Scott Schwefel

Communicating with the Four Color Personalities

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communication

Communicating with other people is sometimes the most frustrating part of our day. Hollywood loves a good misunderstanding, which may explain the wealth of comedic films and romantic comedies that get pumped out every year. Misunderstandings can happen between people who are complete strangers and between individuals who know each other very well; all this boils down to a lack of communication and a lack of active listening.

Learning how to adapt, communicate and interact with others is something we work on our entire lives. When you begin to dive into understanding your personality type more, you’ll unconsciously begin to notice certain character traits in other people as well. Spotting these strong character traits can help you along the way to more effective communication and cooperation with people of different personality types that you see every day.

Intentional interaction

When you are familiar with the four color personalities system, you can begin to categorize the people around you into their specific personality type as well as yourself. Knowing what your personality type gives you a baseline for understanding how you will interact and react with people who have a different or opposite personality type from you. You may even realize that interacting with someone of your same character type is the most frustrating!

The flip side of positive interactions with other people is knowing what behaviors aren’t going to be good for either of you. Try to play to the strengths of the other person; for instance, a Sunshine Yellow personality is looking to involve people in the work they are doing. They will respond well to people who display a bit of a competitive spirit and who are passionate about the project at hand, but won’t be as happy working with people who are slow paced or hesitant about moving forward.

Playing to strengths

A Fiery Red personality wants to get things done now and has little patience for co-workers who need to be told what to do. Fiery Red personalities need direct interactions and strong opinions, as well as a straightforward approach to the conversation or project. Earth Green personalities will find a Fiery Red approach to be overwhelming, and seek to foster a harmonious and encouraging setting in which peoples’ voices can be heard.

Finally, a Cool Blue personality will interact the best with someone who understands that they want to do it right the first time around. Spontaneity doesn’t always work with Cool Blues, who appreciate a controlled and deliberate approach.

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!

Scott Schwefel

More of Others, Less of You

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personality

More of others, less of you. Sounds a bit harsh, doesn’t it? More of others, less of you is simply a way to make sure personalities are being balanced in everyday interactions. Part of the essential method of adapting and connecting is understanding the personalities of the people around you that you interact with every day. Whether you’re in the office, at home or interacting with strangers, adapting to their personality type is essential for interpersonal success.

Making a conscious effort to adapt to the personality strengths of others doesn’t lessen your grasp of your personality; rather, it enhances your understanding of all your social interactions. Adapting and connecting with other people serves to change your inner perceptions of who they are and ultimately changes how you interact with them on a much deeper, subconscious level.

How to make more of others

In a world that prizes individuality and independence, how do we go about learning how to make more of others? Part of Insights Discovery is knowing what color personality you are, and how this can change and reflect upon your interactions with others. Attentive and empathetic listening is one way to start pulling the focus away from yourself and towards others, to begin to change both your outer and inner ways of interacting and communicating.

Observe what other people are doing, and listen to what they are saying. Peoples’ personalities shine through their interactions with others but often go overlooked because we are putting our attention on the wrong things. Once you have observed and listened to a person, figure out where they fall on the four color personalities chart.

Peoples’ personalities aren’t always easy to decipher, especially if they act differently outside of work than they do inside. However, their general way of being will remain consistent, and their strong personality characteristics will become evident. Matching your co-workers up to the four color personalities chart can get you started interacting with them on an entirely new level.

How to interact with others

You may recall that the four main color personalities are Fiery Red, Earth Green, Sunshine Yellow and Cool Blue. Already these four categories evoke certain feelings or characteristics you can attribute to them. By consciously bringing to mind the characteristics you want to display when interacting with others, you can more effectively communicate with people who have the same personality type as you, but those who are also very different as well.

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!

Scott Schwefel

Adapting and Connecting, Inside and Out

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layers

As Shrek once said, ‘Ogres have layers!’ Exasperated, Shrek was trying to convey to Donkey how complicated it could be and feel as his behavior didn’t reflect what was going on inside of him. Ogres and humans might not have too much in common, but we certainly can relate to Shrek’s ordeal when it comes to our layers.

