Category: People & Relationships

What do you do when you’re confronted with something you’re not good at?

Some people get discouraged and quit. Others keep doggedly working to get better at it, and in the process become more “well-rounded” human beings.

Conventional wisdom says that the second response is the healthy one. But the empirical evidence suggests that it’s people who specialize in an area of aptitude who are successful and happy, not those who focus their energies on becoming “well rounded.”

As a psychologist, I was trained to assess and treat what was wrong in peoples’ lives, to help people accomplish this business of “self-improvement.” But something changed in me about thirty years ago. I grew very weary of working on what was wrong with people and became more interested in what was right with them (i.e., their strengths).

It was this change that ultimately led me to working with Lynda-Ross Vega to develop Your Talent Advantage (YTA), a sophisticated psychological assessment that accurately assesses a person’s strengths and forms the basis of a roadmap for developing them in their lives.

Many times after I have given presentations about YTA, and even after I have just delivered a person’s assessment results, I have been met with, “Okay. That’s interesting, but so what?” As in, “Now that I know this about myself, of what practical use is it?” I am convinced that this response is because the results are focused on their strengths, rather than on their weaknesses and deficiencies.

If the YTA assessment results were like school report cards and employee performance reviews that highlight areas “in need of improvement,” I suspect that the question “so what?” would never arise. The questions would be about what you could do to improve or where you could find classes for remediation. People would be jumping in, raring to get to work on improving themselves.

Perhaps this is because people don’t think there’s any work involved in making the most of their talents and abilities. After all, these are the things they’re already good at, right? So where’s the room to move?

But here’s an analogy – if you had a mining claim somewhere, with a few different veins of gold running through it, wouldn’t you want to know which vein lay closest to the surface? It’s not that digging up that gold wouldn’t still be work. It would just be the kind of work most likely to yield results.

Still, so many people love working on what they don’t do well that they’re baffled about how to take advantage of information about their natural skills and abilities. Why? Because:

1. We get so little feedback about or gifts, skills, and talents in life that we don’t understand what it takes to further develop them. (Interested in this? Take a look at a skill or talent you have, then look at a leader who exemplifies that skill or talent. What would it take to close the gap between your level of mastery and theirs?)

2. Our gifts and talents are so chronically underdeveloped that we are unaware of what they are and cannot recognize their value or practical expression. (Do you know how to lean on your natural skills and abilities during a crisis? In leading a team? In everyday problem-solving? If you’re like most people, the answer is ‘no’.)

3. There is an endless supply of what we don’t do naturally well, but only a finite list of our gifts and talents. Somehow, we believe that if we focus on the positive, we will run out of “areas to improve.”

 4. We see others doing things we struggle with and buy into the idea that we are somehow “less than” they are because we can’t do everything.

5. We grossly undervalue the worth of our own innate abilities, falsely believing that if it is easy for us then it is easy for everyone. (Not true!)

6. We have bought into the belief that we must be “well-rounded” rather than specialists, despite all the empirical evidence demonstrating that those who specialize are more successful and happy.

7. We are conditioned to focus on “bad news” (newspapers, television and radio news, etc.) rather than “good news.”

8. We suffer from “pleasure anxiety” and distrust both positive feedback and feeling good about ourselves.

9. We somehow feel “wrong” focusing on our own positive qualities. As my mother used to say derisively, “Boy, you sure are tooting your own horn!”

Do you see yourself in any of these statements? (I know I do.) If so, it’s time to break out of the pack and do something extraordinary: discover the depth, unique qualities, and nuanced expression of skills and talents you are naturally gifted with.

About the Author:

Gary Jordan, Ph.D., has over 27 years of experience in clinical psychology, behavioral assessment, individual development, and coaching. He earned his doctorate in Clinical Psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology – Berkeley.  He is co-creator of Perceptual Style Theory, a revolutionary psychological assessment system that teaches people how to unleash their deepest potentials for success. He’s a partner at Vega Behavioral Consulting, Ltd., a consulting firm that specializes in helping people discover their true skills and talents.  For free information on how to succeed as an entrepreneur or coach, create a thriving business and build your bottom line doing more of what you love, visit www.YourTalentAdvantage.com

 

What do you do when you’re confronted with something you’re not good at?

