Conscious Thought vs Less Conscious Behaviors

March 27, 2018/0 Comments/in Blog /by Scott Schwefel

By Scott Schwefel, CSP, CEO, Discover Yourself

Do your thoughts cause your behavior? That might sound like a silly question at first. Of course, you feel thirsty, you know that taking a drink will quench your thirst, so you move your arm to pick up your glass and drink some water. It’s obvious that your conscious thoughts about being thirsty and knowing that water will make you feel better caused that action, right?

In fact, evidence from cognitive neuroscience suggests that conscious thought may not be as much of a driver of behavior as we expect. Many of our actions are ‘decided on’ unconsciously.

Do thoughts cause behavior?
The question of what causes behaviors has been debated in philosophical circles for thousands of years. The problem is this: if you believe the body to be a purely physical thing, as most philosophers these days do, then it’s hard to explain how this physical body could be controlled by a mind. How do thoughts (a mental thing) cause actions (a physical thing)? In all the rest of the world as we know it, there is no other example of a mental thing causing a physical thing.

The solution that some have come to is that conscious thoughts don’t actually cause behaviors – the thoughts merely run alongside the behaviors, and we think that the thoughts cause the behavior because they happen at the same time. This view, called epiphenomenalism, sounds bizarre but is one of the few ways to make sense of the relationship between mental and physical: conscious thoughts are just a kind of window dressing for behaviors that are actually caused by physical things like the environment.

Push the button
If this sounds like unfounded philosophical pondering, then you’ll be glad to hear that more recently cognitive scientists have performed experiments to investigate the brain’s role in causing behaviors. A famous experiment by neuroscientist Benjamin Libet used EEG (a kind of brain scan) to measure the moment at which people decide to take an action. The participants were hooked up to the EEG machine and then asked to push a button at any time they wanted to in the next 10 seconds, and to look at a clock and take note of the exact moment at which they decided to act.

The strange thing was that a distinctive pattern of brain activation was found before the participants reported deciding to push the button. It seemed that there was a decision making process going on in the brain which took place a full half a second before the conscious decision to act was made. This is pretty solid evidence that behaviors are caused, at least to some extent, by unconscious brain processes rather than by conscious thoughts.

Is that my hand?
That’s pretty strange, for sure – the idea that decisions are being made by you before you’re actually consciously aware that you have made a decision. But still, regardless of the time differences involved, you still feel like you make a decision and then take an action. You’d know if a behavior happened without you deciding to do it, right? If you thought one thing and your body did another thing, you’d definitely notice – wouldn’t you?

According to experimental research, maybe not. There’s a group of experiments called false feedback tasks, in which participants perform a simple action such as drawing a straight vertical line. The trick is that the experiment is set up so that the participants don’t actually see their own hand performing the task. Back in the 1960s, this was achieved by getting participants to put their hand in a box and using a system of mirrors so that when they looked down, they actually saw the experimenter’s hand instead of their own. Nowadays similar effects are achieved using computerized feedback. Using this system, experimenters give the participants false visual feedback. So, for example, instead of seeing their own hand drawing a straight vertical line (which is what their hand was actually doing), the participant sees a hand that looks like their own drawing a line at an angle.

The really strange part is that a large majority of participants still think that the hand that they see is actually their own hand. Even when the action that they intended to take (draw a straight line) was actually followed by a different action (draw a crooked line), participants still felt as if they were in control of their actions and that they had decided to draw a crooked line instead. This means that people perceive themselves as consciously controlling their hand even when it was actually controlled by a computer or by the experimenter, and they believe their decisions to be controlling the hand even when they are not.

Why does this matter?
As you can see, the degree to which your conscious thoughts control your behaviors is actually not as clear as you might think. In terms of both deciding to take an action before it happens, and making an assessment that we chose to perform an action after it happens, we are remarkably influenced by non-conscious factors. We assume that we have consciously decided to take a certain action when we observe ourselves performing that action, when in fact many of our behaviors are not consciously driven.

