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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

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

The Personal and Collective Unconscious

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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!

Scott Schwefel

The Birth of Jung Physiology

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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!