 

Some people get discouraged and quit. Others keep doggedly working to get better at it, and in the process become more “well-rounded” human beings.

 

Conventional wisdom says that the second response is the healthy one. But the empirical evidence suggests that it’s people who specialize in an area of aptitude who are successful and happy, not those who focus their energies on becoming “well rounded.”

 

As a psychologist, I was trained to assess and treat what was wrong in peoples’ lives, to help people accomplish this business of “self-improvement.” But something changed in me about thirty years ago. I grew very weary of working on what was wrong with people and became more interested in what was right with them (i.e., their strengths).

 

It was this change that ultimately led me to working with Lynda-Ross Vega to develop Your Talent Advantage (YTA), a sophisticated psychological assessment that accurately assesses a person’s strengths and forms the basis of a roadmap for developing them in their lives.  

 

Many times after I have given presentations about YTA, and even after I have just delivered a person’s assessment results, I have been met with, “Okay. That’s interesting, but so what?” As in, “Now that I know this about myself, of what practical use is it?” I am convinced that this response is because the results are focused on their strengths, rather than on their weaknesses and deficiencies.

 

If the YTA assessment results were like school report cards and employee performance reviews that highlight areas “in need of improvement,” I suspect that the question “so what?” would never arise. The questions would be about what you could do to improve or where you could find classes for remediation. People would be jumping in, raring to get to work on improving themselves.

 

Perhaps this is because people don’t think there’s any work involved in making the most of their talents and abilities. After all, these are the things they’re already good at, right? So where’s the room to move?

 

But here’s an analogy – if you had a mining claim somewhere, with a few different veins of gold running through it, wouldn’t you want to know which vein lay closest to the surface? It’s not that digging up that gold wouldn’t still be work. It would just be the kind of work most likely to yield results.

 

Still, so many people love working on what they don’t do well that they’re baffled about how to take advantage of information about their natural skills and abilities. Why? Because:

 

1. We get so little feedback about or gifts, skills, and talents in life that we don’t understand what it takes to further develop them. (Interested in this? Take a look at a skill or talent you have, then look at a leader who exemplifies that skill or talent. What would it take to close the gap between your level of mastery and theirs?)

 

2. Our gifts and talents are so chronically underdeveloped that we are unaware of what they are and cannot recognize their value or practical expression. (Do you know how to lean on your natural skills and abilities during a crisis? In leading a team? In everyday problem-solving? If you’re like most people, the answer is ‘no’.)

 

3. There is an endless supply of what we don’t do naturally well, but only a finite list of our gifts and talents. Somehow, we believe that if we focus on the positive, we will run out of “areas to improve.”

 

4. We see others doing things we struggle with and buy into the idea that we are somehow “less than” they are because we can’t do everything.

 

5. We grossly undervalue the worth of our own innate abilities, falsely believing that if it is easy for us then it is easy for everyone. (Not true!)

 

6. We have bought into the belief that we must be “well-rounded” rather than specialists, despite all the empirical evidence demonstrating that those who specialize are more successful and happy.

 

7. We are conditioned to focus on “bad news” (newspapers, television and radio news, etc.) rather than “good news.”

 

8. We suffer from “pleasure anxiety” and distrust both positive feedback and feeling good about ourselves.

 

9. We somehow feel “wrong” focusing on our own positive qualities. As my mother used to say derisively, “Boy, you sure are tooting your own horn!”

 

Do you see yourself in any of these statements? (I know I do.) If so, it’s time to break out of the pack and do something extraordinary: discover the depth, unique qualities, and nuanced expression of skills and talents you are naturally gifted with.  