All this information from philosophy and neuroscience might be interesting to ponder over, but does it actually matter to our everyday lives? Arguably it does, especially when we think about behavior change. If you’re trying to turn over a new leaf, such as by giving up smoking, becoming more organized, or working on a project every day, then you need to think about factors other than your conscious thoughts that might affect your behavior. Things like the environment you are in and your bodily state (whether you’re hungry, stressed, well rested, and so on) can have a large impact on your behaviors even if you are not consciously aware of them. We’ll get into this topic in more depth in the next blog post, so check back soon! www.discoveryourself.com

The Science Behind Self-Awareness

March 21, 2018/0 Comments/in Blog /by Scott Schwefel

By Scott Schwefel, CSP, CEO, Discover Yourself

The topic of self-awareness is obviously important for anyone who is seeking to understand themselves and to communicate and act more effectively. So what do we know about the brain based science of self-awareness?

The development of self-awareness

A good way to understand how self-awareness works is to watch how it develops in children. For example, have you ever watched a young child stare at themselves in the mirror? A very young child of around a year old won’t recognize their reflection, and they may try to play with the other baby that they see. But once kids are just a little older, at around 18 to 24 months, they will start to recognize that the person in the mirror is them. This shows that they understand that they have a physical body which is perceived by others in the world.

A famous test of self-awareness in psychology is called the dot test. You put a brightly colored dot sticker on a child’s forehead, and then sit them in front of a mirror. If the child reaches for the mirror, then they possibly don’t understand that the reflection they see is themselves. But if the child reaches for their own forehead to touch or remove the sticker, you can know that the child recognizes themselves in the mirror. This is one of the key developmental stages of acquiring self-awareness.

Awareness of your physical body

Another key aspect of self-awareness is the awareness we have of how our body is positioned. You might think that we work this out visually – for example, that when we catch a ball we look at the ball and then look at our arm, and adjust accordingly. But in fact, that’s not the case. Even with your eyes closed, you can still tell where your limbs are positioned. This is a sense (yes, we have more than five senses!) called proprioception.

There are special receptors in our muscles called muscle spindles which send signals to our brains indicating when a muscle stretches. This allows our brains to calculate the position of our bodies, even when there is no visual information available. Interestingly, this is why it is impossible to tickle yourself. Certain movements on body areas feel ticklish because those movements are unpredictable – but when you are the one moving your fingers over your side, you don’t experience the tickling sensation because your brain already knows how your fingers are moving and is expecting to feel that pattern on your skin.

Awareness of your own mind

There’s a different way to think about self-awareness, and that’s in terms of our awareness of our own minds rather than our bodies. You might have heard of a famous finding called the Dunning-Kruger effect. This is a cognitive bias in which people who are very bad at a task tend to wildly overestimate their ability at that task. If you take a test of skill or knowledge – and it can be practically anything, from skill at driving to mathematical ability – and then ask participants to rate their own performance on the task before you tell them their results, then you might expect participants who are very good at the task to rate themselves highly and people who are bad at the task to rate themselves as low in skill.

However, that’s not what happens. People who are in the middle of performance on tests tend to rate themselves accurately as scoring in the middle. People who perform very well on a test tend to rate themselves as a bit lower than their actual performance was. But people who perform very poorly on a test rate themselves as average or above average in their performance.

The problem is that in order to assess your performance on a test accurately, you have to have knowledge of the subject. In other words, you have to know what you don’t know. There is also the issue that people tend to assume that others are similar to them – so highly competent people rate themselves as just a bit above average because they overestimate the skills of others, while people low in competence rate themselves as above average because they overestimate their own skills.

Dunning-Kruger is often used to make jokes about incompetence, but it also reveals an important aspect of self-awareness called metacognition. This is the ability to think about your own thinking: this means the ability to understand how you learn, to decide which strategy you should use to solve a problem, and to gain insight into your own strengths and weaknesses.

Why self-awareness matters so much

One of the reasons that metacognition is so important is that self-awareness is linked to self-regulation. Self-regulation refers to the ability to manage your emotions in a productive way – for example, the ability to stay calm and not lose your temper when you have to deal with an overbearing colleague. This process requires you to suppress some emotional responses and plan for the future in order to achieve a long term goal – in this case, to get your work project completed and not to get fired.

