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Use Personality Types to Establish Great Communication with Your Clients

Understanding personality types is an invaluable skill and asset for doing business. And this is true whether it is the business of making money or the business of living life.

Once you truly get a grasp of this system, it becomes easier to communicate with others and avoid potential misunderstanding and conflicts.

Hippocrates, the Greek physician and philosopher was the first person to document and name the four basic traits. He called them:

Phlegmatic	Sanguine
Melancholy	Choleric

Since those words are a bit more than a mouthful, alternative ways to describe these traits has arisen. For example, the Keirsey Temperament’s scale classifies them as:

Idealist	Artisans
Guardian	Rational

But the identification process that I like best are the Colors. Why?

For one thing it’s an easy way to remember the different types. Secondly, the terminology is simple enough for even children remember and use.

(My older children are pretty fluent and generally accurate in identifying people’s personality types and they’re only nine and six years old!)

Here’s how they break down under The Colors system:

Yellow	Blue
Green	Red

The top of this chart is the “Open” section. The bottom part of chart is the “Self-Contained” section. The left side of the chart is “Indirect” while the right side is “Direct”.

So, the upper left hand section would identify the the personality type as “Open and Indirect” and corresponds to the color Yellow. The designation for the upper right hand section would be “Open and Direct” and corresponds with the color Blue.

Likewise, the bottom left hand section would identify the person as “Self-Contained and Indirect” and corresponds to the color Green. The bottom right-hand section identifies the person as “Self-Contained and Direct”, or the color Red. So, what do the terms Open, Indirect, Self-Contained and Direct mean? Indirect and Direct refer to the way people answer questions or share information. Whereas Open and Self-Contained refer to the methods that people use to discuss and deal with feelings.

Now let’s see an example of each type:

Open	An open person is not afraid to give spontaneous hugs or tell you how they feel about you (good or bad).
Indirect	If you ask an Indirect person how many children they have they’ll give you the number, but nothing else without additional questions.
Self-Contained	In the self-contained person’s case they are very private with their feelings. Although they feel things deeply, they won’t volunteer this information freely.
Direct	You ask these guys a question, they don’t quit answering. They just keep going and going and going until you have to interrupt them to ask the next question.

Now that you know the basics, why not click here to take the quiz and see which color best describes you.