ISSUE 91 ISSN 1712-468

There is only one success—to be able to spend your life in your own way.

Christopher Morley,
Journalist 1890–1957

My Source Experience - Journal

My Source
EXPERIENCE Journal

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Secrets of Sucess Journal
This 40-page PDF outlines and provides a summary of most of our 100+ resources. It also provides valuable articles that you can re-purpose or forward to others.

Online Personal Style Indicator

Online Entrepreneurial Style and Success Indicator

Online Stress Indicator and Health Planner

Online Values
Preference Indicator

Online Self-Worth Inventory

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This Week´s Inspiration

Understanding Personal Style is Critical to Everyone’s Success   

Personal Style: Your natural predisposition to perceive, approach, and interact with your environment, which includes time, people, tasks, and situations.

How can you ever be intentional with your decisions and actions in life, if you are not completely clear about your own personal style and its related strengths, preferences, and challenges?! 

It’s a biological fact that we are born with a natural predisposition to a distinct personal style. It’s not something we can choose to avoid. We take our personal style with us, everywhere we go. 

After conducting over 2000 programs and writing on the subject for more than 16 years, I am absolutely convinced that without a full understanding of your personal style—and the personal style of everyone with whom you interact on a personal or professional level—you are missing critical knowledge that can contribute to fulfillment for all the individuals involved. 

It’s like flying a plane in a dense fogbank. Without training in aircraft instrumentation, you are living by a hope and a prayer that you can make it to a safe landing site. That is the way most people live their lives—but that need not be true for you!

CRG is unique in that we teach a holistic development model wherein your personal style and your personality are two separate concepts.

Your personality—the totality of who you are—is composed primarily of six Personal Development Factors™ that contribute to your personhood. 

  1. Your Personal Style
    You were born with it and it stays consistent throughout your lifetime.

  2. Biophysical Factors
    They include your gender and any illnesses (and wellness levels), addictions, or injuries that affect your engagement of life.

  3. Self-Worth Levels
    They affect how and when you engage your life and the various challenges that life brings to you.

  4. Environmental Systems
    Your country, your local area, geography, and your culture all highly influence your perspective on life.

  5. Social Teachers
    These include people who have shaped your viewpoint during your life— parents, teachers, mentors, friends, family, etc.

  6. Emotional Anchors
    They include events in your life—both positive and negative—that leave an emotional imprint.

The CRG model acknowledges that who we are is based on both nature and nurture.

Research confirms that we each have unique and specific style preferences at birth. From that moment, our personal style starts to play a powerful role in our lives. Here are some of the things that are influenced by personal style.

  • Choosing supportive child-care environments
  • Parenting style
  • Learning and instructional styles that meet your specific needs
  • Selecting the right job and understanding job-style fit
  • Accepting the differences in yourself and others
  • Getting along better with your life partner
  • Coaching others
  • Customer service, sales, and leadership
  • Designing a life that plays to your strengths
  • Having the confidence to reject feelings of guilt and the pressures to change from those who are different than you are. That includes peer pressure, parents, and teachers.
  • Building teams that complement your business needs
  • Starting a business
  • Hiring and promoting
  • Resolving conflict

And much more!

If you really want to succeed in life, knowledge of personal style is non-negotiable. 

Recently, I facilitated a team development process for a billion-dollar organization. Even though some team members had been through our Personal Style Indicator in the past, they identified the PSI as the single-most-important element to take participants to the next level. 

The process was as much about having people understand each other as it was about having them understand themselves. 

There is no replacement for this process. And we are constantly amazed at how powerful the PSI process becomes, in any group, under any circumstances.

I want to strongly caution you that not all personal style assessments are constructed equally. Many are not worth your attention. Saying I’ve done this before with another tool does not mean that tool had merit or that it supports the concepts that CRG teaches. 

In fact, Dr. Terry Anderson founded CRG in 1979 because no style assessments were taking into account the various personal style theories, nor were they honoring the learner as part of the assessment process. That was the genesis of our first assessment, the Personal Style Indicator (PSI)

Last week, in an email to us, a woman made reference to her dislike and frustration with DISC and MBTI tools. Then she said that the PSI overcame her disappointment—the PSI was the first assessment to actually capture the complexity of who she was! 

