"Those who apply themselves too closely to little things often become incapable of great things." Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Sunday, December 30, 2007

How To Get The Response You Want

How To Get The Response You Want
Category: Goals, Plans, Hopes

Personality assessments are used today in almost all social settings. Whether it be used for employer screening, military recruitment, or any other interpersonal environment, personality assessments attempt to give a behavioral understanding of how we interact. Two popular assessments are DISC, developed in the early 1900's by a Harvard psychologist; and Myers-Briggs, developed by two females two help women during WWII who were entering the industrial workforce.

While these two systems have there uses and critics; there is another model that has been somewhat dusted under the rug. Timothy Leary, a Harvard educated psychologist who become an infamous promoter of psychedelic drugs; notably introduced a personality assessment based on interpersonal behaviors; i.e., how we react to others behaviors, and how they react to us.

According to Leary's work we respond involuntarily in a reflex like fashion to someone else's behavior. This reflex serves to enhance our ego's and to diminish anxiety. So it follows that a persons most favored behavioral pattern is set in accordance to which types of behaviors have produced the least amount of anxiety.

Leary categorizes the major behavioral patterns along sixteen personalities. Each personality provokes a certain response. For example the "docile-dependent" provokes advice/help. Whereas a "managerial-autocratic" type provokes obedience/respect. Further along Leary's grid we find that a confident/independent "narcissist" provokes inferiority; and a "cooperative-over-conventional" type provokes tenderness & love.

The just of the interpersonal matrix is that if you want a certain response, you can provoke it by adjusting your behavioral signals to provoke the appropriate response. This provides a wealth of information to all of us who wish to have a better understanding of our personal, business, and political relationships. Many of the popular assessments tell us "how we are", and where we fit in. The beauty of Leary's model, is that it tells us "how we can be" to create the relationship we seek to build or sabotage. By focusing on how we can behave to change conditions, Leary's Interpersonal model puts the power back in our hands and allows us to develop a more flexible approach to our social behavior. In my next blog I will give a more detailed example of how to use multiple behavioral patterns at certain points along an initial meeting with a person to maximize rapport...

Further reading: "Self-Determinations" by Timothy Leary; "Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality" by Timothy Leary

Angel Armendariz

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Have You Seen The Gorilla?

"In a recent experiment conducted by professors from Harvard and the University of Illinois, people were asked to watch a video-tape of two three-person teams of students passing a basketball back and forth, and count how many times the ball was passed among the members of one team. On that tape, while the students are passing the ball, a person in a gorilla costume walks slowly among them, stops, turns to the camera, thumps his chest, and then walks on.
So busy were the subjects with counting passes that fewer than half of them even noticed the "gorilla" at all. When they were shown the same videotape again but without the instruction to count the passes, they all saw the gorilla-and most of them refused to believe it was the same tape they had just watched. When a professor repeated the same experiment , live, before a group of four hundred people, fewer than 10 percent even noticed a dark shape, let alone the gorilla."
Scientists call this phenomenon "inattentional blindness." You can be paying so much attention to one thing that you're blind to a whole lot of other things. That's one way in which your brain can misdirect you when it thinks it's doing things right."
- Get Out of Your Own Way, by Robert K. Cooper

This "inattentional blindness" is the effect of habituation and limited focus. When we focus on a certain thing or things we selectively choose those "things." This choosing cuts off other things. Choosing what to focus on is a powerful capacity that when left to our old habitual tendencies suffocate our ability to see new opportunities or novel forms.
We are many times self-delusional in a sense when we affirmatively believe that what we perceive is absolutely the only reality. We have to consciously realize that what we consider real is only our selective attention to a group of things. To combat our tendency to this "inattentional blindness" we can use several methods to jolt us into re-evaluating our environment for the best possible opportunities. Three ways to do this are:

* Ask different questions throughout your day; i.e., "How can I do this more
effectively?"
* Take different routes to and from your usual places of commute.
* Seek Novelty - consciously seek a new experience through meeting new people,
or reading/learning something new.

By exercising your perception in different ways you open the doors to becoming aware of new opportunities. It is only by seizing opportunities that we breathe life and excitement into our spirit.

Angel Armendariz
"We are all in Sales. Period." - Tom Peters