Posts

Scott Schwefel

Leading the Four Color Personalities

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leader

Being the boss is the best. The boss is the top of the pile, the head honcho, the person to whom everyone else looks for guidance and insight. The boss knows the inner workings of the business, knows how to steer the company through thick and thin, and manages projects and people with grace.

Of course, being the boss is a difficult job, and sometimes bosses turn out to be just as flawed and human as anyone else. The leaders of a company, leaders of an individual division, and leaders of teams within a company all have their strengths and weaknesses, both personally and when dealing with their co-workers. Taking into consideration the personalities of all people involved can help create better leadership styles as well as working relationships with others.

Leading by example

Successful leaders lead others in a way that inspires. These leaders don’t yell, cajole or threaten to get a job done. They know that respect will get them a lot further than emotional manipulation will. Unfortunately, the stressors of being a leader or being a boss very much exist. We don’t always operate the way we would like to under pressure, and bosses can take out their frustration on those working for them.

Acknowledging the personality and leadership strengths and weaknesses of bosses and leaders within a company can help pave the way for respect and success in business. Not everyone will always get along, but leaders are the most visible when it comes to adapting and communicating with people around them.

Learning and leadership

People don’t and shouldn’t stop learning just because they’ve advanced professionally. When it comes to being a leader, there is still a lot left to be learned just about yourself and how you function when in charge of managing many projects and people well. Leadership can be a struggle because you have to take into consideration the personalities of the people who are working for you, as well as your knowledge of your personality. How you interact with your employees can bring insight into how you may be adapting and communicating at work in ways that can be beneficial or harmful.

The best kind of professional leader isn’t one who necessarily has all the answers, but is one who commits to their job and their team. Part of this commitment is understanding the important role personality plays in the workplace.

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

When We Clash: Seeing Strengths and Recognizing Weaknesses

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cooperation

A lot of knowing who you are is knowing what you’re good at. Sometimes we know right away- as kids we’re the first one to volunteer, the first to speak in a group, the first to run outside and jump on the swings. We might show signs of leadership from a very early age, inspiring others to follow us to greatness or misadventures. Other people prefer the middle of the pack, speaking up when they have something to say, but not dominating the conversation.

Some of these people are expert negotiators not because they were taught, but because their strengths lie with keeping the peace among conflicting ideas and groups. From an early age, they’ve cultivated this talent, whether they knew it or not. Some of us are born to meet deadlines, operating swiftly and effectively under stress when the rest of us buckle under the pressure. What differentiates all these different groups of people and their reactions?

Recognizing Weaknesses

Carl Jung put together the basis of psychoanalytical theory by studying the conscious and unconscious minds, the environments in which these minds lived, and the ways in which they reacted to the world around them. Humanity has a tendency to recognize the faults of others far before we ever acknowledge our own; just think about the last time you were on the road, and someone cut you off. Did you immediately jump to conclusions about their driving ability or general intelligence? Or did you sit back and think, maybe you weren’t paying as close of attention to your surroundings as you could have been?

How we react to our own and others’ weaknesses can define our workplace relationships and our lives as a whole.

Recognizing Strengths

Unfortunately, our strengths can get us in as much trouble as our weaknesses can! There might be someone you know or work with who you seem to clash with, even though the two of you are very similar when it comes to working and communication styles. The strengths of Cool Blue types runs through their conscientiousness, attention to detail, and their thoughtfulness. Sunshine Yellow personalities are strong when they can be sociable, dynamic, and persuasive. Earth Green types are loyal and supportive while remaining personable and genuine. Finally, Fiery Red personalities are strongest when they can be direct, precise, and purposeful.

Recognizing the strengths and weaknesses of ourselves and the people around us can help us build better workplace relationships and increase communication with all the people we interact with in our lives.

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

Using Other Color Personalities

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When it comes to adapting and communicating, we sometimes miss the point. We get more caught up in finishing a project or assignment than actually hearing what someone else is saying. We rush through directions with our team without understanding that a person in the group might have a better idea, or might be caught up in their concept of the project or idea. We forget that adapting to others’ work styles can make our professional lives easier, even as it teaches us to change our perceptions and behavior.

Work can be tough. We’re expected to lead a group of people we may not know well; we’re expected to follow directions, even when they don’t make sense to us. Somehow we all have to form some cooperative agreement to meet our work goals, and some of us might have the chance to build personal relationships with the people we work with.

The skills of others

Finding people you trust and mesh with at work can make a professional environment a lot more friendly and welcoming, especially when you spend the majority of your week there. Building personal relationships in a professional environment is possible, but can be difficult. You may be surrounded by people whose strengths and personalities are much different than yours. You’re also surrounded by people who may not want a personal relationship with their co-workers as they vie for professional accolades or promotion.

