Angela O Meora Character Traits

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The novel Olive Kitteride written by Elizabeth Strout contains thirteen short stories, one of which is “The Piano Player”. Angela O’Meara is the main character of this chapter, and she has been the piano player at a local cocktail lounge for over twenty years. When looking at her behavior, she displays traits that show that she has a reflective personality. A reflective personality is one of four basic communication styles, which are all influenced by sociability and dominance. Subsequently, a reflective communicator is somebody who has a low sociability and a low dominance. As written in Selling Today: Creating Customer Value, “Sociability reflects the amount of control we exert over our emotional expressiveness.” (Manning 78), while “Dominance can be defined as the tendency to …show more content…

Angela shows her low sociability when she is on the job as she works straight through her shift without taking a break. When asked by her boss why she does not stop, Angela responds with, “I hate to get started again” (Strout 50). She does not take a break as she has stage fright. It takes plenty of courage to walk up on stage to begin with, and she cannot muster up the courage to do it twice in one night. Additionally, when Angela was younger she was offered a scholarship to a music school in Chicago. It would be fully paid for, but the catch was that her mother would not get to have her as her “mommy’s girl”. Therefore, her mother decided that she would not go to the school (Strout 55-56). From this, Angela has led her life letting people forge decisions for her, while also keeping to herself. As Selling Today says, “people with [low dominance] classification tend to be reserved and cautious.” (Manning 83), which is how Angela tends to act as a result of her mother babying her. Her reflective personality is why she appears to be so submissive and quiet not only at work, but also in her personal

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