The 4 personality types intro.

Talking every day to a lot of people, you quickly realize that you cannot communicate the same way with every one and expect great results. Each and every person is different and must be treated in a different way. 

The first time I realized this was when I started teaching martial arts. I was trying to be the best teacher I could be, and even though my physical skills were great, my communication skills needed some work. You see some of my students understood me better when I was talking to them from a distance, some when I was correcting their stance with my hands and others when I was a bit more strict with them. Others wanted a more relaxed environment to learn. 

So looking at behavior models I found the character model from Hippocrates of the 4 personality types which led me to the DISC profiling model, as a more current and complete solution. Now DISC comes from the 4 personalities that it describes

Dominant

Influencer 

Careful

Stable

This model is amazing and you can find whole courses dedicated to it in their page. I strongly recommend to dig a little deeper to it. From their own page I will give you the benefits of their disc profiling model:

"DiSC profiles help you and your team:

Increase your self-knowledge: how you respond to conflict, what motivates you, what causes you stress, and how you solve problems

Improve working relationships by recognizing the communication needs of team members

Facilitate better teamwork and teach productive conflict

Develop stronger sales skills by identifying and responding to customer styles

Manage more effectively by understanding the dispositions and priorities of employees and team members"

The system basically categorizes behaviors as open and closed, and task oriented and people oriented. Now, we people are not just one of those personality types because we kinda have them all inside us. But one of those 4 is more evident in our behavior. Also sometimes during the course of our lives, we transition from one personality type to another. 

We will dig a bir deeper in these personality types in another article. I use them in my sales training here in Greece and it is an amazing solution for effective communication.