There’s a test of self-regulation that’s often performed with kids, called the marshmallow test. The test is simple: you take a child, and tell them they can either have one marshmallow now, or two marshmallows in ten minutes. While kids would obviously prefer to have two marshmallows than one, this is a tough test because children often lack a firm understanding of time – so “in ten minutes” seems like it could be forever for a child. The test requires that the children prioritize their future happiness at having two marshmallows later on, over the current desire to have one marshmallow now.

The interesting part of this test is the long term results. Researchers at Stanford found that children who were able to self-regulate and to wait for the two marshmallows had better outcomes later in life than children who couldn’t. These children who could self-regulate had better educational performance, better physical health, and more successful careers. The ability to regulate your emotions and to prioritize the future over immediate gratification is a key skill for a happy and successful life.

This is just scratching the surface of the research on self-awareness in cognitive psychology, so check back here soon for more about this fascinating topic, or visit www.scottstedtalk.com to learn more. You can also contact Scott at www.discoveryourself.com

How Psychometric Testing Can Help You Build Stronger Teams

March 1, 2018/0 Comments/in Blog /by Scott Schwefel

You may have heard about the use of personality tests, or psychometric testing, in business contexts in order to achieve a higher standard of management and team building. Today we’re going to look at what these tests measure and the ways that they can bring business benefits to your team.

Why study personality?
The theories of personality psychology may be interesting to read about, but more than this they can provide concrete advice on how to work more effectively. Psychometric testing can be used to give insights which enable people to gain self-understanding, letting them be more aware of their personality style and strengths and weaknesses. From this information, people can learn better strategies for interactions with others based on the specific needs of each personality type.

In a business context, psychometric testing can bring distinct benefits to your team. You can adapt your management style to bring out the best from each member of your team by finding the correct motivation and communication style for them. And by sharing the insights into personality that you gain with your team, they can interact with each other in a more effective and productive way as well.

Types of personality tests
As complicated as humans are, there are many different ways to measure and define personality. In academic contexts, personality is most frequently analyzed in terms of the degree to which a person displays the ‘big five’ personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Another style of psychometric testing which is popular among the public and in some business contexts is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) system, which is based on the theories of Carl Jung. The MBTI assigns personality to a pole from each of the dichotomies of sensing/intuition, feeling/thinking, introversion/extroversion, and perception/judging.

The Insights Discovery profile system that we use at Discover Yourself is also based on the work of Jung, but with greater detail than MBTI and with profiles that are optimized to provide information for management contexts. Each Insights profile will give concrete advice on communicating with, managing, and motivating the person, as well as information on how the person would manage others.

The benefits of personality testing
The advantage of personality testing is that it gives you a set of tools with which to think about yourself. Do you interact best working alone in a small team or do you thrive in a large group? Do you prefer a high level of organization with rigid structures, or are you more comfortable in a flexible situation where you can respond quickly to new information? Do you communicate most effectively in a written, visual, or oral form? These are the kinds of insights that you can clarify with personality testing.

When it comes to personality testing in business, the creation of a space in which people can express their preferences is a tremendous boon. Perhaps a team member finds phone calls stressful and would prefer to be emailed when possible. Or a manager likes to be looped in on all relevant emails by their staff, even if they are not directly involved in the discussion, so that they can maintain an overview of their team. In the work world there are rarely opportunities for members of teams to frankly discuss their personal preferences, and personality testing enables and supports these conversations to give your team confidence when interacting with each other.

Understanding personality test data
If you are considering using psychometric testing to gather information on your team, there are a few key issues to remember. Most important is the understanding that results from psychometric tests are descriptive, not prescriptive. This means that personality data can describe the ways in which a person will tend towards thinking and interacting with others, but does not provide strict rules about how a person will always behave. Each person is different, and while personality testing can be used for broad general information about personality types, individual differences will always be present. This means that personality tests should be used as guidelines and inspiration for experimentation with new communication styles, and not taken to represent a fundamental and unchangeable part of a person.

Further, psychometric tests like MBTI and Insights rely on people’s own judgment of themselves and their self-reporting of these judgments. Therefore the results will only be as accurate as a person’s honesty and self-insight. This is in some ways a strength of the format, as it stems from the belief that people know themselves best. But in some testing scenarios, there is also the opportunity for people to bring in the insights of their colleagues or friends to give them information on how they are perceived by others as well as how they perceive themselves, which can improve accuracy and the applicability of the test results.

