communicate

I’m in a class called Selling and Sales Management. The teacher is fabulous, and I basically love everything about it. Recently we had to fill out this 72 question survey where it’s all “choose A or B”. Whichever one we agreed with more. And then of course we take those answers and put them in a grid and add up the As and the Bs, etc etc and it all means something. It was developed by Redken as part of their interview process, they’d just give you all these pieces of paper and see if you can figure it out.

The questions start all normal and then all of the sudden,
A) I express what I feel.
B) If married, my erotic needs will be satisfied.

…umm, say what? And then,
A) Most people can’t be trusted.
B) Being erotic is as natural as being hungry.

A) I’m a physical-sensual person.
B) The wild sex life of the old Romans was tame compared to goings on now.

This all seriously interested and totally confused me.

Then, two days later, our answers got put in a grid and measured, giving us scores in nine different segments. Esteem, Assertion, Self Reliance, People Orientation, Conventionality, Romance, Tension, Hedonism, Authoritarian. From those nine segments, we add up different numbers and get three more scores. Parent, Adult and Child. How we communicate.

Within the Parent category, there’s Nurturing – caring, comforting, reassuring, protecting, and Critical – judgmental, criticizing, disapproving, disciplining. And with the Child category there’s Natural – fun-filled, joyful, impulsive, curious, and Adapted – rebellious, anxious, inadequate, pouting. With Adult there’s just one…and it’s basically emotionless. It’s rational thinking, it’s Dr. Brennan from Bones, it’s reasonable. I came out with 24% parent, 50% adult, and 26% child. Which is so dead on.

But. The cool part is understanding how to use all the information. Understanding how you’re communicating, how the person you’re speaking to is communicating, and if they match. Not that they’re necessarily the same, but they add up right.

For instance, if you come to someone with a natural child statement, all excited about something, curious to learn more, happy, and you get a critical parent response, you’re not going to be thrilled. But you could be responded to as a kid, with excitement and joy, or as a nurturing parent, supportive and reassuring, and like either of those responses.

My teacher pointed at the diagram and said, “If you understand this it means marital bliss. If you don’t, it means divorce.” Which is so true. Communication is ridiculously important.

Another reason this fascinates me is that there’s no wrong way. Rational thinking and communicating is good. Rational has a place. And comforting, caring, nurturing – they have their place. And joy, enthusiasm, being childlike is important. Expressing excitement is necessary. Can you imagine what our lives would be like if we didn’t express enthusiasm, if we didn’t share in our joy, but instead bottled it and kept it to ourselves? That would suck. We feed off of each other’s energy. We build each other up through the excitement we feel about things. The number one reason someone is hired over someone else is their enthusiasm. How does that not speak volumes of its importance?!

What I’ve learned in the first few class periods gets me all that much more interested for what we’re going to learn in the rest of the class.