Hitting Keyboards

Back at the start of the century, I was fortunate enough to participate in an Executive retreat held at a winery/function centre in Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula Region.

The format involved a day or so assessing progress against business plans, another two days of strategy development plus some social and some personal development sessions to round off the week.

One such session involved a presentation about what our persons handwriting said about our personality and related behaviour traits.

The size of our writing, how we crossed a “t”, dotted an “i” and spaced words, combined with the shape of our loops and direction of slant to provide our profiles.   

These were then compared to traditional question and answer profiles we had completed off-site a week before. The results were incredibly close and often identical.

The presenter talked about work being done in the prison system and that violent crime offenders had largely similar handwriting.  

As a result, a trial was being conducted to see if changing an offenders hand writing would flow in reverse with the result that violent tendencies or fits of anger could be prevented.

The theory was, if their habitually tiny handwriting delivered with such pressure as to damage the paper could become more “loopy”, large and light, would a behaviour improvement and therefore a reduced tendency to re-offend result?

My mind wandered to this today when thinking about the different ways we operate a keyboard and if our keyboard mannerisms reflect personality traits.

It would be interesting to know if the keyboard “heavy hitters” share behaviour traits or the “hunched over” operator is an indicator of a disinclination to trust, or a need to protect.

Of equal interest would to know if the lack of a need for handwriting skills today means the ability to make personality and behaviour assessments from it have diminished.

As for me, I tend to be a moderate hitter who sits reasonably upright and have been known to display some piano player like theatrics when striking the keys.

Maybe I am just a show off.

For the record, none of my former executive colleagues recorded handwriting profiles indicating a future gaol term.