Carl Jung clarified his concept of the conscious and subconscious minds in his psychoanalytical research. He pioneered explanations of what happens in our ‘light’ sides, or the things in our brains that we can think about and analyze, and what happens in the ‘darkness’ of our subconscious minds. These two layers revealed more about humanity’s layers than was previously known and helped created the field of personality studies as we know them today.

Balancing behavior

The idea of the four color personalities is used to help us figure out where our personal strengths lie. This idea of ourselves comes from a combination of our unconscious and conscious thoughts about who we are and what we do with that information. Other people can’t always know what’s going on in our heads, which is why our external behavior is such a huge marker to others to display information about our personalities. When we act contradictory to our internal selves, discontent and confusion can result.

Our adaptable outer shell of behavior is just the outermost layer of what makes us who we are. Underneath is a complicated, wonderful bunch of layers that encompass our intellectual, emotional, and spiritual selves. Each of these layers works in different ways to instruct and inform our outermost behaviors, thoughts, and opinions.

When working with people of different personality types, our various layers can sometimes clash. Adapting to cooperate and work with people with every personality strength can be a challenge, which is where some outer behavior change can positively alter a situation.

Adapting and connecting

Adapting doesn’t mean conforming; rather, adapting to another person’s personality type can simply mean shifting your focus to them in a way that enhances communication and connection. For instance, when dealing with someone who is a Fiery Red personality, talking to them directly and energetically will capture and keep their attention. Interacting with an Earth Green energy can mean slowing down and paying attention to the nuance of a conversation while someone with a Sunshine Yellow personality will appreciate openness and optimism. Paying attention to detail and giving deeper thought to a project or topic can make a Cool Blue energy relax into an engaging conversation.

By paying attention to the personality traits of those around us, we can begin to shape our external behaviors to adapt better and communicate. This, in turn, transforms our inner layers, right down to our sense of self!

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!

Scott Schwefel

Adapting and Connecting

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relate

The world is full of personality types- we all know that just by looking around us! From the coffee shop to home, our office to the drivers of the cars commuting alongside us we deal, indirectly and directly, with a huge variety of people every day. Some of these people we click with automatically. These people become our best friends, our significant others, our confidants, our go-to work buddy. Other people grate at our edges, never quite meshing with how we think or live our lives. In the middle we have acquaintances, people whom we can work well with and may even be friends with, who are also different and talented and strong in ways we may not entirely understand.

How we interact, react and work with other people can determine the success of our personal and professional lives. Understanding your personality type, your strengths and your weaknesses can help you better know how you deal with situations that pop up in your everyday life. The four color personalities are a good guide for knowing yourself and for knowing the dominant characteristics of the people around you.

The importance of adapting

Almost every job requires some interaction with other people; whether you are interacting predominantly with clients or entirely within your company, there are elements of everyone’s job that demands social interaction. To keep clients happy and your office running smoothly it helps to adopt an attitude of compromise and adaptability, morphing how you think a job should be done with the realities of the situation at hand.

Sometimes we aren’t good at adapting, and listening to other peoples’ opinions on how a job should be done can be frustrating. The four color personalities spectrum applies to everyone and can be used in a professional and personal environment to help you learn to adapt to other people’s dominant personality types to increase connection with them.

Adapting means to consciously make an effort to connect with another individual by changing your opinions or behavior. Adapting happens from the outside; you change your behavior, which in turn changes your perception and opinions on the inside.

The importance of connecting

Connecting is the second half of building strong relationships with the people around you no matter their individual color personality. Connecting with co-workers means adapting to their individual personality and working styles just as they are adapting to you. Making an intentional effort to work with others’ strengths and weaknesses, over time, will increase interpersonal connection and improve working environments, too.

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!

Scott Schwefel

Influencing the Individual: Nature versus Nurture

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nature v nurture

Carl Jung not only founded the field of analytical psychology but revolutionized how people thought about the major theories in psychology during the late 1800s to the mid- 1900s. At this point, scientists and psychologists mostly focused on the group- groups of people, how they interacted with one another, and what influenced them. Carl Jung flipped the script, in a sense, and took psychology even further by moving popular interest to the individual.