Stepping back and gaining a new perspective on a professional situation can help you deal with it better, no matter your personality or the personalities of the people around you. Noticing where you are in conflict with others can help you determine how you can change your attitude or approach to a professional situation.

Having someone you trust at your job can also help you notice where your personality might clash with others and how you can prevent these clashes in the future. A good action plan for adapting and communicating better with those around you might take an outside pair of eyes to create. We can’t always see where we might be reacting wrongly in a situation, but an objective bystander may be able to shed light on the problem.

Strengths and weaknesses

The personality strengths we have depend on what Color Personality we are. Other people have different strengths and weaknesses that we can use to better communicate with people around us. Using their insights and trusting their judgment can open up our professional lives in many ways.

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

Strategic Communication

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communication

Strategy and communication are often two words that cause a buzz in a professional environment. Some people cringe when they hear the word strategy- it means a coordinated plan, or at least what seems like a coordinated plan to those who came up with it. For those who have to implement these workplace strategies, it can simply mean a lot more work.

Ditto with communications. We often talk about communicating better in our professional lives, and even in our personal lives. We wonder why someone misinterpreted our email or other digital communication, forgetting that other people don’t know what’s going on in our heads. Our tone, vocabulary, and structure of our communications can carry a larger message than the content of our communication efforts.

Implementing strategies

Putting together a strategic plan for communicating better with others doesn’t have to be a pain, but it will lead to a shift in your perspective and attitude toward other people and situations that may come up with in your life. The Four Color Personalities idea is built around the concept that we each have different personality strengths that can be built into broader categorizations about how we interact with and react to the world around us. These categories not only help us understand why we think and act the way we do but why others behave in the ways they do as well.

Coordinating your personality and matching it up to what you know about someone else isn’t the final solution to strategic communication- far from it! Strategic communication means learning about yourself, who you are, and what your personality is like so that you can better grasp why some people are easy to work with and why others might not be.

Creating an intentional atmosphere of strategic communication is something that can take place at home, at work, or even out and about during your everyday life.

Intentional Communication

Sometimes it can take more than a little bit of effort to break through a communication barrier with a co-worker, a boss, or a business partner you have contact with. You may need an outside pair of eyes to see where your communication skills may be lacking, and what you could do to improve your connection with another person. Think about what strategies you could use to communicate better with the knowledge of someone else’s color personality in mind.

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

Building Sustainable Professional Relationships

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personality

The Four Color Personalities system is designed to give insights into your personality as well as the personalities of the people around you. When we get along with family members or certain people we work with, we may attribute it to our good natures or synchronicity. When we don’t get along with someone, we are likely to blame it on a defect in their personality and can begin to act differently towards them because of our dislike.

This unconscious (and conscious) hostility can make workplace relationships rocky, to say the least. When you know your personality strengths and weaknesses using the Four Color Personalities, you can start to notice where and why you are succeeding in certain relationships and not in others.

Workplace personalities

Sometimes you don’t get along with someone because of something they’ve done; a manager failed to credit you for an idea that turned into something big, or your boss consistently treats you as less-than. Unfortunately, these behaviors are all too common in the professional world and certainly rear their ugly heads in some work environments more than others. While we can’t always make our bosses appreciate us or our co-workers acknowledge our work, it can help shift our perspective on our professional relationships.

Examining the relationships with people you get along with is beneficial for understanding how complimentary personalities can get along. You may even find that your more productive professional relationships are with people that are very opposite to you! Figuring out why you don’t get along with certain people in your office can help you begin to smooth over the bumps in your work relationships and make your professional environment more productive.

Work towards relationships

There are a few things you can do to begin changing your behavior towards those you may not get along with. Using the Four Color Personalities system, you can determine where their personality falls on the scale and use this to plan how you interact with and react to them. Make a list of the things that bother you about them ad strategies to overcome these personality differences based on the ideas of adapting and communicating.

Remember, it’s not always someone with an opposite personality type that you may have trouble with… it could be someone very similar to you! Any conflicting relationship means taking a good hard look at yourself as well as the other person to come to a suitable solution.

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

Eight Color Personalities Put a Spin on Workplace Communications

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eight

You know better than most that there are more than just four generic personality types around you at home, at work or even when you’re out and about around your neighborhood. Personality is like color; there are as many shades and hues as the eye chooses to see. Strong personal characteristics can certainly follow similar patterns for different people, but they always take slightly different forms depending on the person.

Our individual histories, both environmental and genetic, teach us how to display our personalities. We subconsciously and consciously adjust our behavior in new situations whether we are at a party meeting new people for the first time or interacting with a different team in our company. We each display our personalities differently, even if there are many similarities between us.

