Guy Answers the Question: Is One Style Better Than the Others?
People often ask me if one DISC style is better than the others.
My answer is, emphatically, NO! One DISC style is not better than the others. All of the DISC styles have value. All of the DISC behavioral styles contribute something to businesses and families.
I would say that a particular behavior normally associated with any of the DISC styles can be either appropriate or inappropriate depending on the context and the situation.
For example, I am naturally calm, unemotional, and analytical. That particular blend of behaviors is really good for evaluating data and coming to rational conclusions based on the evaluation. These behaviors are not particularly helpful when I want to connect with another person or do a presentation in front of a group of people.
When I work with others, I have to apply more engaging behaviors so that they realize that I care about them, the situation, or my presentation. My “high-C” behaviors are not necessarily worse than typical “high-S” or “high-I” behaviors. While my natural style is really good for analyzing data, the behaviors that go with that style might not be effective (I should say, probably will not be effective) in connecting with others.
I have to learn to apply different behaviors in different situations. I do this to be effective in the situation, not because my style is “worse” than any other style.
One of the mantra’s we repeat in training is:
Not good. Not bad. Just different.
This article is from theDISC FAQ'sseries. Use the links below to read more from this series.
Guy Answers the Question: Can I Have One Style at Work & Another Style at Home?
One question that frequently comes up in my discussions of the DISC Model of Human Behavior is:
Can I have one DISC style at work and another DISC style at home?
- or-
I feel like I am one way at home and another way at work. Is that possible and is it normal?
The simple answer to the question is: “Yes. Differences between your home behaviors and workplace behaviors are not only possible, they are highly probable.”
The longer answer is a bit more involved, but not terribly complex.
When I hear this question or some variation of it, at least two things immediately come to my mind:
Different environments call for different behaviors. So, you tend to adjust your behaviors to your environment.
Let’s not confuse how we “behave” with who we “are.”
I’ll take these two thoughts one at a time.
First, let’s recall that very few people exhibit only one DISC style because most of us actually exhibit a blend of the four DISC styles in our everyday behaviors. Since we generally use at least two of the four DISC behavior styles, we can usually “shift” or “float” between our two (or three) primary styles depending on the situation.
Since the workplace environment is often quite different from our home environment (and we usually have different roles in the two environments), we adjust our behaviors to what is appropriate for both the environment and our role in it.
This is completely normal (and probably a good thing!).
The second point is, in some respects, even more important. Our behaviors are our behaviors. They are not who we “are” they are what we “do.”
Our thoughts and emotions reflect who we “are.”
In a full DISC profile assessment, you receive two different DISC behavioral style graphs. One reflects your basic or “natural” DISC style – who you “are.” The other reflects your environmental or “adapted” DISC style – what you “do.”
These two graphs are often similarly shaped. Sometimes they are not. Regardless, they represent two different aspects of your behavioral style. What is happening in your head and emotions and what is showing up in your behavior. While your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are generally connected, they are not necessarily exactly the same (at least as far as other people can see).
For example, have you ever meant to say or do one thing and then said or done something totally different? I have. This doesn’t happen frequently. It does happen.
In the interest of brevity, I won’t go into all of the details of the distinction between who we “are” and what we “do” in this post. Maybe I’ll dig into that topic some other day. For now, I’ll leave it at this: it is normal, expected, and highly likely that you will exhibit different behaviors in different environments.
This difference does not necessarily imply that you become a different person in those environments. More likely, it’s just a reflection of what you need to do to succeed in the different environments.
Guy Shares Two Questions to Help You Control Your Anger
A question that often comes up in my conversations and training sessions regarding conflict resolution is this:
How do I control my anger?
Great question. Sadly, it’s often the wrong question.
Anger is not really a primary emotion. It does not come first. It may come quickly. It just doesn’t come first. Anger is generally the result of something else.
If you imagine at your emotional container like a bottle filled with a carbonated beverage and sealed with a stopper, you can develop a simple model for understanding what happens when you get angry so that you can attack the anger at it’s source rather than trying to control it after it happens.
