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Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You
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I stumbled across this great little book last summer and I wanted to let others know about it. For years we have talked about "people-reading" by looking at the contents of people's office's or how they dress. This research-based book describes contemporary findings in how your apartment, home, office decor gives clues to your character or personality. Sam Gosling, associate professor at the University of Texas/Austin, has written a highly readable account of his research on reading personality traits from what people do in social environments and how they organize and decorate their lives. While the book uses the Big Five assessment and describes the findings in those terms, it easy fairly easy to build a bridge from three of the five factors in the Big Five to the DiSC model.
Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You
by Sam Gosling by Basic Books
Paperback 
List Price: $15.95
Our Price: $1.96 Buy Now
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| DISC Master Class |
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This Master Class, still in development based on feedback from practitioners, will take place in Rhode Island in three, two-day sequential sessions over the next 12 months. Because the content will build from session to session, continued participation will require attendance at the first session. Enrollment in this small group program will also include participation in an exclusive online community of practice. Practitioners with 5+ years of client experience with DISC may apply for this program. More details will follow in a separate mailing. Contact Pamela if you are interested in attending this training. |
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Pamela Cole
PsychTech Inc. |
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Greetings!
The year has started fast with a lot of time spent in research and development for a new learning platform. I'm excited to be converting content from long-standing popular classroom programs to an elearning format. The learning curve is steep but well worth it to continue to present valuable DISC application information in a way that is both useful and accessible.
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 Beyond the Big Four™
Why do we need more than Four? Well, the dashboard compass in my grandfather's Osmobile was great for telling me I was going North but it was no help at all when I wanted to find the nearest Starbuck's. Knowing which of the four directions you are headed in is great as a starting point, just like knowing about the four DISC styles is a great starting point in understanding differences in people. However, if you need to go somewhere specific or get a specific outcome in an interaction with someone, you'll need a navigation system that can zoom in to the level of detail necessary to the task. Having a general idea that someone is outgoing is not as useful as having a step-by-step suggestion for how to create a positive climate when relating to them so that they will be receptive to hearing your ideas and sharing theirs.
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With DiSC PPSS or DiSC Indra you have access to information based on the 15/16 styles/patterns which provides a more accurate description as well as a more informative coaching guide for attaining specific results.
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Emotional Intelligence and DISC
I just finished reading an interesting meta-review of the research on Emotional Intelligence and job performance in the January Journal of Applied Psychology. In the article they laid out the well-accepted model of emotional intelligence defined as "the processes by which individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express these emotions". The article presented a cascading model of three emotional intelligence factors affecting job performance in a sequential fashion: emotion perception, emotion understanding, and emotion regulation.
The researchers highlighted the impact of emotion regulation on job performance because it is used to induce positive emotional states that are beneficial to performance because they broaden behavioral repertoires, improve behavioral flexibility and increase attentional scope. In addition to the production of positive emotional states, emotional regulation also includes the suppression of negative emotional states. Individuals with greater emotional regulation ability can use a more effective strategy for managing negative emotional than suppression (which has a high energy cost) by using stratiegies such as cognitive reappraisal.
The discussion of resource allocation theory caught my attention because it is something we have been talking about for several years when we talk about the energy cost of adaptive behavior and the impact of such an energy drain on the resources available for task performance. They also noted that individuals high in emotion regulation intelligence will match their chosen regulation strategy to the demands of the task and to the momentary store of personal resources at hand, so as to maintain overall job performance. (Of course, emotion regulation is preceded by two abilities: the ability to perceive emotion and the ability to understand emotion.)
This is where I see the power of our DiSC tools in helping people increase their emotional understanding of self and others, and broaden their repertoire of adaptive responses so that they can chose a strategy that matches the demands of the situation and their available personal resources.
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 The Big Five and the Big Four™
Most of the contemporary research on the effects of personality on performance uses the Big Five model, OCEAN, (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism) Parallels with the DISC Model can be seen in the facet descriptions of the five factors (friendliness, gregariousness, assertiveness, cheerfulness, dutifulness, orderliness, self-discipline, cautiousness, modest, cooperation, sympathy, trust). you can find interesting information to add to your understanding of DISC from these parallels between the two models.
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Emotional Labor and DISC
Recently, I've been gifted with some insight into a several year period that was quite stressful. I was working as a facilitator for the University of Toyota, conducting training for Lexus and Toyota dealership personnel around the country. It hadn't seemed very different from work I've done in automotive for the past 20 years so I didn't really attribute my exhaustion to the work I was doing. (I thought it might just be my age.....)
Now that I've been learning about emotional labor and the strategies people use to adapt their behavior to the "display rules" for the work environment, I can see the cause of my the stress and dissatisfaction.I wasn't able to shift to "deep acting" but only did "surface acting" because of my conflict with the core values of the industry and the conflict I had with UOT on learning philosophy and design. "Surface Acting" has a much higher emotional cost and negative impact on satisfaction and stress. I'm sure it also impacted the quality of my performance.
I share more about my new understanding about the relationship of emotional labor, DISC styles and job fit in this short presentation.
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| I'm looking forward to continued collaboration with colleagues and clients to create new learning and performance solutions so we can all thrive in the shifting sands of our global political and economic reality.
Sincerely,
 Pamela
Pamela Cole
PsychTech, Inc. | |
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