This response is not new. We hear it every week. 

Because of the outstanding CRG designs, close to 85% of individuals and professionals switch to the CRG style tools from others, once they experience and understand CRG’s powerful differences.

Cautions

Personal style, temperament, and typology have been part of society since Ancient Greek times. Individuals and organizations have created many types of assessments to capture your personal style so they can communicate insights back to you. Many of these assessments, however, are based on incorrect assumptions, claims, and approaches.

Here are a few recommendations.

  • The assessment process should always be professional in its intent and approach. Avoid style assessments based on core values of “cute” or “simple.” Some tools use animals, colors, and nondescript icons to inform you of your style tendencies. How can knowing that you are some kind of dog or shade of red possibly help you put into context the essential concept of your personal style? 

  • Many assessment options use a rank-order or “least-most” scoring methodology. If an assessment uses a 4-quadrant model, make sure you are ranking all 4 dimensions against each other. In other words, if you are required to score only 2 out of 4 choices, that is a flawed design that can lead to inaccurate results.

  • Be very cautious about assessment feedback that suggests you must develop your weaknesses instead of playing to your strengths!

  • Please be careful if an assessment stipulates that only a certified professional can debrief you on your results. In the end, only you can confirm your preferences.

  • If the assessment process is so confusing that you really can’t understand it, that’s a strong indicator that the results will also be hazy. Seek a more down-to-earth, straightforward assessment!

  • Don’t confuse yourself by using several competing style models and assessments that are all trying to measure the same thing. We at CRG are still bewildered when professionals suggest you should take several personality assessments. That results in less clarity and more chaos! Even large organizations with thousands of employees should embrace a single model—or risk greatly reduced effectiveness.

  • Avoid assessments that pigeonhole you and label you with demeaning terms.

Your personal style preferences are a baseline for everything you do or will choose to do. Therefore, everyone should have knowledge and awareness of his or her personal style and its related strengths and challenges.

For younger children, we ask parents to complete the assessment with the youngsters, to provide insightful perspectives.

Everyone will benefit from completing these assessments—to help improve their life and increase their success! 

If you have already completed the PSI and can vouch for how well it works, please make sure you get this information to the people you care about—and to others who want to improve their lives.

This Week´s Action Steps

Understanding Personal Style is Critical to Everyone’s Success

  1. Your Personal Style plays a part in everything that happens in your life.
     
  2. Your Personal Style is only one part of your total personality.
     
  3. CRG embraces a holistic approach to your development, including these six factors: Personal Style, Biophysical Factors, Self-Worth Levels, Environmental Systems, Social Teachers, and Emotional Anchors. The CRG model acknowledges both the nature and nurture parts of your development.
     
  4. Personal Style is your natural predisposition to time, people, tasks, and situations. You are born with predetermined preferences in each of those areas.
     
  5. Although you change in some ways throughout your lifetime, your personal style remains consistent.
     
  6. Every single person can benefit from the power of knowing about his or her personal style, to help make intentional decisions in every part of life.
     
  7. Understanding and accepting the differences in others’ styles becomes a cornerstone to your success in life.
     
  8. Not all personal style assessments are created equal. CRG has serious concerns about assessments that provide “cute” answers or that have serious design flaws.
     
  9. If you have not completed the appropriate CRG style assessments for you, wait no longer! Here are your choices: Personal Style Indicator, Sales Style Indicator, Entrepreneurial Style and Success Indicator, Instructional Style Indicator, Learning Style Indicator, and Job Style Indicator.
     
  10. If you have already completed those assessments, think of the precious people in your life who can immediately benefit from the information. Send them the links so they can complete the assessments online. We also offer many of our assessments in several languages!
     
  11. After 16 years of personally conducting over 2000 programs and writing 1,000,000 + words on the topic of personal and professional development, I cannot think of anything more important for you than understanding and acting on your personal style preferences—while accepting and embracing the differences in others.
     
  12. It’s not an overstatement to claim that the CRG assessment experiences have saved lives, marriages, relationships, and companies.

Until next time, keep Living On Purpose!.

Ken Keis


For information on CRG Resources, please visit http://www.crgleader.com.