A few weeks ago, I read an interesting article titled On the Job, Nice Guys May Finish Last. The title immediately caught my attention, and I had to take a look.

In reading the article, I saw an immediate connection to my work and for other people interested in using the DISC model in their professional and personal lives.

The point made in this article is particularly significant for people with supportive tendencies (people who are people-oriented and reserved).

People with strong supportive traits are great at building relationships, easing tensions, helping others, and holding a team together. And, as Dr. Christine Riordan says in the article I mentioned above:

People with this natural personality trait may be less likely to face confrontation or other difficulties at work.

I’m not suggesting that having the supportive trait is a problem (it happens to be a strong secondary trait for me). I am suggesting that people with this trait commit themselves to learning the skills of assertive communication.

People with supportive traits often use passive communication strategies in an effort to ease tensions and reduce conflicts. While these strategies are sometimes useful and necessary, I recommend learning to use them intentionally when appropriate rather than as a default because they are more comfortable.

Consistently passive communication and conflict avoidance can create situations where conflicts go unresolved and continue to simmer under the surface until they explode and destroy a team or family. In addition, passive communication can make people, like the lamb pictured above, susceptible to “predators” in the workplace. Both scenarios can have  major negative impacts on your career.

Learning to apply assertive communication techniques can improve the odds of successfully confronting and resolving conflict situations at work by stopping the spread of destructive conflict and confrontation.

Related posts:

1. Communication Tips: Connecting With Reserved, People-Oriented People
2. DISC Model FAQ’s: Could I Have More Than One DISC Behavior Style?
3. DISC Model FAQ’s: Is Changing Your Behavior Phoney?

A Question to Ask of Yourself:
How do I better control myself?

I often hear people ask questions about the DISC model that indicate a desire to use the model to somehow change others.

Rather than using the model to label, categorize, or stereotype people, I suggest a different approach: use the DISC model to find ways to connect with other people in better, more effective ways.

Towards that end, one question that I suggest you ask yourself is this:

How can I use the DISC model to better understand other people and change my behaviors so that I communicate more clearly?

My message is pretty simple: get over yourself.

Learn to adjust and modify your words and actions so that they are heard and understood more quickly and more clearly by other people.

This is what I strive to do every day. I’m not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. The more I work at it though, the better I get. And you can do it, too.

Do this, and you will significantly improve your effectiveness as a leader, team member, or parent.

Related posts:

1. DISC Model FAQ’s: Is Changing Your Behavior Phoney?
2. DISC Model FAQ’s: Could I Have More Than One DISC Behavior Style?
3. DISC FAQ’s: Can I Change My Personality Style On Purpose?

… And What You Can Do About It

Have you ever told yourself that you wouldn’t do something? Maybe you said you wouldn’t eat too much at a party. Maybe you told yourself that you wouldn’t speak too soon at a meeting. Or maybe you just told yourself that you wouldn’t break the speed limit on the way home from work.

Whatever it was, you told yourself that you wouldn’t do something that you either normally do, wanted to do, or habitually do, and you eventually “gave-in” to the temptation.

Well, there’s a good reason for this behavior, and Dan Heath gives more details about it in this article over at Fast Company. I suggest that you check out the article for more details. For now, here’s the short version: self-control eventually runs out. In other words, you can only resist so long before you “run out” of self-control.

Your limit might be different from mine, and we all have a limit.

So, what does this observation have to do with this blog?

Since one of the recurring themes here is “get over yourself,” the concept of depleting self-control is vitally important to understand.

Whether you are trying to change your behavior, your team member’s behavior, or your child’s behavior, remember that everyone has a self-control limit, and when you exceed the limit you invite failure.

You invite failure to comply with rules, failure to cooperate, and failure to do things in new and different ways.

This is an observable and repeatable psychological phenomenon. Like so many of the things I write and speak on, I don’t suggest hiding behind the behavior. Rather, I suggest understanding the behavior and then making plans that recognized the reality of life instead of wishing that things were different.

So, what do we do with this observation?

Here are three suggestions to get you started with applying  this principle in your efforts to change your behaviors or to influence another person’s behaviors:

1. Get away from tempting situations as quickly as possible.
   Since we know that self-control will eventually run out, if at all possible, remove the temptation to do things the old way or to partake in some forbidden behavior.
2. Give people (or yourself) a break.
   If you ask someone to change their behavior in a particular situation, make some time for them to get away from it for awhile so that they can replenish their “supply” of self-control.
3. Make big changes in small steps.
   Smaller steps do many things to make change easier to accept. One benefit of smaller steps is the reduction of effort required to remember the new way of doing things. If the effort to remember the new way is small, the time to “self-control” exhaustion is longer. This longer temptation resistance time increases the odds that the new way of doing things becomes easy to remember before our self control runs out.

