Herrmann Brain Dominance Inventory

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There have been many discussions lately on various other psychological personality tests and inventories people have used throughout the years to categorize human behavior. One such method is called the Herrmann Brain Dominance Inventory, or HBDI. This week we’ll find out how it matches up to Insights Discovery and what characteristics the two methods have in common.

The Herrmann Brain Dominance Inventory, or HBDI, was created by Ned Herrmann in 1988. Herrmann was a management educator who worked for General Electric and developed this method as part of his education training with the company. The inventory identifies cognitive patterns in the way people think to find similar traits. The creation and theory behind the HBDI are much like that of Myers-Briggs.

Cognitive Basis of HBDI

Herrmann developed his inventory to help his employees and coworkers at General Electric find out the dominant patterns within their thinking and how this could affect their jobs and how they worked with others. In this way, it is similar to other inventories like Myers-Briggs and Insights Discovery. Herrmann focused on the cognition behind these thoughts and behaviors, creating four categories. These categories were Left Limbic, Right Limbic, Right Cerebral, and Left Cerebral.

The Left Cerebral category includes people who are rational thinkers, problem solvers, precise and analytical, and detail oriented. The Right Cerebral category includes people who are future-leaning, creative, visionary, innovating, conceptualizing, and challenging of existing rules. The Right Limbic category includes people who are strong interpersonally, social, open, caring, expressive, enthusiastic and empathetic. Finally, the Left Limbic category includes people who are structured, detail oriented, good at administrative tasks, consistent, and procedural.

Herrmann used what scientists knew about the entire brain system to create his inventory, which used the idea of dominant brain function to analyze why some people think and behave in a more rational or logical manner, and why others are more social and spontaneous. Insights Discovery uses colors to describe these similar categories.

Comparing Insights Discovery

The four categories of Herrmann’s Brain Dominance Inventory fit in a similar way to the colors of the Insights Discovery system but utilize different vocabulary terms to describe peoples’ strongest personality characteristics. Criticism of the inventory has been that it is too simplistic, but for Herrmann’s purposes, it worked well for the business environment he created it for.

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!

Putting the DISC in Discovery: Insights Discovery versus DISC Methodology

DISC

DISC is a personality test created by William Marston. The test is based on four major personality traits, much like Jung’s work was. These traits include dominance, influence, steadfastness, and compliance. Marston used these four character traits to describe peoples’ relationship with their environment; or, how they would act or react given certain situations in their life.

While Insights Discovery and the Myers-Briggs test are based on Jungian psychology, Marston’s DISC creation is considered to be a methodology. A man named Walter Clark turned Marston’s ideas into a behavioral test in 1956.

Describing character

Marston and Clark independently realized that people think they behave differently at home versus when they are at work, but knew that peoples’ underlying characters didn’t change from place to place. The DISC idea was used to describe how people behaved when met with situations that could come up in home or work, the theory being that certain personality types will react differently than others.

DISC uses the same idea as Insights Discovery does; that is, to simplify the myriad of personality types into generic, easy to follow and easy to remember categories. However, what makes DISC vastly different from Insights Discovery is that DISC has spawned thousands of different personality type tests based on its methodology. DISC isn’t overseen by one company or person, so anyone could create a DISC-based assessment and call it legitimate.

The idea behind DISC is valid, but it can be difficult to determine which tests are better because there are so many different ones out on the market today. This choice means that people can essentially find the answers they want, rather than an accurate assessment of their personality using slightly different tests and methods.

What’s the difference?

How is Insights Discovery different? Insights Discover comes from a Jungian background as opposed to the Marsden methodology. Insights Discovery keeps things simple, as DISC also does, but keeps its categories and ways of assessing peoples’ personalities consistent. This ensures both validity and reliability when conducting an analysis of a person’s dominant personality traits.

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!

Psychological Theories: Myers-Briggs and Insights Discovery

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There are many articles and websites that will compare and contrast various psychological theories, pitting them against one another in an attempt to find the one great, overarching theory of psychology. As the field of analytical psychology has advanced there have always been theories that have been left behind or discounted based on new evidence; in the same vein, there have been theories that have been taken apart and put back together in light of new ideas and facts that have been discovered.

