Adapting and Connecting

March 3, 2016/0 Comments/in Blog /by Scott Schwefel

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!

Color Personalities and the Keirsey Temperament Sorter

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

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!

SmartSkills Personalities versus Insights discovery

January 5, 2016/0 Comments/in Blog /by Scott Schwefel

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!

Herrmann Brain Dominance Inventory

December 29, 2015/0 Comments/in Blog /by Scott Schwefel

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

December 22, 2015/0 Comments/in Blog /by Scott Schwefel

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

December 15, 2015/0 Comments/in Blog /by Scott Schwefel

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

December 8, 2015/0 Comments/in Blog /by Scott Schwefel

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?

December 1, 2015/0 Comments/in Blog /by Scott Schwefel

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:

Extraverted thinking
Introverted thinking
Extraverted feeling
Introverted feeling
Extroverted sensing
Introverted sensing
Extroverted intuition
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

November 24, 2015/0 Comments/in Blog /by Scott Schwefel

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

November 17, 2015/0 Comments/in Blog /by Scott Schwefel

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!

Posts