Photo by NomadicLass.

Related posts:

1. Being Too Nice Can Hurt You
2. A DISC Model Question You Should Ask of Yourself
3. DISC Model FAQ’s: Is Changing Your Behavior Phoney?

My Boat - USS Benjamin Franklin

Twenty-one years ago this month I left the U.S. Navy, got married, and began my civilian career.

A lot has happened in those twenty-one years. I have moved from South Carolina to New Jersey to Michigan and to Indiana. I have worked in large multi-national corporations, small family-owned businesses, and in my own business. I have become a father. I have faced financial ups and downs. I have experienced health challenges and been with family members through their health challenges. I helped to care for my aging mother-in-law until I had the privilege of being with her as she passed away.

A lot happened while I served as a submarine officer in the Navy and since. All of it has contributed to making me who I am today.

Even though I served in the U.S. military, when people ask for veterans to stand or raise their hands, I do it in a sort of  self-conscious way. In many respects, I don’t feel totally worthy of being called a “veteran” because I don’t really see my service as being a great sacrifice or struggle. While I learned a great deal about myself, about working with people, about problem solving, and about responding to crises, my experience seems a little insignificant compared to the service of others.

I never faced anything like the men and women of our armed forces face today or in any of the wars prior to my time in service. In the midst of my training for and response to life-and-death situations, the most significant casualty I faced was a fire on-board our submarine that lasted about one minute. The most physical hardship I faced was nine days without showers due to an equipment malfunction. Not so significant when compared with facing IED’s on roadsides every day.

On one Veteran’s Day a year or so ago, my daughter had a discussion with her teacher about my service. When her teacher asked which war I had served in, she said: “The Cold War.” It was funny, and it was true. I “fought” the Cold War.

Last Friday, I got up around 4:00 am to fly from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania back to Indianapolis. On this journey, I had about a two hour layover scheduled between flights in Detroit. My two hour layover eventually became a seven hour layover due to mechanical problems with the plane.

Another person on the flight from Detroit to Indianapolis was a U.S. soldier who began his travels somewhere in Iraq. He had already made 18 hops in his 2.5 day journey home, and he just wanted to see his wife and kids for three days. Tomorrow he begins his 2.5 day return journey back to his duty station in Iraq.

We spoke a bit during our time together in Detroit. Sadly, I do not know his name. I know a little of his story, and I saw his two young children waiting for him with “Welcome Home” signs at the Indianapolis airport. We only got the chance to briefly connect. As is often the case in group conversations like the one we had in Detroit, the roughly forty of us that were waiting together shared conversation, but we didn’t get very personal.

As we waited, I saw several people get really agitated with Delta Airlines. True, they could have done a better job of keeping us informed about the status of our delay. But, was it really that big of a deal? I noticed that the solider who had been traveling for 2.5 days to spend 3 days at home never got angry. He was as frustrated as anyone, and he kept his cool. He seemed to be able to keep the short-term situation in perspective compared to the bigger picture of his life and experiences.

Memorial Day is for people like him who serve in harms way and the people who have given their lives in service to their country. It is a day to remember their service and sacrifice.

And, as we face little daily struggles like delayed flights, traffic congestion, children who forget things at school, and a thousand other minor daily irritations, let’s remember to keep things in perspective.

Related posts:

1. Just Be Nice
2. Getting What You Want With Gentle Persistence

Guy Answers the Question:
Can I Change My Personality Style on Purpose?

People often tell me that they believe that they have changed their personality style, and then they ask me if I think this is possible.

My general answer is this: It might be possible. I don’t think it is probable.

In short, I don’t think that your core, inner, basic personality style changes unless you experience some type of major psychological or brain trauma.

I do think that you can learn to behave differently in different situations. I think that you can learn to adapt, mold, and shape your behavioral style to increase your effectiveness in a broad range of situations.

However, changing your words and actions does not change your personality style.

Further, why would you want to change your personality style? Assuming that you fall in the range of normal human psychology, your personality style is just another expression of “normal.”

Wanting to change your personality style implies that there is something wrong with your natural one.

In the vast majority of people, there is nothing wrong with their personality style. So, why try to change it?

As we consider the question raised in the title of this post, we have to carefully distinguish between who we are and what we do.

Personality style relates to our perceptions, interpretations, priorities, and reactions to the world around us. Behavior style is often related to our personality style, and it is influenced by many other things. Personality style is part of who we are. Behavior style is merely what we do. They are definitely related. They are not exactly the same thing.

So, can you change your behaviors in response to the world around you? Absolutely you can!

Can you change your personality style? Not real likely.