Psychological theories of personality, or why people behave the way they do, have been around since the time of the ancient Greeks. These thinkers spent their time discussing the actions of the people around them, testing these behaviors against what they were able to discern about the human mind. The fields of philosophy and psychology were certainly grown during these discussions amongst the ancient Greeks.

Modern day psychology

Moving closer to the present day, many psychological breakthroughs about personality and human behavior have been made. From Freud to Jung and many in between, psychologists and scientists have taken what we know about the human brain and done their best to match it to what we know about the human mind and reasoning. Through this tests like the Myers-Briggs and psychological theories like Insights Discovery have been created.

Myers-Briggs built a psychological personality test based on Jung’s psychological types, which he created in 1921. First-year psychology students in universities around America will be well versed in the Myers-Briggs tests, as will employees of major companies seeking to build teamwork and workplace efficiency. The Myers-Briggs test is commonly used to help individuals pick jobs or careers that fit their personality type. The Myers-Briggs gives each individual a four-letter designation that emphasizes the most dominant parts of their personality.

Other theories, like DISC or Insights Discovery, were created with the same Jungian background but different psychological motivations behind them. Insights Discovery was created to break people out of a four-letter designation, which can be difficult to remember, and to give a personality description based on colors rather than words. People might feel like they are being stuck into a personality box when they are given single words to describe the dominant parts of their personality.

Simplifying characteristics

Of course, any theory that tries to boil human character down to its simplest forms will run into problems. Take any five people on the street, any five people in your family or any five people in your office and you will find out pretty quickly that none of them fit into any sort of box, psychological or otherwise! Humans are complicated, but in many ways our personalities and behaviors are predictable. Insights Discover allows people to learn their main characteristics without placing them into rigid personality structures.

Using colors not only gives people the ability to remember their personality type easier but gives people the ability to be a shade of any color in the rainbow!

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!

Analyzing Yourself: What Jung Knew

 

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Throughout his life Carl Jung was constantly questioning and engaging with the information he was gathering. From his patients to his research, his collection of knowledge about the inner workings of the human mind changed how he saw the world around him. Jung was able to revolutionize the field of analytical psychology because he continued to question, continued to invent, and continued to piece together what he knew about the world around him to create new and exciting theories.

Jung’s work focused on the areas of human consciousness and unconsciousness, but also on methods of analyzing what happened in those areas. He didn’t focus on dreams in the same way Freud did, but certainly took peoples’ dreams into consideration when discussing the idea of the unconscious mind having an influence over our conscious selves.

Methods of analysis

Jung created three primary methods of analysis which included explication, amplification, and the active imagination. Explication and amplification were used to interpret what was going on in the unconscious while active imagination served as a technique for experiencing the unconscious.

Explication was used by Jung to explain what dreams implied. Amplification was used to identify parallels from dreams into popular culture, where those ideas may have come from in the first place. Through explication and amplification, the greater meaning or story behind a dream could be created, providing insight into a person’s psyche. An active imagination can be used to interact with the psyche, or unconscious mind, of an individual. This is not a passive observation of what has already happened in a dream, but an active participation in the inner psychology.

Present day analysis

So, what do these methods of analysis have to do with our personalities? Seeking to interpret your own or someone else’s actions or intentions can be useful in your personal and professional lives. Although we can’t always know what is going on in another person’s head, we can begin to learn how to decipher their actions, behaviors, and intentions using Jung’s three methods of analysis. Far from just being used on other people, these three methods are best used on yourself. Understanding what your unconscious mind is trying to tell you can pinpoint areas of stress or worry in your life, give you creative new ideas for a project, and help you understand why you react the way you do when faced with certain individuals or situations.

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!

Eight Great Psychological Types- Which One Are You?

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We all know that humans can be complicated. Take any office or business environment, for instance, and already you have a wealth of personalities and motivations spinning around the room. From clients to customers, the CEO to the secretary everyone is working together in some way to push their work forward into something meaningful.

