Understanding the four personality types is the first step to making your words impactful. The red personality type is dominant and assertive, the yellow is spontaneous and charming, the green is calm and dependable, and the blue is analytical and cautious.
Next, you can pair up reds and blues or greens and yellows because they complement each other. Look for how a personality operates. Both reds and blues are task-oriented people. It’s just the way they get things done is different. Similarly, greens and yellows are people-oriented. Ensure when you team up with someone, their overarching goals align with yours.
Lastly, each personality has something that stresses it out. Be mindful of these stressors. Stressors for reds include taking authority away, lack of challenge, wasting resources, and repetitive tasks. For yellows, feeling invisible, isolation, and public humiliation are stressors. Greens get stressed by uncharted territory, rapid change, lack of privacy. And lastly, blues get stressed by spontaneity, risky decisions, and overly emotional people.
At the end of the day, it’s all about understanding how a person ticks and adapting to their personality so that your words have maximum impact.
About the Author
Thomas Erikson is a pioneer of the DISA system and has worked as a behavioral and communications expert for over two decades. DISA stands for Dominance, Inducement, Submission, and Analytic ability — the four personality types discussed above.
Erikson has trained more than 5,000 executives in his career, focusing his efforts on how leaders can have a greater impact if they master the art of communication. The first step to doing that is understanding the listener.
