Sunday, January 23, 2011

Activity Vector Analysis

In 1940, using Marston's model, Walter Clarke developed a tool called the Activity Vector Analysis. It measured how one perceived themself and how one thought others perceived them. Participants took it twice with these two response focuses. The combination from these two focused responses described behavior with these four dimensions: Aggressive, Sociable, Stable, and Avoidant.

In 1950 John Cleaver created a 24-question forced-choice instrument from the Activity Vector Analysis. This instrument required the participant to select two words from four choices -- the word that was the MOST and LEAST like them.

In 1970, two professors from the University of Minnesota -- John Geier and Dorothy Downey -- created the DiSC® Personal Profile System, which took the responses from Cleaver's 24-question forced-choice instrument and identified a total of 15 classical patterns that emerged. They created a company called Performax Systems International to promote this assessment. In 1984, Curt Carlson (also a graduate of the University of Minnesota) purchased Performax Systems International and created Carlson Learning Company.

In 1994 the Personal Profile System was revalidated. Since the meaning of some words had changed over the years, some of the words were changed in the forced-choice instrument, and four more tetrads were added. Today's DiSC® assessment includes a total of 28 tetrads.

After Curt Carlson died, his company sold the DiSC Personal Profile System to The Riverside Company in 2000, which soon thereafter became Inscape Publishing, Inc. (Inscape is a hybrid word created from internal landscape.)

Today, more than 50 million people around the world have benefited from using the DiSC® assessment. Inscape Publishing has trademarked DiSC® with a small "i". The DISC model itself cannot be patented because Marston never developed a product to patent. He created the model and theory behind it, but never created an actual product that could be sold. Therefore, a number of companies have since created profiles based on Marston's model. The original assessment tool is the one created by what is now known as Inscape Publishing, Inc. You can always tell if you have the original assessment by looking for the small "i" in DiSC®.

In addition to DiSC, Inscape Publishing has created a number of other assessments and learning tools. We invite you to spend some time looking over the many samples, which you will find links to on this site.

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What does DiSC Mean? DiSC® is a non-critical tool for understanding behavioral types and styles. It is designed to help people explore personality and behavior types so they can better understand themselves and others. Each person's DiSC® profile is based on the combination of these four primary behavioral dimensions:


Dominance:

Direct, driver & decisive -- D's are strong-minded, aggressive, strong-willed people who enjoy challenges, taking action, and immediate results.

They thrive on power, prestige, authority, and individual accomplishment. They fear being taken advantage of through loss of control. Their focus tends to be on the bottom line. They ask WHAT questions. A good high D slogan: Just do it! (good with RESULTS)
Influence:

Social, optimistic & outgoing -- I's are "people" who prefer participating on teams, sharing ideas, entertaining and energizing others. They like to gain consensus.

They thrive on popularity, recognition, expression, and talking. They fear loss of social approval. They focus on shaping the environment by influencing or persuading others to see things their way. They ask WHO questions.

A good high I slogan: Don't worry, be happy! (good with PEOPLE)
Steadiness:

Stable, sympathetic & cooperative -- S's tend to be helpful team players. They prefer being behind the scenes, working in consistent and predictable ways. They don't like rapid change, and they don't like conflict. They are often good listeners.

They thrive on team work, structure, predictability, and calming down excited people. They fear loss of stability in the environment and abrupt changes. They focus on cooperating with others to carry out the task, being patient and loyal. They ask HOW questions. A good High S slogan: Don't rock the boat! (good with PROCESSES)
Conscientiousness: Concerned, cautious & correct -- C's usually plan ahead, constantly check for accuracy, and use systematic approaches. They thrive on details, proof, critical thinking, analysis, accuracy, and perfection. They fear criticism of their efforts or actions. They focus on quality and accuracy. They ask WHY questions. A good high C slogan: Measure twice, cut once! (good with DETAILS)

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Six Keys to Changing Almost Anything - HBR

Six Keys to Changing Almost Anything - HBR

Change is hard. New Year's resolutions almost always fail. But at The Energy Project, we have developed a way of making changes that has proved remarkably powerful and enduring, both in my own life and for the corporate clients to whom we teach it.

Our method is grounded in the recognition that human being are creatures of habit. Fully 95 percent of our behaviors are habitual, or occur in response to a strong external stimulus. Only 5 percent of our choices are consciously self-selected.