Some cultures value independence while others value dependence on others for society and family structures to function normally. The Western world beginning with the advent of the Roman Empire became more and more individualistic while Eastern cultures are traditionally known for being group-focused. This, then, begs the question: how much of our personalities are influenced by our environment, and how much is influenced by our genetics?

Discovering the individual

Jung’s focus on the individual mirrored that of Freud, who took the information he gleaned from his patients and the people around him to either prove or disprove the psychological theories of the day and to develop his theories. Jung followed suit, creating his theories of personality and analytical psychology using data he had and new information he was constantly gathering.

Jung invented an almost entirely new way of thinking about people and how we interact with each other and our world. Far from being just reactionary beings, we are capable of movement and thought and words and actions all at the same time. Combining this outward display of behavior with internal mental processes continues to the present day.

Jung didn’t know everything about the human brain; in fact, we still don’t! What he did know, however, influenced the field of analytical psychology dramatically. Jung paired what he knew of neuropsychology with human behaviors and asked his patients what they were thinking and feeling when they were interacting with themselves, other people and their environment.

Nature and nurture

Before Jung’s discoveries, nature was the go-to explanation for why people behaved the way they did. Jung acknowledged the influence of nature, but also brought to light more information about the individual’s influence on their personalities. The individual conscious and subconscious was brought to light by Jung’s line of analytical and psychological inquiry, and through answering his questions he opened up an entirely new way of thinking about human thinking and behavior.

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!

Scott Schwefel

Practical Applications of Personality Analysis

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personality

Personality can be tricky. There are hundreds of tests and analyses designed to piece out the individual characteristics and behavior patterns that make us who we are. Discovering the intricacies of personality has fascinated scientists and individuals for hundreds of years, and in some ways, we are nowhere near knowing exactly why we are the way we are.

Thankfully we do have ways of knowing what influences peoples’ actions and behaviors. Empirical evidence about the human brain connected with first-hand observations and assumptions have allowed us to compile information about personality and temperament. Scientists and researchers like Carl Jung, Myers-Briggs and others have used this knowledge to create tests to label personality types for a mass audience.

Labelling temperament

Creating personality tests and labelling temperaments for a broad audience can be challenging. Most tests are designed with the empirical data backing them up in mind; they make the assumption that personality is something genetic, that we are born with. In many ways this is indeed true- we are a product of our DNA. In other ways, our surroundings, or our environment, influences our personalities. Factors like cultural tradition, family, and religion can also affect how a person thinks and behaves.

Planning for all these eventualities explains some of the differences and abundance in personality tests and temperament analyses that exist today. Each of these tests were created for a purpose based on a preferred psychological theory, of which there are many to choose from.

Some tests were set up to assist with personnel hire for companies. Human Resources departments are looking for the right people to place in the jobs where they will be the most effective. Certain personality types are suited for different kinds of work; for instance, an extremely detail-oriented person may find themselves quickly frustrated in a job where projects are open-ended and their role isn’t clearly defined. Likewise, highly creative and artistically strong individuals might have trouble adapting to a job that is rigid, not allowing them to utilize their creative thinking skills to do their job well.

Practical application

Understanding the strengths and unique qualities of different personality types isn’t just the arena of company hiring squads. Psychologists use their knowledge of human temperaments to assist with therapy to tailor what they know about their patient to make treatment plans more effective. Personality types are important when training sports teams, when teaching students in classrooms, and when traveling the world and engaging with new people.

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!

Scott Schwefel

The Versatility of Jungian Psychology

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jung

Carl Jung is, of course, famous for being one of the founders of the field of analytical psychology. His psychological theories revolutionized the study of psychology and brought many new insights into human thinking and behavior. He focused on the individual rather than the group, which allowed him to create theories of individual behavior as well as greater group theories of social psychology.

Critical thinking was a massive part of Jung’s method of psychological analysis. He took the empirical knowledge he had about humans, their characters and the inner workings of their brains and combined this with his observations of what people did in specific situations. He asked questions and pursued the answers to what he considered the conclusion.

