In 1984 I was madly reading books as part of the literature search for my dissertation. My dissertation advisor, David Keirsey, had made a link between the four temperament patterns he has observed and four of Eduard Spränger’s value types, so I needed to know more. I read Spränger’s Types of Men, written in the 1920s. In it, he described 6 different value types—Aesthetic, Theoretic, Economic, Religious, Social, and Political. I was intrigued by an example Spränger used of describing a book through the perspectives of these six types. Once I learned about the four value types that related to Keirsey’s four temperament patterns, I found I could listen for the perspectives that people were coming from much more quickly than I could if I just tried to identify their type or the temperament based on other descriptions. At that point in my life, I wasn’t really aware of the value of perspective taking, but this experience got me started on a journey of seeking to understand people in a way I hadn’t before even though it started out as just in the interest of identifying their temperaments. I started listening for their perspectives rather than just to identify their ‘type.’ As we developed applications of temperament and type to teams and communication my colleagues and I added a perspective shifting activity to our workshops. That activity has come to be referred to as the “car activity” and is written up in Understanding Yourself and Others, An Introduction to the...