In Crisis? 
In the interest of ongoing development and making more connections in our community, I applied to participate in the Leadership Winnipeg program this year (For more information http://www.winnipeg-chamber.com/Membership/Leadership_Winnipeg.aspx ), and with the support of the good people of Volunteer Manitoba and the Winnipeg Chamber I was pleased to receive a bursary as a non-profit leader to participate.
Last Friday I participated in our first full day session- based on the Insights Discovery Personal Profile (more information https://www.insights.com/), which I had completed the week before. Full disclosure I have done this tool once before- my results were remarkably similar. Though I will not go into explaining the full tool, it is based on the work of Carl Jung and identifies 4 general personality energies that with other factors make up to 8 types. I am generally cautious with these types of activities, tending to believe the full complexity of human behaviour is a personal and deeply complex thing. However, I acknowledge that it does appear that we have some overarching traits and that when we understand our own and others better it may assist us in communicating and working together. And so…. Drumroll…. I am sunshine yellow energy…not surprisingly this puts me into a sociable and communicative category. Which is probably good news for the blog….
My lead energy is followed by fiery red and not too far behind earth green, with just a little bit of cool blue. Apparently the whole combination makes me somewhat orange and a category called motivating inspirer… which I am not sure is grammatically correct but certainty does sound inspiring.
What did I learn from this? While I probably had some of this knowledge already I think that the take away for me was- how do I do a better job communicating about how I like to communicate- and how do I encourage others to do the same? And how do we balance communication between very different styles? For example, if I have a preference for fast, friendly and frequent communication (A new idea I am going to call my 3 F’s) how can I make sure that my cool blue colleagues who prefer to warm up a bit feel engaged and heard? Time to talk to some folks with that awesome cool blue energy and find out!
Stay tuned…