Personality data and your team
Once you have personality data about your team, you can use this to optimize and improve your team interactions. Some people erroneously believe that there is one personality type that is best suited to business, or that a team needs to be made up of similar personalities in order to be successful. But this is not the case: a team benefits from a variety of personality types interacting. You can benefit from having both outgoing, social and communicative extroverts as well as thoughtful, interior-focused and introverted members for different tasks. As a manager you can assign roles based on differing strengths, such as assigning your extroverts to client management or networking tasks and assigning detail-oriented conceptual work that needs to be performed by one person to the more introverted members of your team.

Finally, consider the value of understanding not just personality types in isolation, but also knowing how these types will interact with other personality types. With detailed personality profiles like the Insight, you’ll see information on the opposite types of a given personality as well as advice on how that personality will interact with managers and with other colleagues. Being able to predict how your team members will interact with others will allow you to assign duties in a way that maximizes your team’s chances of success.

Find out more about psychometric testing and how personality data can help you to build a stronger team at Discover Yourself: https://discoveryourself.com/

Beyond Success

July 26, 2016/0 Comments/in Blog /by Scott Schwefel

Throughout the past few weeks, we’ve talked about success and how to achieve it. Achieving success following this path requires much thought and personal work, but in the end, it will hopefully allow you to reach some of the personal goals you have created for yourself. Using the power of your personality type and what we know about the subconscious mind, we can create successful patterns of living our lives and accomplishing our goals.

Working towards success

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” William Churchill spoke these words as a man acquainted with both great failure and great success. Churchill, Edison, Einstein, and other individuals throughout history had failed many times before they were able to produce the successes they knew they were capable of. Einstein puzzled with the very nature of the makeup of the universe, and his contributions to physics and mathematics were products of asking questions, finding answers, figuring out if they were right or wrong, and continuing on his line of questioning until he reached the end.

When creating the filament wire for the lightbulb, Edison failed over and over again in the quest for light. In Edison’s case, this was finding the literal light in the form of contained electricity. He failed over a thousand times to create the right filament, and yet he continued to work away at this problem until he got it right.

Success and happiness

This isn’t all to say that all the successful people we know aren’t faced with challenges eventually. Albert Schweitzer said: “Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.” Combining what we are passionate about with what we do every day can have a major impact on our overall success rate as well as how happy we feel about the path our lives are on.

Success doesn’t always lead to happiness – just ask the lottery winners who may be financially successful, but are no happier than they were before they won. Successful professionals may find that their professional success has come with many personal sacrifices and that their passion has waned. However, success in these fields would be extremely beneficial to the person who has planned out their personal and professional goals, done the work to achieve those goals and has remained aligned with their passion for what they do.

Carl Jung opened up an entirely new world with his discoveries, and new discoveries in the psychology of personality and the self are still being made today. Insights Discovery is based squarely on Jung’s theories, and as such, it is an invaluable tool in helping people to understand themselves and others. Schedule me, Scott Schwefel, as your keynote speaker, and I will come to your group and address the differences in personalities in a truthful, fun, and easily understood way. Follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to share my blogs with the color energies you work with!

Success, One Step at a Time

July 19, 2016/0 Comments/in Blog /by Scott Schwefel

The path to success isn’t found through a formula. Success doesn’t just happen because someone got lucky, or won the lottery. Success looks different for everyone, which is what makes defining success and following your own path that much more important.

There were eight steps outlined in the last eight blogs to show one way how success can be achieved using your passion and what you want your life to look like. The first step was to find your passion, which is a statement that can seem simpler than it is in practice. Finding your passion can take time, but think about what you would do if you didn’t have to worry about money or time. What would you do?

Steps to success

The second step to success was to define success as it pertained to you; this doesn’t mean success as society, your family, or your job defines it. Step three was to know your personality, what you are good at and who you are at both work and home. Step four was to set goals which align with your passions and can be placed into categories like your physical health, your spiritual life, your family, your friendships, and your financial and work lives.

