Relating in technicolor: how to understand others.

"My parents raised me green and gold but I think I'm a blue at heart." "My partner's so orange, it drives my gold side crazy."

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Gibberish? Interior decorating? No, it's an accessible, nonjudgmental way to talk about personality and temperament. True Colors [R] is sweeping the country as a tool for self-understanding and effectiveness in the classroom, office or meeting room.

"True Colors is a metaphor for how we view the world," Mary Helen Conroy--WIHE's director of Career Connections--said at the pilot Project FUNdrai$e workshop at Harvard University in March. Project FUNdrai$e is Rosie Stallman's and Cherri Mankenberg's company, improving fundraising by women athletics administrators.

Fundraising works best when we recognize and learn to work across differences in personal style. So do teaching, counseling, applying for a job and leading a committee or department--just about everything.

Color typing is rooted in earlier instruments and theories. Carl Jung's Psychological Types (1921) formed the basis for the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator [R], developed in the 1950s. Its categories for how people process information and make decisions brought INTJ, ESFP, and fourteen other acronyms into the popular culture.

It was insider-speak, relished by those who mastered it and meaningless to everyone else. David Keirsey, in his PhD thesis The Polarization of Intelligence (1967) and his later book with Marilyn Bates Please Understand Me (1984), grouped the Myers-Briggs classes into four temperaments: Guardian (SJ in Myers-Briggs), Rational (NT), Idealist (NF) and Artisan (SP).