 

Gary Jordan, Ph.D., has over 27 years of experience in clinical psychology, behavioral assessment, individual development, and coaching. He earned his doctorate in Clinical Psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology – Berkeley.  He is co-creator of Perceptual Style Theory, a revolutionary psychological assessment system that teaches people how to unleash their deepest potentials for success. He’s a partner at Vega Behavioral Consulting, Ltd., a consulting firm that specializes in helping people discover their true skills and talents.  For free information on how to succeed as an entrepreneur or coach, create a thriving business and build your bottom line doing more of what you love, visit www.YourTalentAdvantage.com

I receive a lot of interesting and entertaining emails from friends of mine. Some I delete, and others I pass along. Every now and then, I get one that contains important public service information that should be passed along to everyone.

One such email I received contained the following video of the latest on CPR from the American Heart Association. It seems that people were reluctant to perform the “mouth-to-mouth resuscitation” of classic CPR, and someone discovered that the chest compressions alone—if performed vigorously—were enough to engage the lungs and the heart. How fast is vigorously? Watch the corny video for yourself on YouTube and find out! (Just search for “Ken Jeong – American Heart Association – “Staying Alive” – Hands-Only CPR video)..

(I forwarded the email and video to my broadcast list, and I hope that you will watch it and do the same!)

The day after I sent it out, I received a response from a friend of mine, a physician who has spent many years in a hospital Emergency Room:

“A funny story about this: two years ago at one of my son’s baseball tournaments, a coach collapsed, and they called me over to the field. Now, I haven’t had any updated CPR training in about five years. I go over there and the guy has no pulse and no respiration, and some lady is doing CPR chest compressions really fast. I opened the guy’s airway etc., and the whole time the lady doing the compressions is singing ‘staying alive, staying alive, aah, aah, aah, aah, staying alive’, and I am thinking, ‘What a sick woman. This guy is dead and she’s singing Bee Gees’ songs.’ The guy made it to the hospital, got a pacemaker, and is fine. When I started telling other medical people about the sicko singing “Staying Alive” during CPR, they told me that it’s the tempo for the compressions. Thank God I didn’t open my big mouth during the CPR.”

How powerfully perception changes our view of a situation! With a little information, a shift of perception occurred that completely altered how my friend viewed the efforts of the woman involved. One piece of knowledge moved her from ‘sicko’ to courageous, well-informed helper.

In every context—whether we realize it or not—our view of an event is limited by what we perceive, and what we perceive is never the full story. Our perception is limited not only by our personal Perceptual Style, but also by the context of a situation, the history leading up to it, and the length and closeness of our involvement with it.

Too often, like my friend, we react with knowledge of only a small slice of the whole and end up drawing conclusions that are inaccurate at best and detrimental at worst. It is true that we cannot know everything about a situation before we must act, but we can give others the benefit of the doubt when their actions seem out of line. Because, as the old saying goes, “Things are not always what they seem.”

Understanding the role of perception in our lives takes conscious awareness and effort, but that effort offers rewards in the form of strong relationships, trust, and clear communication. Without it, we risk charging into a situation uninformed and ill-prepared. So much in our lives, loves, and businesses rests on accurate perception of a situation and our ability to communicate with others—being too quick to judge the actions of others can very quickly backfire.

Of course, understanding the role that perceptual differences play won’t always make our interactions with others “smooth sailing.” Some differences are simply too large to overcome. But in the vast majority of cases, a simple twist in perception—often due to more complete information—will allow you to see the world from another person’s point of view, and change the way you view their actions.

About the Author:

Gary Jordan, Ph.D., has over 27 years of experience in clinical psychology, behavioral assessment, individual development, and coaching. He earned his doctorate in Clinical Psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology – Berkeley.  He is co-creator of Perceptual Style Theory, a revolutionary psychological assessment system that teaches people how to unleash their deepest potentials for success. He’s a partner at Vega Behavioral Consulting, Ltd., a consulting firm that specializes in helping people discover their true skills and talents.  For free information on how to succeed as an entrepreneur or coach, create a thriving business and build your bottom line doing more of what you love, visit http://www.YourTalentAdvantage.com .

 

 

“Adjust your approach.” As a coach, you’re probably familiar with this concept, as different clients need different tools – and different types of communication – to achieve the results they’re looking for. But most often, these adjustments are based purely on intuition; sometimes they make a difference in the client relationship, and sometimes they don’t.

