About

I am a bunch of things.  I will list few of them here so you can get a feel of who I am.

First, where does that Pensive Otter come from?

In the Marston model of personality (DISC), I am a high I.  Gary Smalley and John Trent took Marston’s model and applied animal representations to evoke each of the DISC characteristics.  The otter is their representation for “I”.

And the Pensive?  This comes from the classical view of temperament (or humours).  They were, of course, melancholic, sanguine, phlegmatic, and choleric.  Each of these humours had characteristics associated with them.  They were:

• melancholic - gloomy, pensive
• sanguine - headstrong, passionate
• phlegmatic - unemotional, passive
• choleric - bad-tempered, angry

Hence, we have an incongruous juxtaposition of a playful otter with a gloomy, pensive, thinking individual.

For those of you into other sorts of pesonality indicators and modifiers, I am also INFP (Myers-Briggs) with a strong logical streak, an adult ADD, a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP), a Scanner (Barbara Sher’s term) which some call Renaissance Man or Homo Universalis or even Polymath (Margaret Lobenstine uses the term Renaissance Soul). Of course a few also use the term universal genius… but while I have found most Scanners/Renaissance Souls to be quite intelligent, it isn’t a requirement for the label (as far I have been able to tell.)