Have you ever left an encounter with a customer (or coworker, or family member) really different from you and felt completely drained?
Perhaps they seemed really boring. Or too animated.
You might have found their amount of details exhausting. Or their lack of them annoying.
Maybe it felt like there was a wall between the two of you.
Or that you felt like you had to be “on” all the time around them.
Whatever it was, those differences left you physically tired.
Uncomfortable.
Frustrated.
And think about the impacts those differences have on business.
It costs a lot of time when there is unresolved conflict or unclear expectations. A boss has to re-explain himself or re-do work to employees who don’t “get” him. He becomes a fire fighter, solving the same problem over and over again, instead of working on strategy or leadership.
It also costs a lot of money. Companies lose hires who have the skills but don’t fit the job, or they lose those hires when they onboard and develop as if all hires were same type of person.
And think of the customers and sales we lose when we just don’t “click” with the customers different from us and can’t see how to adapt to their styles.
All of these problems have a solution: two simple questions.
To learn them, you’ll want to know why doctors used to use leeches.
It’s in your blood
In the first part of our series on DISC, I shared that we all have natural preferences for how we evaluate and interact with the world. When we are forced by a person–or even a situation–to change that “style,” it can “overclock our computers.”
Our brains are computers running on electrical impulses. When the front of our brain has to do “extra translating” to a style it’s not used to, it literally saps our energy.
In other words, you really are tired at the end of the encounters described above.
This phenomenon causes all sorts of problems for humans: Customers with different styles can get cranky. Team members with different styles can wear us out.
At a basic level, we struggle to connect with styles different from ours–which makes it hard to give good customer service or work as a team!
There is a lot of research behind that reality, from psychological surveys to measurements of brain pulses.
But let’s go back to the beginning. Humans have been noticing differences from day 1. And they started lumping those differences into four basic categories in Ancient Greece.
Hippocrates–yes, the Father of Medicine credited with the Hippocratic Oath–died in 370 B.C. His medical theories were practiced by doctors well into the 1800s.
Doctors believed that our blood contained four fluids, called “humors.”
When the humors were out of balance, it would cause disease. Doctors would order patients to eat certain foods thought to help the body produce a particular humor.
Or they would drain a patient’s blood hoping to lower a particular humor. (That’s where leeches come in to the story.)
This played out in Shakespeare. In “The Taming of the Shrew,” the title character is a woman with too much choler (“yellow bile,” one of the four humors, produced by the gall bladder). It is a comedy because the characters interact with this difficult woman who is so different from them.
We still describe such comedy as “humorous.”
And while our understanding of medicine has changed, we still might call a difficult person someone “with a lot of gall.”
The humor concept plays out in his tragedies, too. In “Julius Caesar,” Marc Antony eulogizes Brutus by saying
His life was gentle; and the elements
So mixed in him that nature might stand up
And say to all the world, “This was a man.”
Four poles
Why does Antony call them elements instead of humors? That’s the final piece of the puzzle.
The ancients saw natural divisions to the world in fours.
There were four seasons.
Four stages of development (infancy, youth, adulthood, old age).
Four elements, too (earth, wind, fire, water).
You may notice that much of this has been scientifically disproven. But at the time, they all matched up with a set of poles. This was physical and metaphorical at the same time.
Don’t overthink it. Just consider the analogy:
Some people are “wet,” like buttermilk. You put it in a bowl with flour, and it clumps the flour to it. “Wet” people naturally affiliate.
We describe others as “dry.” Literally: We still say people have a dry personality or dry wit. And what does dry flour do? It separates from other bits of flour. “Dry” people naturally detach and observe the world more objectively than those “wet” folks who are perhaps more relational.
Now for the other pole: We still describe folks as “hot” and “cold,” too.
And it’s apt. “Hot” people want action, just like heat can turn water into steam, making a heavy locomotive move.
Ice is the opposite of steam. It has structure, stability. Likewise, “cold” people value structure and stability.
So as you anxiously await next week’s unveiling of the entire DISC model, consider that you can nail down someone’s style with two simple questions.
Are they dry or wet?
Are they hot or cold?
Those answers translate to the DISC model. But using the metaphor of temperature and moisture, you probably have a decent idea of someone’s behaviors already.