Just as problematic is the fact that coaches often don’t adjust their approach until the first approach has clearly failed to produce results, eroding client confidence and straining the coach/client relationship, sometimes to the breaking point. In this case, such adjustments are a classic case of “too little, too late.”

The Perceptual Style Theory offers a reliable means of avoiding this by giving you, the coach, a clear picture of who the client is before you begin working together. By making use of an assessment that reveals the client’s psychological type at the outset of the coaching relationship, it’s possible to make those important adjustments right away.

The power of this is hard to overstate, as it gives the client an immediate sense of being deeply understood. As the coaching relationship progresses, it also gives the coach a clear picture of what kind of language will speak to the client, and what kind of language won’t.

When you honor and connect with a client’s Perceptual Style (PS), you interact with them in a way that reflects their actual experience of the world. Based on your knowledge of your client’s PS and your understanding of your own PS, you can adjust your approach to ensure that your client gets the most out of the coaching experience.

To clarify, when we talk about adjusting your approach, we’re talking about fine tuning the words you use, as well as the manner in which you interact with them, including intensity, speed, emotional variability, and energy level. Each PS has its own comfort zone, sources of motivation and inspiration, and immediate turn-offs. Knowledge of all of these things can be crucial in catalyzing the kind of results the client is looking for.

Knowledge of the client’s PS can help you to interact in ways that will promote clear communication and avoid stylistic conflict. It is, in effect, meeting your client halfway –

so that even though you do not see the world the way they do, you have the tools to acknowledge and respect their worldview as valid.

By learning to adjust your approach to accommodate each of the six innate Perceptual Styles, you’ll see your effectiveness as a coach grow exponentially. It is, after all, simply human nature to respond to those who speak our language, and interact in the ways we’re most comfortable, even when we’re seeking significant change in our lives, be it professionally or personally.

About the Author: 

Lynda-Ross Vega: A partner at Vega Behavioral Consulting, Ltd., Lynda-Ross specializes in helping entrepreneurs and coaches build dynamite teams and systems that WORK. She is co-creator of Perceptual Style Theory, a revolutionary psychological assessment system that teaches people how to unleash their deepest potentials for success. For free information on how to succeed as an entrepreneur or coach, create a thriving business and build your bottom line doing more of what you love, visit www.YourTalentAdvantage.com

 

Why did you get into coaching? One of the most likely reasons is that you wanted to have a real, positive and lasting impact on the lives of your clients.

Unfortunately, many of the approaches that coaches currently use in their work don’t have this kind of lasting effect, for the simple reason that they focus on what clients currently don’t do well, as opposed to what they do.

It sounds counterintuitive, doesn’t it? After all, the client has come to you, the coach, because they have an issue in their life (or a host of issues) they want to change. Change, by definition, calls for something new. Surely there can’t be any harm in helping clients figure out new skills that can help them change their circumstances.

Well, yes and no.

A coaching approach based on the usual method of trying to strengthen these acquired skills – i.e., things that don’t come naturally to them – may have an impact on a client’s life, but it is likely to be short lived and superficial. (It’s also, quite honestly, the kind of stuff you find in self-help books and magazines that want to help you, essentially “become someone else.”)

Clients come to us as coaches most often because they don’t know what to do to change and often cannot articulate why what they are trying to do isn’t working. Over the past 30 years of coaching, my business partner and I have found that real results come when we help our clients discover what it is they already do well, and put it to greater use in their lives. We call this strengths-based coaching.

Using their natural gifts consciously in their lives not only tends to help a client blow through whatever blocks they might be facing, it’s more fun for the client. After all, who doesn’t enjoy doing what they do well? It’s a winning combination that inevitably leads to a real, lasting impact.

Of course, a total focus on a client’s strengths isn’t always an option – sometimes, in order to overcome a block, a client really does need to acquire new skills. But even so, we do our best to focus on those new skills in a way that honors who the client is by taking advantage of their natural capacities. When letting go of roles that require acquired capacities is not an option – such as job, for example, that doesn’t really satisfy the client, but which they can’t quit for the time being – then coaching should explore how the client can keep the end objectives (to keep the job) but modify the means used to achieve it so that they use their natural skills and abilities as much as possible.