In 1911, the mathematician Alfred North Whitehead intuited what researchers would confirm nearly a century later. "It is a profoundly erroneous truism," he wrote, "that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."

Most of us wildly overvalue our will and discipline. Ingenious research by Roy Baumeister and others has demonstrated that our self-control is a severely limited resource that gets progressively depleted by every act of conscious self-regulation.

In order to make change that lasts, we must rely less on our prefrontal cortex, and more on co-opting the primitive parts of our brain in which habits are formed.

Put simply, the more behaviors are ritualized and routinized — in the form of a deliberate practice — the less energy they require to launch, and the more they recur automatically

What follows are our six key steps to making change that lasts:

1. Be Highly Precise and Specific. Imagine a typical New Year's resolution to "exercise regularly." It's a prescription for failure. You have a vastly higher chance for success if you decide in advance the days and times, and precisely what you're going to do on each of them.

Say instead that you commit to do a cardiovascular work out Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 6 a.m., for 30 minutes. If something beyond your control forces you to miss one of those days, you automatically default to doing that workout instead on Saturday at 9 a.m.

Researchers call those "implementation intentions" and they dramatically increase your odds of success.

2. Take on one new challenge at a time. Over the years, I've established a broad range of routines and practices, ranging from ones for weight training and running, to doing the most important thing first every morning without interruption for 90 minutes and then taking a break to spending 90 minutes talking with my wife about the previous week on Saturday mornings.

In each case, I gave the new practice I was launching my sole focus. Even then, in some cases, it's taken several tries before I was able to stay at the behavior long enough for it to become essentially automatic.

Computers can run several programs simultaneously. Human beings operate best when we take on one thing at a time, sequentially.

3. Not too much, not too little. The most obvious mistake we make when we try to change something in our lives is that we bite off more than it turns out we can chew. Imagine that after doing no exercise at all for the past year, for example, you get inspired and launch a regimen of jogging for 30 minutes, five days a week. Chances are high that you'll find exercising that much so painful you'll quit after a few sessions.

It's also easy to go to the other extreme, and take on too little. So you launch a 10-minute walk at lunchtime three days a week and stay at it. The problem is that you don't feel any better for it after several weeks, and your motivation fades.

The only way to truly grow is to challenge your current comfort zone. The trick is finding a middle ground — pushing yourself hard enough that you get some real gain, but not too much that you find yourself unwilling to stay at it.

4. What we resist persists.

Think about sitting in front of a plate of fragrant chocolate chip cookies over an extended period of time. Diets fail the vast majority of time because they're typically built around regularly resisting food we enjoy eating. Eventually, we run up against our limited reservoir of self control.

The same is true of trying to ignore the Pavlovian ping of incoming emails while you're working on an important project that deserves your full attention.

The only reasonable answer is to avoid the temptation. With email, the more effective practice is turn it off entirely at designated times, and then answer it in chunks at others. For dieters, it's to keep food you don't want to eat out of sight, and focus your diet instead on what you are going to eat, at which times, and in what portion sizes. The less you have to think about what to do, the more successful you're likely to be.

5. Competing Commitments.

We all derive a sense of comfort and safety from doing what we've always done, even if it isn't ultimately serving us well. Researchers Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey call this "immunity to change." Even the most passionate commitment to change, they've shown, is invariably counterbalanced by an equally powerful but often unseen "competing" commitment not to change.

Here's a very simple way to surface your competing commitment. Think about a change you really want to make. Now ask yourself what you're currently doing or not doing to undermine that primary commitment. If you are trying to get more focused on important priorities, for example, your competing commitment might be the desire to be highly responsive and available to those emailing you.

For any change effort you launch, it's key to surface your competing commitment and then ask yourself "How can I design this practice so I get the desired benefits but also minimize the costs I fear it will prompt?"

6. Keep the faith.

Change is hard. It is painful. And you will experience failure at times. The average person launches a change effort six separate times before it finally takes. But follow the steps above, and I can tell you from my own experience and that of thousands of clients that you will succeed, and probably without multiple failures.

Monday, January 3, 2011

Oxymorons

1. virtual reality

2. original copy

3. old news

4. act naturally

5. pretty ugly

6. living dead

7. jumbo shrimp
8. rolling stop

9. constant variable

10. exact estimate

11. paid volunteers

12. civil war

13. sound of silence

14. clever fool

15. only choice

Great Proverbs

From 4-hour Work Week


Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. - MARK TWAIN

Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination - OSCAR WILDE