So, we have our emotional container represented by a bottle filled with a carbonated beverage. Now, we shake it up, and we get an explosion of foam. The foam represents anger.
Have you ever had a sink full of foam when you were trying to wash your dishes? If you have, you realize just how difficult it is to get rid of the foam. Well, anger is the same way. Once it blows out of us, it is really difficult to reign in and clean-up. It would be better to stop the foam (anger) before the explosion.
One tactic for controlling anger at its source is to recognize that by removing what came before the foam, we never have to deal with it at all. Since anger is a secondary emotion, we can dig past it to the primary emotion behind it and deal with that rather than trying to deal with the anger.
In many cases, the primary emotion triggered by an event in our lives will be one of two things:
Fear, or
Hurt/Pain (either physical or emotional)
If we can learn to identify which of these is at work in us when we start to feel “angry,” we can deal with the primary emotion in a way that can remove or reduce it. When we do that effectively, we get our anger under control by never letting it get ramped-up in the first place.
Several months ago, I read the results of a study that said a key predictor of domestic violence was the inability to clearly articulate emotions. The strategy I am proposing here aims at improving your skills in the area of expressing what is really inside rather than letting it build to the point of explosion. When we back-up the chain of emotional responses to the key, underlying, primary emotion, we can often express our fear or hurt more clearly so that it never escalates to full-blown anger.
How do you apply this approach?
When you feel anger welling up inside you, stop and ask yourself these questions:
What do I fear?, and
What is causing my pain?
If you can find an answer to these questions and then express the emotion in a healthy way, you just might avoid the need to clean-up the foam of your anger.
(I don’t mean to suggest that getting angry is always a bad thing. It’s just often a bad thing, if you want to preserve relationships. I’m also not suggesting that this is the only way to get your anger under control. It’s just one way to do it. If you have other suggestions, please leave them in the comments section below.)
Can more than one DISC behavior style fit a person? or
Could I have more than one DISC behavior style?
In a word, the answer is: yes. In fact, emphatically yes!
The four quadrants of the DISC model do not define four neat and tidy “categories” of people. The four quadrants represent typical or general behaviors of people who share certain perspectives. Each quadrant does not, in and of itself, represent a “type” of person.
We Want to Understand, Not Stereotype or Label
The four DISC types simply provide an objective and descriptive way of looking at, understanding, and communicating about different behavior, communication, and leadership styles so that we can better understand ourselves and others.
Think Blends, Not Boxes
Only a small minority of people (about 5%) would agree that only one of the four DISC descriptors totally describes their viewpoint or perspective. Even this group of people will have some of the other traits. They just don’t have them to a strong degree.
As a general rule, most people have more of some of the D, I, S, or C traits and less of the others. When a trait is strong in a person, we call the trait a “high” trait for that person. This is simply a shorthand nomenclature for discussion purposes, not a label we can use to box people in to a neatly defined behavior pattern.
About 80% of people will have two traits that are “high” traits and two traits that are “low” traits. About 15% of people will have three traits that are “high” traits with the remaining trait being “low”. While DISC profile assessments will not produce a profile with four “high” traits (it’s not mathematically possible within the parameters of the assessment), it is possible to have roughly equal proportions of all four traits in what is known as a “level style blend.”
This blending of traits creates profile results that have 41 basic types. When you consider all of the various ranges of intensities of traits within the 41 basic types, you can get 19,680 basic style descriptors starting from the four original quadrants.
So, can you have more than one DISC type? Absolutely you can, and you probably do.
Guy Answers the Question: Can Four Styles Really Describe Everyone?
One question that frequently comes up when I teach the DISC model is this:
“Can you really describe everyone with just four styles?”
The short answer is: yes, you can describe all the behaviors and perspectives of all people using information revealed by understanding the four DISC style descriptors.*
Sometimes people take exception to this simple answer. When they do, I usually get challenged with something like:
“There are 6 billion people on the planet, you can’t possibly define all of them with four letters/categories.”