Step five was to think. Think about your goals once you’ve written them down and work towards attaining those goals, one day and one step at a time. These accomplishments may not seem like much, but in the long term, they reveal much more about who you are and how far you’ve come. Setting your mind to your goals is a powerful tool.

The next two steps were the most essential. Operate with integrity both at home and at work, and execute your plan to utilize your passion every day and find success. Inspiring respect in others is a by-product of living with integrity and executing your personal plan for success on your terms.

This isn’t the end

Of course, finding success isn’t the end of the line. Failures happen, and success is temporary, but continuing to strive towards personal success creates good habits and brings you closer to living out your passions consistently. Giving back to the people who helped you accomplish your goals is essential, as is giving your knowledge and experience back to others who may be on their journeys to success behind you.

Carl Jung opened up an entirely new world with his discoveries, and new discoveries in the psychology of personality and the self are still being made today. Insights Discovery is based squarely on Jung’s theories, and as such, it is an invaluable tool in helping people to understand themselves and others. Schedule me, Scott Schwefel, as your keynote speaker, and I will come to your group and address the differences in personalities in a truthful, fun, and easily understood way. Follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to share my blogs with the color energies you work with!

Giving Back

July 12, 2016/0 Comments/in Blog /by Scott Schwefel

You are on a roll! You have accomplished a few of the goals you have set for yourself and are seeing improvements in your personal, professional, and social lives. What happens now? There will always be a few setbacks when it comes to shaping your life and accomplishing your goals, but over time you may find that setting your attention towards your goals makes them easier to attain.

You may start to feel better, not only mentally, but physically as well. If one of your goals was to eat better and exercise more, you should feel the physical benefits of this new lifestyle as your body grows healthier and more energetic. If your goals were professionally oriented, you might have gotten closer to a coveted position within your company or finally settled into a new career that is more closely aligned with your passions.

Looking ahead

Looking ahead to the future means continually assessing and evaluating your goals to see what you have accomplished in the last few months or years. Knowing how far you’ve come can give you a much-needed mental boost on those days when you feel like you haven’t accomplished very much. Take this newfound energy and success and channel it not only towards yourself, but towards other people as well.

You can imagine that you are in a place of growth as you accomplish your goals and create a life you are passionate about. This direction leads you towards places of influence over others, whether it is within your family or your professional sphere. As you grow and begin to know yourself better, you can have an incredibly positive effect on those around you. Giving back to the people you interact with every day can be as simple as smiling at the barista at your local coffee shop or not losing your temper when confronted with bad drivers on your commute.

We can’t always control the world around us, but we can control our reactions to the people, circumstances, and situations we find ourselves in. As we enter a new phase of defining and finding success for ourselves, we need to remember that we are in control of our futures and our destinies.

We are what we think

The idea that we are what we think about is nothing new. Everyone from the Greeks to Buddha to figures in the Bible echoes a concept along those lines. If we are consistently thinking about who we are, what we want to accomplish, and how we are going to obtain success, our lives will naturally flow in those directions.

Carl Jung opened up an entirely new world with his discoveries, and new discoveries in the psychology of personality and the self are still being made today. Insights Discovery is based squarely on Jung’s theories, and as such, it is an invaluable tool in helping people to understand themselves and others. Schedule me, Scott Schwefel, as your keynote speaker, and I will come to your group and address the differences in personalities in a truthful, fun, and easily understood way. Follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to share my blogs with the color energies you work with!

Activate Success

July 6, 2016/0 Comments/in Blog /by Scott Schwefel

The most successful people didn’t get where they are by accident; they had a plan, worked hard, and were rewarded with successful outcomes. Everyone’s definition of personal success is unique unto themselves, but what we can all agree on is that knowing where you are going and what to do is an important part of being successful.

Executing a plan that will lead to success comes from the goals you’ve already set for yourself. Your goals will ultimately lead you to achieve different objectives in your life, both personally and professionally, and often lead to greater feelings of success. This execution of the plan is the means by which we set out to accomplish these goals.

