I ran into an interesting little problem while assessing a couple people to determine their Fun Factor, (see note at bottom of this blog.) These people were my sister her husband.
I was visiting them over the weekend and we got on the topic of The Fun Factor. I decided to run through the whole Fun Factor assessment process with them. My sister and her husband are extremely enjoyable to be with, so I expected very high Fun Factor scores.
While they scored high in most of the five essential attributes, they didn't score particularly well with the Humility attribute. Very odd. Somebody having a challenged attribute of Humility does not make them unauthentically joyful and positive. It simply caught me off guard because I thought they were two of the most perfectly enjoyable people in the whole world; I found them to be authentically fun people. Perhaps I was too close to the situation, and my perception of my sister had been biased. That made a great deal of sense to me, but I still needed to dive in deeper because something wasn't quite understandable about The Fun Factor scoring system.
Because it was far more consistent with research and perception than not, lack of humility generally resulted from egocentrism. In neither of them did I recognized any prevalent egotistic behavior. No outward tendency towards a stronger identification of self above others.
What I found was that they lacked what one might consider as empathy. Actually, it wasn't that they lacked it as much as it simply wasn't particularly pronounced. I researched whether First Responders in general tended to be empathic. I found that empathy is remarkably important for successful First Responders. They put themselves in the minds and the bodies of the people who they serve. This makes them highly effective and efficient and identifying not only their own situation but that of the person or people they are serving. I also noted that First Responders have a tendency to have a modified lens through which they express feelings of empathy with those who they were not serving. While the research stopped short of saying that this was a self-protection mechanism, (which makes sense that it would be), it did indicate that the frequency upon which First Responders maintained unusually high levels of empathy and their ability to use it objectively fell outside their profession as time went on. Again, it's not that they lacked empathy, it's simply filtered differently for First Responders.
The information suggests that empathy and humility do belong on different sides of the same spectrum. Regardless of the situation, there is a tendency for First Responders to have a different bias by which they are empathic. Whether it's for personal protection, or whether it is "hardened" by time I'm not entirely able to answer, and I'm in the middle of a bunch of research trying to figure that one out. What seems to be likely is that this altered state of empathy affects how it their humility is perceived by those outside their profession, whether it's somebody they serve, or other First Responders.
Note to readers. This by no means is any kind of a psychological or social assessment presented by somebody who is trained and educated in some form of field of psychology. The Fun Factor is nothing more than one person's assessment based upon their perception.
To First Responders, I in no way wish to ever say that as a result of your profession you are not fun people to be around. I know at least a dozen who very much are.