With so many personalities and differing psychologies interacting with one another, both friendship and conflict are bound to come up. Understanding what your unique personality type is can help you be the best leader, employee, customer, or employer you can be. Equally, it can help you to understand better the wealth of personalities around you and the times when they may clash.

Foundations of personality

Carl Jung expanded his notions of the four main personality types and mixed them with the two general attitudes, which are extroversion and introversion. We all can imagine a stereotypical introvert and a stereotypical extrovert- one is the life of the party while the other may have retreated to a corner or not come to the party at all.

The realities of introversion and extroversion are more complicated than that, though. Extroverts and introverts can be on a scale from moderate to severe. Some people literally can’t fathom the idea of interacting with others unless they have to; their energy isn’t drawn from social situations, but rather from solitary activity. Extroverts can want to be the center of attention at everything they are involved in, creating a whirlwind of people and entertainment around them at all times. There can equally be moderate introverts and extroverts, who prefer socializing and recharging by themselves in a more relaxed manner.

Combining the introverted and extroverted attitude with the four basic psychological functions gives us eight psychological types, which are:

  1. Extraverted thinking
  2. Introverted thinking
  3. Extraverted feeling
  4. Introverted feeling
  5. Extroverted sensing
  6. Introverted sensing
  7. Extroverted intuition
  8. Introverted intuition

Finding yourself

We’re all somewhere in this psychological personality jumble together! Knowing approximately what our personality type is can help us acknowledge our strengths while also giving us a way to gain insight into other people. In an office setting, for instance, a boss with a particular personality type may be able to cut down on his team’s interpersonal conflict by rearranging tasks and pairing individuals together who can use each other’s strengths to their advantage.

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!

The History of the Four Personalities

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The four personality types exemplified by the four colors have existed for centuries. Before they were called Fiery Red, Earth Green, Cool Blue, and Sunshine Yellow they were known as humors. The four humors dictated the four most common temperaments that people displayed. Hippocrates was the first to inspire the idea of humors, which were called sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic.

Carl Jung used the idea of the four humors to influence his discoveries about the intricacies of human behavior. His thoughts involved the four personalities as well as the idea of the conscious and unconscious minds, where the four personality types lived. Jung personified this split between the conscious and unconscious as representing the ‘other,’ or ‘dark’ part of our personality.

Between the dark and the light

Jung didn’t intend the dark side to mean the less desirable parts of our personalities, but rather the unconscious aspects of the four types. This shadowy portion of the human character includes all of feeling and a portion of the sensing and intuition. Thinking, he claimed, was an entirely conscious act, so it is considered to be ‘in the light.’ The shadow and light portions of our personalities are inseparable from one another.

Understanding how the shadow and light parts of us work together is essential when attempting to understand the effects of our characters on our families, our work, and on all the other aspects of our lives. Taking thoughts, beliefs, and habits from the dark side into the light can help us understand why we are the way we are and how we can best interact with the world around us knowing what we know about ourselves.

The darkness always mixes with the light, and some aspects of the four personality types will be in the shadow while others are in the light. Hippocrates never went further than his theory of humors to explain the inner motivations of human behavior, but Jung certainly built upon this early perspective in his work.

Interactions with the four personalities

Interactions between the conscious and unconscious minds are incredibly important in influencing how we think and behave. Our strengths, or the personality type we exemplify the most, is going to be conscious most of the time- that is, we are aware of how we think, act, and react in certain situations. However, thinking about the other personality types can help an individual to understand that they can use each of these personality types and their strengths in everyday situations when it is beneficial to do so.

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!

Internal Compass Directs Personal Behavior

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Carl Jung’s idea of psychic totality looks something like a compass- each direction points to an unconscious or conscious set of functions that influence a person’s external behaviors. These internal compass points are constantly at play directing a person through life, but certain directions of this internal compass pull individuals in different directions. Everyone feels one or two psychic functions stronger than the others, but each one has a consistent influence on a person’s character.

