Home » Squidoo Community » About Me

Squidoo Lensography of Lensmaster Reasonable Robinson

Ranked #1,976 in Squidoo Community, #167,990 overall

A squidoo articles offers a mix of stepping stones to new topics and ideas

Welcome to the squidoo lensography of Reasonable Robinson. People, society, community, world views, motivations, beliefs and attitudes are several of the things that interest me.

The common thread that ties all of my squidoo lenses together is a passion for understanding what makes people tick I try and pick a wide range of themes that touch on people's lives, pulling together links and resources so that the lens becomes an introductory focal point and a springboard for readers to explore more if they wish.

Some of my lenses reflect my general interests, which range from music, through to astronomy and space science. Some reflect my concern with the world of work and education. Some reflect odd ball and extreme aspects of life.

I like to think that my Squidoo lenses complement my other blogging and social media activities. I've been an active blogger since the spring of 2007 with my flagship blog Gullibility

When I first signed up for Squidoo I tended my lenses rather intermittenly. In fact I only had 3 lenses for over a year. I now have over 150 live lenses.

My lenses are definitely about social rather than technical affairs. That reflects my background in business and higher education. It doesn't mean I don't like technology, it just means that there are plently of Squidooers who are more qualified and smarter than me in these areas.

Contents at a Glance

What Is Squidoo?
Seth Godin Tribes
Why Are You Called Reasonable Robinson?
My Top Lenses By Lensrank
People
Green Living
Music
Shopping
DIY Hobbies
Business
My How To / Education Lenses
My Latest Lenses
My Squidoo Lens
Giant Squid Status
My Home Town
Carlisle A Town With A Border Reiver His...
My Uncle John A World War One Hero From...
Where I Live

niche marketing and website platform for creative people

Seth Godin Tribes

Seth Godin the originator of Squidoo

Why Are You Called Reasonable Robinson?

My nom de plume was invented by my younger brother. It came about some twenty years ago after I was involved in an altercation in a British pub. I was in the company of some friends when a rather rowdy young girl started annoying one of my girl friends. I decided to intervene and took hold of the girl who was threatening my friend in order to restrain her and call the landlord to eject her off the premises. As I was doing this a car screeched into the pub car park and out leapt a friend of the girl I was restraining. Now, having started to train in Karate (circa two weeks!) I thought I could handle the situation, and as the guy approached me I stood with my arms folded and started to say "now let's be reasonable about this" Unfortunately for me I got as far as "now lets be reas..." when the guy punched me in the mouth! Ouch- lesson learned.

My second christian name is Robinson (as in Crusoe) after my grandfather on my mothers side, and so my witty brother named me Reasonable Robinson!

My Top Lenses By Lensrank

People

Green Living

Music

Shopping

DIY Hobbies

Business

My How To / Education Lenses

My Latest Lenses

My Squidoo Lens

A Blogger Blog promoting My Squidoo Lenses

I use this Blogger Blog as a general lens directory to reach the parts Squidoo sometimes might not reach. It was started in December 2009 and I add a lens a week

Fetching RSS feed... please stand by

Giant Squid Status

In October 2009 I was awarded Giant Squid Status. This was due in no small part to the feedback and encouragement of Michelle Willow and my WiiWon team coach Carol Fisher

Like any skill Squidoo lens building can be learned improved and developed. There are lots of helpful and knowledgeable people in the Squidoo community too.

My Home Town

Carlisle county town of Cumbria in the UK

Carlisle Called Lugavalium by the Romans. Situated at the western end of Hadrian's wall Carlisle's history has been dominated by its location as a border town on the English -Scottish border. The River Eden runs through it and it was the home of the first and only state owned brewery. The brewery was nationalised in order to ensure the brewing of a consistently weak beer for the ammunitions workers that worked in the area during the 20th century world wars. Home of Carlisle United F.C. and Carrs of Carlisle famous for their water biscuits.

The Grandmother of US President Woodrow, Jessie Woodrow Wilson was born in Carlisle too, and President Wilson visited Carlisle before the Versaille Peace Conference. There is a pub named in his honour in the town too.

Carlisle A Town With A Border Reiver History

Carlisle the town and Carlisle the family name

Carlisle was a key border town during the times of the Border Reivers. Carlisle is also the name of one of the Border Reiver clans that roamed the border region from the late middle ages to the nineteenth century.

Border Reiver Family Names T Shirt by reasonablerobinson

Border Reiver Men's T Shirt by reasonablerobinson

My Uncle John A World War One Hero From Carlisle

A Sailor In Winston's Little Army the Royal Naval Division

Where I Live

Nottingham home of Robin Hood, Raleigh Bikes, Players Cigarettes, Boots the Chemist and The Salvation Army

Nottingham home of Robin Hood, Torvill and Dean, Nottingham Forest F.C., Trent Bridge cricket ground, The National Watersport Centre, and close to Newstead Abbey home of Lord Byron, Newark the home of Gulliver in Gulliver's Travels, Aslockton home of Thomas Cranmer, Henry VIII's legal marriage advisor. Nottingham is the place of Standard Hill where King Charles raised his Standard at the start of the English Civil was, and is home to the famous Goose Fair. It stands on the River Trent.

