a Curious Disposition yourself, knowing your default setting for your use of time can lead to a better understanding of yourself and help you to devise strategies for those times when watching the clock is important or being more organized is important (for appointments, plans with someone, etc).

If you have Curious Disposition people in your life, knowing their default setting for their use of time can lead to more understanding, better communication, and increased ability to get along.

Copyright 2020 by VKHodson & MPelullo-Willis, Reflective Educational Perspectives, LLC / LearningSuccess™ Institute • reflectiveed.com, aselfportraitonline.com

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