Related posts:

1. DISC Model FAQ’s: Can Your Personality Style Change Over Time
2. DISC Model FAQ’s: Is Changing Your Behavior Phoney?
3. A DISC Model Question You Should Ask of Yourself

I have noticed one behavior many of us use that almost guarantees that our suggestions, solutions, and opinions will be ignored when we offer them:

We tell people what to do before we have heard their whole story.

When we offer people suggestions, solutions, and opinions before we have heard them out, they often do not care what we have to say. So, they rarely listen to and fully comprehend what we are suggesting.

The suggestion might be useful. It might be right on target. It might be exactly what the other person needs to hear.

And, they probably won’t hear it.

If you speak too soon, you’re just trying to push fluid into an already full container.

Offering suggestions before people have told their whole story is like having a doctor prescribe medication or treatment before listening to all of the symptoms.

I once had numbness and tingling in my foot. I went to my doctor, and he asked a whole battery of questions before prescribing a treatment plan. He asked about my physical activity, other pains or sensations I had in other parts of my body, how my leg felt, etc.

In the end, we identified the source of the numbness in my foot to be a problem in my lower back. It could have been any number of other problems. If he had jumped on the numbness in my foot without digging further into my other symptoms, he could have prescribed a wonderful treatment for a problem that had nothing to do with my problem.

In this case, he chose to diagnose the problem before he prescribed a solution.

When we work with other people, we need to keep this idea in mind.

We may have valuable experience to offer. We may have seen this problem before. We might even have a great, simple solution to offer.

And it just doesn’t matter if we offer the suggestion, solution, or opinion in a way that virtually guarantees that the other person ignores or discounts our input.

As you work with others and attempt to share your experience, remember the lesson from my doctor:

Ask, listen, and diagnose before you prescribe.

Related posts:

1. Effective Communication Skills: You Don’t Know Until You Ask
2. Rules Without Relationship Breeds Rebellion
3. How To Get People To Do What You Want

Guy Answers the Question:
Is Changing Your Behavior Phoney?

As I teach, train, and coach using the DISC model, people hear me say that I encourage them to change their behaviors to fit the situation and to better connect with other people.

Sometimes, people ask me if consciously changing behavior is phoney or fake. This concern raises another common question about the DISC model, and how I recommend people use it to connect and communicate more effectively.

In answering this question, I often refer to a Thomas Jefferson quote:

In matters of style, swim with the current. In matters of principle, stand like a rock.

As I see it, choosing a behavior, word, or tone that will improve your communication effectiveness is not a moral or ethical issue. It is just a matter of style.

We often change our behaviors for different environments. For example, most people recognize that appropriate behavior during a wedding ceremony is likely to be different from appropriate behavior at the celebration party after the ceremony. Different environments call for different behaviors.

As long as your intent is not to defraud, manipulate, or somehow deceive the other person, behaving in a way that might be uncomfortable or unnatural for you in the interest of connecting with them is not fake or phoney. Rather, I see it as working to create a better environment for the other person.

Related posts:

1. A DISC Model Question You Should Ask of Yourself
2. DISC Model FAQ’s: Could I Have More Than One DISC Behavior Style?
3. DISC FAQ’s: Can I Change My Personality Style On Purpose?

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:

1. Fear, or
2. 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:

1. What do I fear?, and
2. 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.)

Related posts:

1. Resolving Conflict Lesson: Watch Your Step
2. Conflict Resolution Insights: Why Conflicts Escalate
3. Why Your Natural Response to Conflict is Probably Wrong & What You Can Do About It

Try as I might, I could not get my mind to focus on what she was saying. I could only think about what I still had to do to prepare for the next day before going to bed. Sadly, this is not the first time I have struggled to have a fruitful conversation with my wife while I am traveling for business.

After we ended our phone call and I hung-up the phone, I finally realized the cause for this problem. My wife was not the problem. The topic of conversation was not the problem. My desire to engage in the conversation was not the problem.

I really wanted to engage, and I couldn’t because of the way I had defined the task of calling home. (Since I am a pretty task-oriented person, even relationship issues become tasks in my mind.)

Here’s the way my mental task list looked:

• Check my course notes.
• Confirm I have all training resources ready to go.
• Call home.
• Press my clothes.
• Read to relax.
• Go to bed.

Notice that the way I defined the task of calling home did not include listening to my wife and engaging in a conversation. And therein lies the problem. As soon as she answered the phone, my task was complete.  I had called home.

When I mentally checked “call home” off my list, my task-oriented mind immediately shifted to the next task – press my clothes. As a result, I couldn’t force myself to listen despite my desire to do so.

Now I realize that in order to keep myself under control, I have to redefine the task to include listening and engaging in conversation.

If you’re as task-oriented as I am and you want to build strong relationships at work and at home, you might consider looking at how you define your relationship related “tasks.” Make sure that you include the relationship parts of the task in your definition.