My Nottingham Lenses

Some Of My Favourite Books

Gullibility

Excerpts from my flagship blog

Fetching RSS feed... please stand by

I Am An Aquarius

image credit Visual Statistics

According to Suite 101 as an Aquarian you can expect me to be "extremely open-minded, tolerant, extroverted, experimental and emotionally detached"

There Are Only 7 People In The World

Young and Rubicom have characterised seven personality profiles

Explore the basics here 4CS

I am:

Main Priority: Control
Characterisation: Succeeder

You are powered by a strong goal orientation; your long term growth plans backed up by the confidence of high self-worth. The underlying aim of your drive is duration and stability, a desire for lasting personal achievement. It's possible that you have a forward plan of your life worked out, and think in terms of strategic moves towards willed outcomes.

Your creativity works in a process of simplifying complexity - cutting through ambiguity and extraneous complication, organising solutions. And in finding ways to express your conclusions in down-to-earth examples from personal experience.

You do need to be the captain of your ship, separate from the mass of people - and to enjoy the rewards of success as well as the symbols of prestige that inspire the achievement of life goals. You may feel an attraction to things that have lasted for a long time - well-aged single-malt whisky can be one example, a tendency to align yourself with the local political and social establishment another.

You are particularly aware of the importance of inter-personal communications. Socially you feel most at ease with individuals who share your Control priority, but on some level you may need a more caring and protective antidote to the stress and suppression involved in your drive toward success.

Main Priority: Discovery
Characterisation: Explorer

Who am I? How far, how fast can I go? What is over there? What will happen if I do this? Life is a voyage of discovery, an adventure, an experiment.

You are generally full of spontaneous energy, new ideas and possibilities. It may mean taking a risk, but if the feeling comes to you, you are ready to leave it all behind and follow your impulse wherever it may lead. You cannot commit totally to decisions that could tie you down, lock you into routine - there must always be doors that open to change and new directions.

Your creativity is in the breaking of rules, conventions and stereotypes. The discovery of new and exciting people/music/ideas/films/places/ways to do things. Friends are most probably very important in your life, and you like to work and play in a group. What you respect in others is originality, a real point of view, true to itself, attitudes that don't compromise. And imaginative, clever, ambiguous, somewhat extreme or sometimes even slightly cruel ways of expressing an individual take on reality.

My take on personality classifications is this:

I think the interesting thing about categorisations is that they appear to give a neat resume of who you are, and tend to reveal your main predispositions. They do have their limitations, and can result in thinking about people in a stereotypical way.

Because of their generalised nature they can be used uncritically and this leaves us open to what psychologists call The Forer Effect This is an socio-psychological effect where people read accuracy of a personaility description into a very general chameo that could apply to anybody.

The key limitations for me with personality typing are:

a) doesn't appear to account for differences in social context. In other words people behave differently in different situations.

b) doesn't appear to acknowledge the potentional for individual transformation and change

This is why I am slightly sceptical of the mass application of psychometric testing in the workplace. If the person using them has a 'managerialist' mind-set and sees the world in terms of crisp cleary defined categories and the need to order and control things then personality categorisation can become a negative tool.

As many of you will probably know these types of categorisation and the well known Myers Briggs tests (see below) were inspired by the work of Carl Jung The significant thing about Jung's work was that it was deeply concerned with personal transformation, growth and change over time. He specifically advised against classifying people in permanent typologies.

So, use with caution. I recall the story a friend of mine who worked for a big corporate being stereotyped by her line manager after she had only been trained in using the Myers Briggs instrument for two hours. Once the line manager had classifed my friend as an extrovert and someone who needed structure and detail she then reallocated the customer accounts she had been successfully looking after for several years to someone else! She then treated my friend 'as if' she was her classification. This is known as altercasting and is where the 'target' is cast as for example 'hard working', 'dizzy', 'good fun' etc and so they behave like that in response to the expectation.

You might find the ideas of Don Beck and Chris Cowan in Spiral Dynamics more useful. Based on the work of psychologist Clare Graves the basic idea is that people develop so called 'Value Memes' which change over time and with context. People have a dominant 'meme' that they are predisposed to make sense of the world from for most of the time. Me? it would be good to think I was yellow!

My Personality

I am an Advocate

ENFPs are introspective, values-oriented, inspiring, social and extremely expressive. They actively send their thoughts and ideas out into the world as a way to bring attention to what they feel to be important, which often has to do with ethics and current events. ENFPs are natural advocates, attracting people to themselves and their cause with excellent people skills, warmth, energy and positivity. ENFPs are described as creative, resourceful, assertive, spontaneous, life-loving, charismatic, passionate and experimental.