Thinking, intuition, feeling, and sensing are the four cardinal directions that make up Jung’s psychic totality. Thinking and feeling are opposites, while sensation and intuition are opposites on the other end of the compass.

Following the cardinal directions

Many people go through life never wondering why they are the way they are while others take a more active role in understanding why they think and behave the way they do. Using these four psychic factors, it is often fairly easy to determine where your personality strengths lie, as the opposite directions on the compass points are mutually exclusive. According to Jung a person can be either relying on their thinking factor or their feeling factor at any given time; over time a person can grow to depend on one of these over the other for the majority of situations they come across.

The same goes for sensing and intuition, which Jung categorized as irrational functions. These factors work with information that is perceptual instead of rational, like thinking or feeling. However, everyone depends on one of these factors over the other when perceiving the world around them.

The process of thinking, or adjusting to the world by way of mental cognition and making logical inferences, is solidly in the thinking hemisphere of Jung’s psychic function. Sensing and intuition live in the place between consciousness and unconsciousness, able to be used by both. Feeling is solidly placed in the unconscious part of our brain.

Unique psychologies

Jung used the four psychic functions to explain why the people around us have such unique personalities. Everyone blends how they are pulled by the four directions into their psychologies to create the vibrant world of characters we live in. The primary and auxiliary functions, or those functions that work on the conscious and unconscious minds, work in complimentary and opposing ways in each individual’s psychology.

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!

The Personal and Collective Unconscious

Carl Jung Quote

Back in the early days of analytical psychology, Carl Jung had an idea. He theorized that there was a split between a collective unconscious level that everyone shared, and a personal unconscious that was entirely unique to an individual. Far from being a ‘hive mind,’ the collective unconscious is rather a collection of responses and reactions to common situations humans have encountered since the very beginning. This collective unconscious gives us the fight or flight response and allows us to rest our conscious selves when doing activities we’ve done hundreds of times before.

The personal sphere of consciousness is a different beast entirely. Our personal consciousness is made up of the thoughts, beliefs, behaviors and ideas that make us who we are. All of these traits come from the unconscious and its ability to transform everyday events into character-defining personality types. The personal conscious, unlike the collective unconscious, uses information gathered from a person’s life rather than from humanity’s collective background.

The importance of the personal unconscious

Without a personal unconscious, we wouldn’t be who we are and couldn’t become who we were meant to be. As humans, we begin our lives dependent on our unconscious minds for survival- only as we learn and grow do we begin to develop and practice using our conscious minds to make our way throughout the world.

The personal unconscious helps us approach the world from our unique perspective. For instance, a person who unconsciously filters out information in a more analytical way is less likely to have a feeling-type personality as a strong determining factor in their outward, conscious personality. In this same way, other people may have a tendency to favor feeling over thinking when looking at the world around them, or developing a strong sense of intuition about life’s circumstances versus a more sensory approach to those same situations.

Our personal conscious and personal unconscious exist on separate levels and yet interact with one another in a highly specific way. Working with our conscious and understanding how it works with our unconscious can help us be better leaders, better employees, better coworkers, and better individuals.

The influence of the collective unconscious

As important as our personal unconscious is, we can’t ignore the historical and psychological influence that our collective unconscious holds over us. The very instincts that make us human have developed over a huge span of time; these instincts have taught us to run and hide when we are in danger and to recognize signs of danger or fear through physiological signs like breathing hard or shaking. The collective unconscious also allows us to make quick decisions, often without knowing where they came from in the first place. The collective unconscious governs intuition and reflex, among other important functions.

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!

Jung’s Creation of the Self

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What do you think of when you think of yourself? Some people envision their physical selves, or how they think they appear to those around them. Other people envision what they are or what they do:  they are husbands, daughters, teachers, students. Our sense of self is rooted far deeper than what we appear to be on the outside; far from just being what we look like or what we do, our sense of self runs far deeper than our conscious minds sometimes recognize.

Carl Jung was one of the first to delve into the mysteries of humanity’s subconscious mind, working to discover what we are beneath the surface. His work as a psychoanalyst and later as an analytical psychologist allowed him to take what he observed of human behavior and character and infer greater statements about his ideas of self from there.