Using Jungian philosophy

Jungian psychology turned out to be more versatile than anyone ever thought it could be. Jung’s work influenced thinkers in the past and present working in areas including physics, comparative religion, eco-psychology, and philosophy. His work has been utilized in creating new counseling and therapeutic techniques as well as being the basis of other psychological studies throughout the years.

Part of what make Jung’s theories and ideas so versatile is that they are based on the individual, but can be expanded to explain greater concepts. Jung’s ideas about the typology of human behavior can be used in a variety of other research areas. Jung’s work boils down to relationships; relationships between people and themselves, relationships between people and other people, relationships between people and situations, and more.

Of course, Jung wasn’t the first thinker to have a significant impact on global thinking and academics. Carl Jung was influenced by the works of Immanuel Kant, Frederick Nietzsche, and Arthur Schopenhauer among others. These thinkers themselves were pioneers in their areas and impacted psychology and philosophy in their own right.

The influence of Jung

Jung’s influence passes across countless fields of study and has doubtlessly influenced academics around the globe. His work defined how we think about human behavior and the individual characteristics that make us who we are. These concepts can be used in light of other areas of life and academic study to determine our relationship with ourselves, the environment, and the organizations we live and work with every day. From politics to therapy, ecology to religious philosophy, Jung’s theories continue to influence many areas of study.

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!

Scott Schwefel

Measuring Emotional Intelligence

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The idea of emotional intelligence and our ability to measure it is interesting. We refer to people by emotional adjectives- they are ‘happy,’ they act ‘maturely,’ and we interact with different people in different ways based on our own emotional intelligence. Some people never pick up on the cues other people are placing down. Does that indicate a lack of emotional intelligence?

Reuven Bar-On created the Bar-On Emotional Intelligence Test in 1995 to answer some of the questions he had involving emotional intelligence and how to accurately measure this abstract construct. Using theory and psychological application he created a system used by many organizations and people today.

Discovering emotion

Emotional intelligence doesn’t just mean having the ability to have and express emotions in various settings. There are thought to be three main models of emotional intelligence which include the Mayer-Salovey model, the Goleman model, and the Bar-On model. The Mayer-Salovey model defines emotional intelligence as the ability to use, perceive, and understand emotions to facilitate thinking, while the Goleman model measures emotional and social competencies that influence how a person manages and leads.

The Bar-On model changed its definition of emotional intelligence to include an array of emotional and social abilities, skill and behaviors that impact a person’s intelligent actions. These social abilities, skills and behaviors include problem solving, independence, assertiveness, optimism, stress tolerance, self-regard, flexibility, interpersonal relationships, happiness, self-actualization, empathy, emotional self-awareness, social responsibility, impulse control, and reality testing.

The Bar-On model breaks down its emotional intelligence components into five categories which are Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, Adaptability, Stress, Management, and General Mood.

Discovering Theory

The theory behind Bar-On’s emotional model includes some of Darwin’s theories of survival and adaptation. He stressed the importance of appropriate emotional behavior for animals and humans adapting to changing environments and situations. Other theoretical influences to this emotional test included Thorndike and Wechsler, among others.

The Bar-On model was used as a way to analyze a person’s psychological well-being and has continued to change and evolve over the years. As additional research has validated or invalidated some of the claims of the Bar-On, the creator adapted his interpretation of emotional intelligence to fit the new data.

Insights Discovery used the works of Jung to change and shape their personality test, which takes a look at similar metrics as the Bar-On but with a different theoretical basis and different analytical methods. The Bar-On is certainly another interesting way to discover personality types.

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.  If reschedule me, Scott Schwefel, as your keynote speaker. 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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Scott Schwefel

Color Personalities and the Keirsey Temperament Sorter

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keirsey 2

David Keirsey created the Keirsey Temperament Sorter as another way of categorizing how people think and behave in their personal and professional lives. His test is similar to Myers-Briggs and other personality assessments and has a similar basis to all of these tests and character indicators. The Keirsey Temperament Sorter is founded in the theories of Hippocrates and Plato, utilizing Plato’s four major personality types including Artisan/Iconic, Guardian/Pistic, Idealist/Noetic, and Rational/Dianoetic.