Check out a full description here Advocate

Places I've Been

plus Squidoo links to those places

Flagstaff Arizona: Went to N.Arizona University for a week on a project for my MBA course. Visited Meteor Crater, and also drove to the Grand Canyon and on to Las Vegas for one night!
Prague: I went here on a school trip from Nottingham in 1968. We got out of the country the night the Soviets invaded. I was 11 years old. What an amazing city. The Astronomical Clock is amazing, and also the Jewish Cemetary where notes are posted to the dead.
Chicago: I've been to Chicago form the UK several times on business. My first visit was to a Trade Fair and we had an amazing time. Made the mistake of thinking that 'The Loop' was a rail trip around the city and ended up in the back of beyond...looking like a real 'tourist' from Europe. Best memory was hearing Sunny Land Slim in Chicago Blues North Halstead. I've still got his album which he signed for me.
London: The UKs Capital
San Franscisco: Fishermans Wharf!
San Antonio: I was here on a business trip. I contracted pneumonia which wasn't very nice. Great city. I was amazed at the Alamo chapel to see a Welsh flag comemorating one of the defenders, I didn't expect the Welsh flag to be known very much outside of Europe.
Las Vegas: Working in the gambling industry meant that a visit to Las Vegas was a must. Great fun, although when I stopped in the Camelot Hotel I thought (as I came from Nottingham) having breakfast in the Maid Marion restaurant wasn't what I'd travelled half way around the world for. I've stopped in the MGM too, visited the pawn broker shop area, and shot guns in a gun shop.
Reno: What a great city! Check out the Liberty Bell restaurant run by the grand children of Charles Fey the inventor of the Slot Machine. The first slot was the Liberty Bell. They do great steak and fries!

Squidoo Conversations

Anti-Valentine's Day: how to weather Feb. 14: An early entry on Squidoo.com recounted a foray to a local petting zoo where not only was the writer jumped by a filthy-footed goat, but her date was spit on by an angry llama. Throw a party, says Squidoo, but avoid the following: anything pink or red, ...
Fed up with the romantic-industrial complex? Why to hate Valentine's Day.: An early entry on Squidoo.com recounted a foray to a local petting zoo where not only was the writer jumped by a filthy-footed goat, but her date was spit on by an angry llama. Throw a party, says Squidoo, but avoid the following: anything pink or red, ...
What are Longwood Memes and Who's Behind the Fad?: But in internet terms, according to squidoo.com, an internet meme is "an internet phenomenon, or a meme, is an image, video, phrase or simply an idea that spreads from one person to another seemingly for no logical reason at all.
Local CVB recognized for social marketing: The CVB used the free social networking site, www.squidoo.com, to create eight websites, or lenses as they are called in squidoo lingo, according to Pete Schultz, CVB director. ?The goal has been to connect with people searching for tourist information ...

'About me' brainstorming session

Here you can add all ideas you come up with for 'about me' lens! You might not use these particular ideas but to someone else they might come handy! :)

Squidoo

Squidoo Lensography of Lensmaster Reasonable Robinson

A squidoo articles offers a mix of stepping stones to new topics and ideas

Contents at a Glance

Contents at a Glance

What Is Squidoo?

niche marketing and website platform for creative people

Seth Godin Tribes

Seth Godin the originator of Squidoo

Why Are You Called Reasonable Robinson?

My Top Lenses By Lensrank

People

Green Living

Music

Shopping

DIY Hobbies

Business

My How To / Education Lenses

My Latest Lenses

My Squidoo Lens

A Blogger Blog promoting My Squidoo Lenses

Giant Squid Status

My Home Town

Carlisle county town of Cumbria in the UK

Carlisle A Town With A Border Reiver History

Carlisle the town and Carlisle the family name

My Uncle John A World War One Hero From Carlisle

A Sailor In Winston's Little Army the Royal Naval Division

Where I Live

Nottingham home of Robin Hood, Raleigh Bikes, Players Cigarettes, Boots the Chemist and The Salvation Army

My Nottingham Lenses

Some Of My Favourite Books

Gullibility

Excerpts from my flagship blog

I Am An Aquarius

There Are Only 7 People In The World

My Personality

I am an Advocate

Places I've Been

plus Squidoo links to those places

Squidoo Conversations

'About me' brainstorming session

1

What makes me smile?

2

If I was an animal I'd be...

3

Why I love Squidoo/Writing

4

What makes me sad

5

25 Things About Me

6

What are my goals

7

Wireless Alarm Systems

8

Healthy Heart Diet

9

London walking routes

10

Discount Codes

11

Ginseng Benefits

12

Car Shipping Prices

13

Lawn Grubs

14

What I love

15

childhood memories

16

How I met my spouse

17

Best personal learning experience

18

What am I passionate about?

19

Who do you tweet and why?