To which, I reply: “You’re right. I can’t define all people with four letters or categories. I can, though, use four basic style descriptors to create a frame of reference that allows me to understand them better when we interact.”
Here are some observations to support this position.
We Regularly Use Only Two Categories to Describe All People
There are two broad categories that we use every day to describe all people on the planet: male and female.
The studies of male vs. female perspectives I have read indicate that men tend to share perspectives on certain issues, women tend to share perspectives on these same issues, and men tend to have different perspectives from women on the issues in question.
The results in the studies point to general perspective similarities only on the issues evaluated in the study. It would be a wrong application of the study results to say that all men or all women think, feel, or behave a certain way in all situations. It is okay to say that the studies reveal tendencies and similarities in the perspectives evaluated in the studies.
I am not a woman. When I read the study results about the perspectives many women have on certain issues, I frankly don’t get it. I understand it intellectually. I just don’t relate to the perspective.
When I interact with my wife, I can use my understanding of the study results to better understand the true intent of her words and actions. I can attempt to view her behavior through her lens rather than through mine. I don’t want to stereotype her with the results. I just want to use the study results to get an emotional hook that allows me to “get” what she is saying in a different way than I would “get” it if I had no way to reframe what I was hearing and seeing.
We Use Only 26 Letters to Define the English Language
I don’t know the exact number of words used in the English language. I have heard that it is greater than 1 million words. And still, all of them are fully defined with only 26 letters.
What Does All This Have to do With the Question We Began With?
I don’t want to categorize, label, or box-in anyone. I don’t want to tell people what job they are or are not qualified to pursue because of their behavior style. I don’t want to psychoanalyze them. I just want to understand them so that I can connect and communicate better.
The four DISC behavioral styles simply reveal tendencies and patterns in behaviors and perceptions. They do not neatly define another person.They do provide guidance and insight to understanding other perspectives that happen to be different from mine.
I see the DISC model as a sort of alphabet that helps me to understand people more fully than I would if I was stuck with only my viewpoint as a filter for understanding them.
When you really understand the model and it’s application, you learn that there are far more than four “categories” to use for that understanding. (I don’t really like the word category in this context. It’s just the simplest word I can find at the moment.)
When you consider the different simple combinations of the four DISC descriptors, you quickly arrive at 41 generalized style “types.”
For example, I have a strong blend of Cautious, Dominant, and Supportive traits. None of the three fully describes my viewpoint. The combination of the three traits gets pretty close. Likewise, my wife has a strong blend of Dominant, Inspiring, and Cautious traits. When I look at that combination of traits, it gets pretty close to describing how she usually responds to situations.
To take it one step deeper, you could consider the various levels of intensities of the four styles that any given person might exhibit. When you do that, you get 19,680 different Basic DISC style graphs. I don’t intend to go deeply into these subtleties here.
And, I haven’t even begun to comment on what you learn from the Environmental DISC style graphs or by understanding “low styles” like the “I” trait shown in my DISC profile graph to the right.
All of this simply makes the point that the simple little DISC model of human behavior has much more depth than most people see when they first encounter it.
When people use the model to define another person or to limit their potential, they use the model as a weapon. They are stereotyping and labeling. Both of which, I think, are wrong. These are really good strategies if you want to irritate someone with the DISC model.
When people use the model to create an understanding of another person’s perspective, they use the model as a tool. They are connecting and communicating more effectively. Both of which, I think, are good.
To me, the beauty of the model lies in its simplicity. Its simplicity helps me to remember it when the pressure hits. It helps me to quickly explain it to others when the time is right.
The depth of the model gives me confidence that I can, with study and practice, learn to use it to strengthen and deepen all of my relationships.
*When I say “all people,” I am referring to all people who fall into what you could call “normal human psychology.” Which means, people with no clinical psychological disorder. This would be something like 90-95% of the people on the planet. Not truly everyone, but most people I encounter on a daily basis.