In the end, it’s all about making room for your client’s brilliance, and how that person can put it to work in overcoming their challenges. Ultimately, the client needs to accomplish his or her personal objectives and goals by using their own natural strengths.

About the Author: 

Gary Jordan, Ph.D., has over 27 years of experience in clinical psychology, behavioral assessment, individual development, and coaching. He earned his doctorate in Clinical Psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology – Berkeley.  He is co-creator of Perceptual Style Theory, a revolutionary psychological assessment system that teaches people how to unleash their deepest potentials for success. He’s a partner at Vega Behavioral Consulting, Ltd., a consulting firm that specializes in helping people discover their true skills and talents.  For free information on how to succeed as an entrepreneur or coach, create a thriving business and build your bottom line doing more of what you love, visit http://www.YourTalentAdvantage.com

 

Article Contributed by Gary Jordan

What does it take for 800 people to work together on a project with minimum friction? Back in 1983, that’s exactly what my partner Lynda-Ross and I aimed to figure out.

When I fist met Lynda-Ross, she was managing a very large multi-year systems development project for a major corporation, and she was searching for tools to help the people working on the project stay motivated, reduce conflict, and perform to the best of their capabilities.

Through my years of college and graduate school, I had been fascinated by theories about psychological styles—such as those posited by Carl Jung—but none of the theories I studied fit my personal experience. Beginning with my doctoral dissertation and continuing through 18 years in private practice, I had worked to create a practical, useable psychological styles theory that integrated internal experience with observable behavior.

Lynda-Ross brought me in as a consultant to the project to help the management staff learn tools and techniques to improve teamwork and optimize the talents of the existing staff.  The more we observed and worked with people, the more we discovered.

One of the things we learned was that, not only do people who perceive the world similarly get along better, but they also had many of the same skills and abilities. As we thought about it, it made sense to us that people who perceived things similarly would possess similar skills. It was the next logical step to realize that the skill and ability similarities we observed were based on a similar style of perception, and that each of the six Perceptual Styles had an innate set of natural capacities.

Together we developed processes and training that used the Perceptual Styles Theory to help build teams, diffuse unnecessary conflict, and help people to understand that seeing things differently is not wrong, just different.

More than thirty years later, the same things we observed on that first project have held true, and they remain the basis of our work as coaches. Why? Because what it took for that huge team to succeed is what it takes for any team to succeed. Here are the four main components:

1. It takes people with different Perceptual Styles filling different positions on the team. After all, skills and abilities are directly tied to the ways that we perceive the world as individuals. The person who excels at accounting is generally not the same type of person who thrives in customer service.

2. It takes all of those people learning how to communicate effectively with one another, despite the differences in their Perceptual Styles. Simple adjustments in language and message delivery can eliminate 90 percent of all communication conflicts.

3. It takes all of those people feeling motivated, even though the differences in their Perceptual Styles means that they will be motivated in different ways. A range of incentives are required for optimum momentum on a project.

4. It takes leadership based on the team leader’s actual skills and abilities. There are many different ways to lead, but the only right way for any given person is the one that fits their innate Perceptual Style.

At every level of development, psychological styles are a huge factor in the success or failure of a business—because no matter what it is or what it does, people are what make your business tick.

About the Author: 

Gary Jordan, Ph.D., has over 27 years of experience in clinical psychology, behavioral assessment, individual development, and coaching. He earned his doctorate in Clinical Psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology – Berkeley.  He is co-creator of Perceptual Style Theory, a revolutionary psychological assessment system that teaches people how to unleash their deepest potentials for success. He’s a partner at Vega Behavioral Consulting, Ltd., a consulting firm that specializes in helping people discover their true skills and talents.  For free information on how to succeed as an entrepreneur or coach, create a thriving business and build your bottom line doing more of what you love, visit www.YourTalentAdvantage.com