If you’re more people-oriented than me, my struggle may not make any sense to you at all. I totally understand. You may, though, have the opposite challenge. You might define task issues by their relationship impact and that definition just might get in your way at times.

Here’s the bottom-line: if you encounter situations that frequently cause you to trip up in your relationships, take a close look at how you’re defining the situation. Your definition might be the source of your problem.

Related posts:

1. Conflict Resolution Tips: Task Oriented People with People Oriented Individuals
2. Conflict Resolution Tips: People Oriented Individuals with Task Oriented People
3. Communication Tips: Connecting With Reserved, Task-Oriented People

In this time of Olympic competition, I wonder about these sorts of questions.

Evan Lysacek beats Yevgeny Plushenko by playing the scoring system to its fullest, and he wins. Then Plushenko plays the victim. In my opinion, he lost – end of story.

Maybe Plushenko is more daring. Maybe he is the better physical skater. Maybe the scoring system should reward the quad more highly than it does. Maybe the system should be changed to better reward risk and daring.

These issues are far beyond my knowledge of skating. I don’t know how to address the systemic issues. I do know that Lysacek understood the rules of the game he was playing better than Plushenko. Lysacek applied the rules to his program, and he was the victor.

Now Plushenko plays the victim and cries foul. Well, he’s a poor sport as far as I’m concerned. Plushenko blames, criticizes, and ridicules Lysacek. Is it Lysacek’s fault that Plushenko didn’t know how to play the game? I don’t think so.

It’s not Lysacek’s fault that Plushenko didn’t plan his program to take full advantage of his athletic ability to gain as many points as possible. The fault is Plushenko’s.

What, you might ask, has any of this got to do with the topic of this blog?

The answer: it’s about personal responsibility.

When we blame our circumstances or outside factors for our behaviors, we abdicate responsibility for our actions. We give away the only control we really have – the control over our words and actions.

Earlier today, I read a post by my friend and colleague Kevin Eikenberry titled: Who Is Responsible, Really? In his post, he calls it a rant, he makes an argument for why we need to take personal responsibility for our actions. I could not agree more.

Do outside events affect us and drive our behaviors to a certain extent? Of course they do.

Do other people’s behaviors affect us and our emotions? Of course they do.

Do we often overlook the influence of environmental factors when evaluating the behaviors of others (Fundamental Attribution Error)? Absolutely we do.

None of this takes away from the point of this post: If we want to win, we have to take responsibility for ourselves. If we want to be great communicators, leaders, parents, spouses, friends, family members, and co-workers; we have to take responsibility for ourselves.

Playing the victim, blaming others, and looking for others to fix our situation are futile efforts. As I heard in the Navy, you need to “man up” if you want to win.

Just for comparison, take a look at the definitions of victim and victor:

vic·tim (n.)¹

1. One who is harmed or killed by another: a victim of a mugging.
2. A living creature slain and offered as a sacrifice during a religious rite.
3. One who is harmed by or made to suffer from an act, circumstance, agency, or condition: victims of war.
4. A person who suffers injury, loss, or death as a result of a voluntary undertaking: You are a victim of your own scheming.
5. A person who is tricked, swindled, or taken advantage of: the victim of a cruel hoax.

vic·tor (n.)²

One who defeats an adversary; the winner in a fight, battle, contest, or struggle.

External events can happen outside my control. Other people may treat me in ways that I cannot control. Economic turmoil and business conditions are usually beyond my control. Winning or losing a particular event, situation, or circumstance might be beyond my control.

Thinking like a victor or a victim is in my control. Victors defeat adversaries. Victims have no control. In the battle to become a better parent, leader, spouse, and co-worker; the battle is with myself. The battle is to overcome my own self-limiting thoughts and emotional responses.

There is no Fundamental Attribution Error when I evaluate myself. There is either the honesty to confront my failures and to learn from them or the dishonesty of blaming others when I didn’t control myself.

Plushenko didn’t learn the rules of the game well enough. He did what he wanted to do rather than what would bring him victory. Lysacek played the game based on the rules as they were given to him.

In working with people, we can either try to change human nature, or we can learn to work with it. We can say that people shouldn’t behave the way they do, or we can learn to understand the way they do.

I cannot control how other people behave. I cannot control many circumstances and events. I can control how I respond to them.

In working with people, you can take the Plushenko approach (this is how it should be) or the Lysacek approach (this is how it is). Plushenko lost. Lysacek won.

In the battle to make yourself a better person, you can be either a victim or a victor. You can’t be both. The choice is yours.

Related posts:

1. Decision Making 101 – Check Your Emotions Before You Decide
2. Why You Might Eventually Do Something You Don’t Want to Do…
3. A DISC Model Question You Should Ask of Yourself