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Scott Schwefel

Adapting and Connecting, Inside and Out

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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

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!

Scott Schwefel

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!