Fluid personality types are chameleons, gifted with the potential for effortless adaptation. But whether your fluidity results in the cultivated mastery of Bruce Lee, or the passive acceptance of a pushover, largely depends how well trained one is in the other archetypes.
Is your Fluid personality an asset or a liability?
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When Your Flexible Personality Traits are an Asset
You are an extremely likable character; often the life of the party or the friend who is called because they won’t judge one’s faults. Extremely comfortable with yourself and others, your fun-loving nature and relaxedness are a joy to be around. Filled with positive emotions, you have an endless well of inspiring wisdoms, contagious warmth and the ability to adapt to any situation. You are rarely stressed, maneuvering obstacles and conflict like an agile gymnast amongst a cheering crowd.
When others furrow their brow or agonize over tasks, you flow through them effortlessly; focused in mind and fluid in body. Though you can charm a lady in one moment and disarm a bandit in another, or take on a dozen traits to suit different situations, you never lose your essence. For you know why and how it is that you flow through life, with no need to control or expectation of outcome, just enjoying the sweet, cool ride.
When Fluidity is a Liability
Your desire to please creates a nervousness and distraction that is easy to push over. You become overly-compliant and malleable while orbiting others’ needs, confused why your former diplomacy is now met with defiance or dismissal. Unable to find your own center or anchoring, you continue to seek excitement or feel-good scenarios; from adding new experiences to your belt to any sense of high that makes you feel alive.
Depending on who you are with, you may change your character to suit the person or situation; falling back on your strong suit as a chameleon but losing your sense of self in the process. You keep your smile and move from this to that but often panic that you may be rudderless or lost for direction. You begin to mask your fears of floating with gregariousness or fawning, distracting yourself from anything but the hard work of building your character.
Related Traits
Agility
Looseness
Gregariousness
Positivity
Emotionality
Flexibility
Warmth
Diplomacy
Excitability
Corresponding Pillar of Mind Body Training:
Flexibility Training
Cultivating Fluidity
Fluidity is developed through the practice of non-resistance. The somatic marker of this trait is a lack of physical tension in the body.
In someone untrained or with a low level of capacity in this archetype, a lack of tension often results in lack of physical structure, presence and resolve. In the trained mind-body athlete however, fluidity is the trigger that turns strength into explosive power, and grit into adapaptive 'staying power.'
But to activate those extraordinary skills, we must teach the mind-body to stop resisting, to stop wanting, and to start accepting. That is the process of flexibility training... when done properly. Flexibility training is not, as many assume, "stretching" the body, where you're pulling limb from source via force.
Flexibility is arrival. It's surrender.
As such, the quintessential skill of flexibility is relaxation. Now, this has a great deal of overlap with the Sensate personality type and training, as relaxation is also the conduit of sensitivity. But where meditation relies more heavily on nonjudgmental awareness, flexibility relies on resistanceless effort - a paradox in terms, surely.
The body (and mind) must be taken to, or near to, it's limits, where the pains and discomforts of that range become real. And they must be accepted, if not embraced. In that dynamic of active nonresistance is where the flexible become fluid.
Training Fluid Personality Types to Become Balanced and Centered
As we discussed above, fluidity stems from a lack of tension. Whether that's a all good, or somewhat good, depends on the level of capacity one has across all pillars.
Fluidity in the hands of a mind-body master like Bruce Lee is a superpower. Fluidity in the hands of someone too weak to fight for what matters to them, or too unsure of themselves to engage, is a liability.
Imagine a wet noodle. That's fluidity without training. Not very impressive.
But if we could keep the adaptability of that noodle, while giving it some modicum of structure and resistance, now we're talking about a pretty cool noodle. Think about it science.
Fluidity, like Sensate, needs a container that turns it into a superpower. That container is grit, and involves developing the structure, strength, and tensional forces of the body. While a noodle will mold to any container, if stretched or manipulated too far, it breaks. Metaphor very much intended!
Fluid personality types often avoid direct confrontation. This can be an effective strategy as long as confrontation doesn't keep confronting. If it does, it can lead to emotional breakdown, if not depression.
The practice of resisting, inherent in strength training, not to mention the awesome adaptations that result to physical structure and muscular development, is what gives fluidity a fighting chance. It's an unbelievably powerful archetype, but until we cultivate the strength required to contain it, it's a liability.
Coaching Fluid Types
The Fluid archetype lies on the will-flow axis in the Somatic Coaching Model of the Weightlessness Method. Sitting on the other side of that axis, as you might have guessed, is Grit.
A simple solution for helping your Fluid personality type client to greater successes without the need for deep alignment or conscious 'buy in' for new ways of being, is to have them strength train. I don't mean go to the gym and work out. I mean strength train - truly test themselves against iron, in the 3 to 5 rep range with very heavy weights.
The Weightlessness Training Method spells out best practices for that.
That said, in going for real and immediate breakthrough with a client, you might work them through a series of postures and poses that reflect alternative somatic options.
The default orientation of Fluid is to melt into your chair, or mold to your environment. First directing their attention to their physical form and then inviting them to feel through it, is the first step in going from unsconscious default to conscious choice.
That's a way of practicing Sensate to balance out Fluid.
Accessing Cerebral next helps move from where they are, to where they want to be. After their present state is felt, they can either physically center, and start the process over again. Or they can add additional tension to the system - leaning forward eblows on knees, or clenching fists for a few seconds. They might breathe more heavily, actively energizing their system, rather than passively falling into form.
To embrace Grit is to embrace resistance. Shifting into a mind-body state or physical posture that doesn't grant them an easy exit, but which requires remolding, is a way of accessing dormant powers in the Fluid Personality.
Learn more about the Somatic Coaching Model of the Weightlessness Method, and the other mind-body personality traits.
Learn how to master your somatic archetype with 3 Months of Mind-Body Performance Coaching via The Weightlessness Process.