The Tyrant

The Tyrant: what combines into this role

Absolute certainty about one's own judgment, a compulsion to control everything in one's own domain personally, and a reaction of becoming very angry the moment one feels threatened. This pattern appears when the three are present together in one person. A person with this pattern takes objections not as opinions but as insults, always looks for the cause in other people and circumstances even when their errors come to light, and wears out most the people closest to them.

The Tyrant: where it shows up

They keep close those who praise and agree with them, and answer those who object and challenge them with rage and cutting them off. They try to make every decision themselves and cannot stand situations beyond their control. On the outside they look like a charismatic leader, but the people who work with them feel they must be careful around this person as they work.

The hardest thing about this pattern is self-awareness. A person convinced of their own superiority finds it hard to examine themselves, so of all the patterns, this is the hardest to notice in oneself. Hearing honest feedback from someone they trust is almost the only way to notice it.

Conviction and infallibility are not the same

Psychology distinguishes firm self-confidence from a state of being unable to accept even the possibility of being wrong. A person with firm self-confidence shows the drive to make decisions in a crisis, but a person who cannot accept that they might be wrong takes every objection as a threat, so neither the organization nor the people around them can learn. Whether one can admit that one might be wrong is the standard that separates the two states.

The Tyrant: same role, different depth

Two people can share a role and still live differently, depending on how strongly it shows up in each of them.

When it shows faintly, there is still room to use strong conviction and drive as a gift, but the stronger it grows, the more the people around them wear out emotionally and the harder self-examination becomes. The more strongly it shows, the more urgently a person needs honest feedback from someone they trust. You can only know how much this pattern is at work in you by measuring it.