Step by step

Step by step, goals -and therefore success- are accomplished. You create a list of goals you wanted to achieve in various areas of your life that include physical, spiritual, family, friends, and finance/work goals. The hope is to align these goals with the passions you have in your life to create a happier, healthier, and more successful version of who you are today. These goals may not be able to be accomplished overnight, which is where the execution of the plan comes into play.

Setting goals based on passion and striving towards them with integrity doesn’t mean anything unless you keep at it. Failure happens, yet all too many people give up after failing to meet their goals. Some passions are harder to integrate into your life, just as some goals are harder to accomplish. Not giving up is an essential part of finding success.

Making a plan

Making a plan to accomplish your goals means evaluating them and knowing what you need to do to check those goals off your list. If you’re looking to change careers or get promoted in your current job, who do you need to network with? What other training or tasks can you do to improve your chances? Do you need another recommendation or perhaps networking in a new industry?

Your plan will change, which is just as frustrating as coming up against a perceived failure when trying to reach your goals. Rolling with the changes and re-evaluating your plan can help keep you in touch with what you’re trying to accomplish and spark the passion you have for the things you’re doing in your life.

Our goals are the lighthouse, and failures are the waves that keep us out of sight of our passions and goals. Failure happens, but we can always use the lighthouse to navigate our way towards our goals even if we get a bit off course.

Jung opened up an entirely new world with his discoveries, and discoveries into the psychology of personality and the self are still being made today. Insights Discovery is based squarely on Jung’s theories, and as such is an invaluable tool in helping people understand themselves and others. Schedule me, Scott Schwefel, as your keynote speaker, and I will come to your group and address the differences in personalities in a truthful, fun, and easy-to-understand way. Follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to share my blogs with the color energies you work with!

Investing in Integrity

June 28, 2016/0 Comments/in Blog /by Scott Schwefel

When you think of the word integrity, what comes to mind? Do you think of people presently in your life or remnants of characters from days gone by? Is integrity a real and concrete character trait that is being encouraged by our families and societies, or is it something that we’ve pushed into the background?

Success used to be closely associated with integrity. Early business pioneers like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford were known not just for their business acumen, but for their personal integrity when doing business as well. Integrity wasn’t just something that was reserved for those who found success in their various professional fields, but for everyone who desired to be respected by those around them.

Modern success

Modern definitions of success often leave out integrity. We’ve grown up assuming that success is attained by earning the most money, acquiring the most business experience, or rising in the ranks faster using whatever means necessary. Integrity as a personal and professional character trait has fallen by the wayside and is no longer closely tied to our concepts of success.

This doesn’t have to be the case, however. Although the media sensationalizes the scandals involving celebrities and politicians, less attention is paid to the people who value integrity as an essential part of their business plans. These individuals and organizations have risen, many very quietly, to influence and change the world around them in meaningful ways.

Valuing success means valuing the choices and characteristics that bring success in the long term. If integrity is one of these factors, wouldn’t you want to work with a company and with other people that value the level of integrity you expect?

Bringing integrity

Although modern society’s definition of success may not include integrity as a core principle, many successful businesses have maintained their growth because of the moral integrity of their founder and employees.

Individuals are the beginning of integrity. Without an individual, an organization or business won’t have the integrity it needs to succeed over the long term. Other individuals or organizations may find quick success using less than moral methods, but everything we do (both good and bad) eventually catches up with us. Behavioral change has to occur on an individual level to create a culture of integrity that impacts the professional world we live and work in every day.

Carl Jung opened up an entirely new world with his discoveries, and new discoveries into the psychology of personality and the self are still being made today. Insights Discovery is based squarely on Jung’s theories, and as such, it is an invaluable tool in helping people to understand themselves and others. Schedule me, Scott Schwefel, as your keynote speaker, and I will come to your group and address the differences in personalities in a truthful, fun, and easily understood way. Follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to share my blogs with the color energies you work with!

Learning to Think

June 21, 2016/0 Comments/in Blog /by Scott Schwefel

How much time during the day do you spend thinking? Scientists estimate that we only use about 10% of our actual brain power for conscious thought throughout the day. This isn’t to say that we can’t use more of our brain power; we simply don’t utilize the full capacity of our brains when we are sitting in traffic, going through the motions at our jobs, and interacting with the people around us.