The unconscious mind and the self

Jung postulated that the conscious mind was only a part of a greater system that created a person’s internal sense of who they are. The subconscious beliefs, attitudes and perceptions that are contained within every person’s brain influence and affect how a person thinks about themselves, their prominent personality characteristics, and how they behave.

For Carl Jung, the unconscious mind holds power over the psyche, or self. The unconscious mind interacts with the conscious mind in such a way that awareness of a unique sense of self is created in each person. The conscious and unconscious minds still have their own aspects of independence from one another, but interact in such a way that one affects the other equally. The subconscious can’t be made known without the conscious, and the conscious would be very shallow if it weren’t for the insights of the deeper subconscious.

Jung’s idea of the unconscious personal mind was that it held four categories which governed the personality of an individual. These four categories included a mix of perception, judging, sensing, intuition, thinking, and feeling. He then categorized these subconscious categories into introverts and extroverts, a conscious way of labeling people who acted in a certain way.

Developing a sense of self

Jung’s observations of the subconscious and conscious have greatly affected the world of psychology and people’s understanding of personality.  The four personality types he identified have been changed into other forms to better explain the intricacies of personality, much like the four color personalities.

Using colors allows people to visualize their strongest characteristics using words and a visual image. The vast majority of people aren’t just one personality type, but rather are a mix of the common personality types. Each subconscious personality type acts on the conscious to greater or lesser degrees, which explains the differences in people’s personalities and behaviors that result from those 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 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!

The Birth of Jung Physiology

Myers-Briggs-Type-Indicator

Carl Jung is known for being one of the most influential individuals in the fields of psychotherapy and psychiatry. He is perhaps most famous for being the father of analytical psychology, which revolutionized the study of individuals and personality characteristics in relation to the subconscious and conscious minds.

Jung created the theory that individuals are governed by four basic psychic functions that include intuition, sensation, feeling, and thinking. Jung theorized that these unconscious psychic functions could become conscious and influence people’s personalities, which accounted for the wide range in how people think and behave.

The four physiologies

Jung created four physiologies, or personality types as they later became known, that influenced how people perceived the world around them and how they responded to it. These four types could be classified as opposites, although according to Jung they served more as complementary personality traits.

Jung defined sensing as the formation of logical conclusions based on sensory perceptions. This intellectual cognition allows different people to sense and perceive the world in different ways based on how they cognitively process this information available to them using their five senses. Intuition, on the other hand, refers to the process of drawing conclusions and making connections beyond the sensory information.

Thinking refers to the process of evaluating information by objective and logical means. Feeling is a more subjective judgment type, where personal and situational preference and information comes into play. Jung created the four physiologies as opposites: thinking and feeling, sensing and intuition. Although each was created in opposition to the other, all the functions operate within an individual’s consciousness and subconscious to create their world view and inform their beliefs and behaviors.

Jung was also the founder of the idea of the attitudinal types of introversion and extroversion, in addition to the four physiologies. An introvert gets their energy from internal sources while an extrovert draws their energy from other people. Jung used these psychic functions to explore the differences in personality and expression he saw in his work.

Utilizing the four physiologies

Each function provides its own knowledge base by which an individual’s personality is allowed to shine through. Jung used these psychic functions to classify the empirical information he had gathered about individuals and their characteristics; he was less interested in finding the foundations of these physiologies in the human brain. Jung theorized that the four psychic functions could operate equally, but that people sometimes have functions that operate stronger and more consciously than the others.

 

We all know people who exemplify Jung’s four physiologies in different ways: some people are highly sensory, relying on the empirical information they can gather to make sense of the world around them. Others are highly intuitive, sensing what cannot always be detected by traditional means. Some individuals rely on feeling to make their way through the world while others rely heavily on their thought processes and analytical way of viewing things to make decisions. Jung’s discovery of these essential personality functions has truly changed how we view our selves and others.

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 someone you know who is one of Jung’s physiologies, 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!