Four more personality types

The four color personalities chart can be broken up into eight color personalities, or even 16! There is no way to represent every single personality out there in the world, but by breaking major character traits down into easy categorizations, people can begin to understand why they are the way they are.

Aside from the main four color personalities- Cool Blue, Fiery Red, Earth Green, and Sunshine Yellow- there are also four more subsets of these types that can be created. Rather than call them by a color they are called by a role they might play in the workforce that fits their personality type. These four personality types are known as the Coordinator, Helper, Motivator, and Reformer.

Coordinators are negotiators. They are willing to toe the line between two groups to come to a consensus and to make sure everyone’s voices are heard. They respond best to people who are willing, relaxed, and easy going.

Helpers seek agreement to reach a consensus during a meeting or about a project. Helpers are in tune with others who trust one another, are inventive with their solutions, and who are receptive to new ideas.

Motivators, Coordinators, Helpers, and Reformers

Motivators want to get things going and are particularly in tune with people who can match their active nature and fast paced problem solving style. Motivators don’t respond well to people who don’t speak up or who cause friction in a group.

Reformers get things done. They rely on thought and logic to solve problems and don’t always appreciate emotional appeals when dealing with a professional problem.

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

Intentional Connection

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communication

Intentionally connecting with people spanning the range of the four color personalities can make your personal and professional lives run that much smoother. Understanding the details of good communication and adapting your behaviors towards other people can not only improve business environments but completely alter your interpersonal interactions with people you know and those whom you’ve just met.

Adapting and connecting to other people is the hallmark of the four color personalities. Knowing where you fit on the personality spectrum gives you a firm foundation for beginning to build strong connections with others. As you get to know them better, you can adapt your personality and style of communication to better fit their character strengths.

How to successfully engage

Successfully engaging others in meetings, one on one interactions, and during presentations can dramatically alter how you interact with the people around you. Using the strengths of each of the four color personalities, you can create lasting partnerships and open communication with the people around you.

Sunshine Yellow personalities are open and sociable. They are very relationally-driven and value the connection they have with other people. Taking time to establish a relationship opens the door for further cooperation and communication with all of the color personalities you may find around you. Working with a Sunshine Yellow personality will be the most successful if a relationship and rapport are established before any discussion of projects or work tasks comes about.

Earth Green personalities show others the importance of a listening ear. Rather than listening out of one ear and mentally forming your next response, seek to actively listen and hear what the other person is saying. This ensures that both parties are on the same page when it comes to projects or business arrangements and that the Earth Green personality doesn’t feel ignored.

Establishing a relationship

The third step of most communications is discussing what you need or what you want. In business this could be help, partnership, or requesting information from someone else. Demanding what you need right off the bat isn’t always conducive to a successful relationship with your employees or co-workers. Fiery Red personalities are very direct when they need to get something done.

Finally, Cool Blue personalities are strong when it comes to discussing things logically and rationally. Use these skills when negotiating or when discussing potential problems and solutions to current work projects. These skills are highly important when finalizing work details and when preserving open lines of communication with business relationships in the future.

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

Communicating with the Four Color Personalities

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communication

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

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

Intentional interaction

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

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

Playing to strengths

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

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

Jung opened up an entirely new world with his discoveries, and discoveries into the psychology of personality and the self are still being made today. Insights Discovery is based squarely on Jung’s theories, and as such is an invaluable tool in helping people understand themselves and others. Schedule me, Scott Schwefel, as your keynote speaker, and I will come to your group and address the differences in personalities in a truthful, fun, and easy-to-understand way. Follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to share my blogs with the color energies you work with!

Scott Schwefel

More of Others, Less of You

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

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

How to make more of others

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

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

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

How to interact with others

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

Jung opened up an entirely new world with his discoveries, and discoveries into the psychology of personality and the self are still being made today. Insights Discovery is based squarely on Jung’s theories, and as such is an invaluable tool in helping people understand themselves and others. Schedule me, Scott Schwefel, as your keynote speaker, and I will come to your group and address the differences in personalities in a truthful, fun, and easy-to-understand way. Follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to share my blogs with the color energies you work with!

Scott Schwefel

Adapting and Connecting, Inside and Out

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layers

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

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

Balancing behavior

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

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

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

Adapting and connecting

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

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

Jung opened up an entirely new world with his discoveries, and discoveries into the psychology of personality and the self are still being made today. Insights Discovery is based squarely on Jung’s theories, and as such is an invaluable tool in helping people understand themselves and others. Schedule me, Scott Schwefel, as your keynote speaker, and I will come to your group and address the differences in personalities in a truthful, fun, and easy-to-understand way. Follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to share my blogs with the color energies you work with!