Active and conscious thought require effort. When we were young, this active thought came naturally. Our bodies and minds were growing and changing, learning about the world around us every single moment. We were passionate and successful at what we did because we believed wholeheartedly in what we were doing.

Activating thought

We all wanted to be successful at one point in time. When did we forget this motivation? Although we might still have dreams of success, our brains have changed, and success seems harder to accomplish. Forgetting what we are passionate about is part of this decline.

Actively thinking about what we put into our brains is partly unconscious and partly conscious. Part of this unconscious input comes from the sensory input given to us through our eyes, our ears, our sense of touch, and what we taste. What we hear, see, touch and taste informs us about the world around us and dictates part of how we react to situations in our lives. The second half of this active thought is conscious, or: in other words, how we think about the information that we’ve been given to us through our senses. This sixth sense, or intuition, can be vitally important for to how we react to and interact with people and events around us.

Our brains like to make excuses. When we ask ourselves why we’re stuck in a job we hate, our brain clings to what is familiar instead of what might make us happier. When we ask why we’re not good at something, our brains like to remind us that life isn’t fair, instead of coming up with solutions that could lead to changes in our lives.

Rewiring our brains

Changing how we think is a process, but not one that comes without rewards. Changing the negative or neutral patterns of our thoughts from negative or neutral into more positive affirmations can serve as a way to change how we see the world around us. Like a computer modeling program or statistics, the information we put into our brains has to be good to produce a better output. Just like data, what goes in will also come out.

Carl Jung opened up an entirely new world with his discoveries, and discoveries into the psychology of personality and the self are still being made today. Insights Discovery is based squarely on Jung’s theories, and as such, it is an invaluable tool in helping people to understand themselves and others. Schedule me, Scott Schwefel, as your keynote speaker, and I will come to your group and address the differences in personalities in a truthful, fun, and easily understood way. Follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to share my blogs with the color energies you work with!

What’s Your Personality Type?

June 7, 2016/0 Comments/in Blog /by Scott Schwefel

Personality can be a tricky thing. Often we are so caught up in living our regular lives that we forget that things like personality can have a major impact on how we interact with other people and deal with certain situations. Personality doesn’t explain everything, but it is a foundational part of human interactions and behaviors that we participate in and find around us every day.

The origins of personality science began with Hippocrates in ancient Greece, where the idea of humors became widely accepted as the reason behind the differences in personality people displayed. His four humors were known as sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, and melancholic.

From Hippocrates to the present

Hippocrates’ ideas on the origin of personality evolved as science itself advanced. Eventual iterations of his beginning personality hypothesis included the Myers-Briggs test, the DiSC methodology, Insights Discovery and much more. All of these concepts regarding personality were built on similar foundations, although they used different labels to categorize each personality type.

Discovery Yourself utilizes the following categories to determine personality type: talker, relater thinker, and director. These are the four main personality types that can be broken up into further personality categories. These four main labels can still bring great insight not only to your personality but to the personality types of those around you.

Thinkers and relaters are typically more introverted, while directors and talkers tend toward extroversion. Thinkers and directors are highly task-oriented, while relaters and talkers are relationally motivated.

Determining personality

Determining your individual personality type can bring you great insight and clarity into who you are as a person, and why you behave the way you do. Do you tend to find energy in solitary activities, or by facing an engaging social situation? Do you find yourself genuinely interested in the other people around you, or do you focus more on the task you are trying to accomplish?

All of these questions can help you determine where you fall on the personality spectrum. Once you’ve found your category or categories, you can begin to notice when in your life you utilize the strengths of that particular personality type. You can also use this valuable information to notice where you might be struggling to work well with others, taking their professional positions and their personality type into consideration. Instead of chalking up misunderstandings to not working well together, you might find that personality holds the key to more than meets the eye.

Jung opened up an entirely new world with his discoveries, and discoveries into the psychology of personality and the self are still being made today. Insights Discovery is based squarely on Jung’s theories, and as such is an invaluable tool in helping people understand themselves and others. Schedule me, Scott Schwefel, as your keynote speaker, and I will come to your group and address the differences in personalities in a truthful, fun, and easy-to-understand way. Follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to share my blogs with the color energies you work with!

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