David Keirsey then subdivided these four character traits into two categories that each contained two types. This gives us a familiar chart with 16 potential character types, much like Myers-Briggs. This temperament sorter was made popular by the book, Please Understand Me, and has been used by many large companies to help with employee training.

Exploring temperament

Like many of the other personality assessments available today, the Keirsey Temperament Sorter has four major character types with subdivisions within each. The four categories have been called Artisans, Guardians, Idealists, and Rationals.  Artisans are known for having strong tactical skills while maintaining an adaptable view of people and situations around them. Guardians are concrete and organized, working well in an environment where they feel safe and secure. They excel at logistical tasks and supporting a larger project.

Idealists work in the abstract, finding meaning in their work and striving to maintain a sense of self. They are very diplomatic and can be valuable members of a professional social environment. Finally, Rationals are very much concerned with their grasp of a task and the knowledge it takes to get a job done well. They are excellent at theoretical projects that have to be turned into reality.

Comparing systems

Keirsey relied on the idea that people can be categorized into temperaments. He classified these temperaments as abstract or concrete thinkers; directive versus informative leadership styles; expressive versus attentive social skills; and cooperative versus pragmatic working methods. All of these categories aren’t replicated in Jungian thinking or the Myers-Briggs test.

One challenge with the Keirsey Temperament Sorter are the labels used to classify different character types. The categories and sub-variants of each type have been given a job description such as Manager or Conservator. While these distinctions can certainly be helpful, they don’t give any indication that people can be slightly outside any of these boxes or excel at other professional tasks.

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.  If you would like further help in identifying yourself or others as part of the four color personalities, schedule me, Scott Schwefel, as your keynote speaker. 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!

Scott Schwefel

SmartSkills Personalities versus Insights discovery

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SmartSkills Personalities versus Insights discovery

The SmartSkills personality inventory system was created by Bob Weile and Jerry Rhodes in 1991. The test utilizes similar categories to Insights Discovery with the use of colors to label various personality types. The test covers common thinking strategies and behaviors that people use in their personal and professional lives.

Bob Weile founded OneSmartWorld, the company that produced the SmartSkills learning and teaching modules used in office and career settings around the country. The modules were produced to allow leaders of businesses and teams the ability to grow their own emotional and social intelligence.

 

Utilizing SmartSkills

SmartSkills was created to show people what their own emotional and psychological strengths were and how they could implement that knowledge in a business setting. Understanding one’s personal strengths can help a leader manage their employees and organize teams based on their individual personality strengths.

The SmartSkills categories use colors, much like Insights Discovery does. Hard Blue refers to people who are highly logical, fact-based decision making, straightforward thinkers, and work well under precise project descriptions. Hard Blue refers to the Reformer personality type in Insights Discovery. The next category is Hard Green, which covers people who are resourceful, ingenious, creative, and quick-thinking. This category covers the Director and Motivator personalities in Insights Discovery.

SmartSkills also has a category called Soft Green, which is defined as imaginative creative. These individuals are future-oriented, creative, and are highly visionary and are related to the Motivator and Inspirer personality types in Insights Discovery.

Soft Blue is the opposite of Hard Blue and encompasses people who are committed, make their decisions based on personal values, and interpret their situation based on their internal mindsets. This category equates to the Helper for Insights Discovery. The final two categories in SmartSkills are Hard and Soft Red. Hard Red is analytical, organized, and highly detailed, while Soft Red is sensitive, a listener, and is in tune with the needs of others. Soft Red matches with the Insight Discovery categories of Supporter and Coordinator while Hard Red equates to Observer and Coordinator.

 

SmartSkills Personalities VERSUS Insights Discovery

Insights Discovery takes a slightly different track from the SmartSkills system. Insights Discovery named their four color categories (as opposed to six) with short words that described what that color meant for that personality type. The two systems aren’t all that different, but utilize slightly different methods to get their points across.

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.  If you would like further help in identifying yourself or others as part of the four color personalities, schedule me, Scott Schwefel, as your keynote speaker. 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!