Blog - People for Success

Extroverted? Learn how you can be quieter and more reflective

4 November, 2021 por P4S

You’ve probably seen articles like: “Introvert? See how to be more social”. They are quite common, but what is not common are the articles that go in the opposite direction.

It is important to note that, even if you have a preference for extroversion (also known as your personality type according to the MBTI – Myers-Briggs Indicator: ENFJ, ENFP, ENTJ, ENTP, ESFJ, ESFP, ESTJ, ESTP), you may also have an introverted part of your personality.

Visible and invisible parts of your personality and type dynamics

The MBTI personality type goes much deeper than just describing four preferences about your personality type. And the way these preferences interact is called type dynamics.

Let’s use the ENFJ personality type as an example: The letters ENFJ stand for Extroversion, Intuition, Feeling and Judgment. Those with ENFJ preferences represent about 2.2% of the world’s population, and are known to be highly aware of others, find happiness in being part of a group, and are generally friendly. And yes, they prefer extraversion.
Extroversion and introversion are not just how you gain energy, but also how some parts of your personality are expressed.

All MBTI personality types have parts of their personality that prefer introversion and other parts that prefer extroversion. Carl Jung said that: “there is no way for a man to be 100% extrovert or 100% introvert.” Basically, there is a part of his personality that he shows externally to others and another part that is internal.

ENFJ types are typically seen by others as warm, enthusiastic, energetic, and very attentive to others. One of the reasons ENFJ types are seen in this way is because the behavior they express externally to others (also known as extraverted) is a preference for feeling, showing concern for decisions and things that affect other people. It is the strongest part of your personality and the most developed part compared to the rest.

The strongest part of ENFJ’s personality is the outgoing feeling. The second strongest and most developed part of your personality is introverted intuition.

Yes – ENFJ’s (and all “E” types) have an introverted side to their personality. So why don’t we see this side? Why aren’t these behaviors more obvious?

Introverted functions mainly take place within the person’s mind. They are a pattern or way of thinking (according to the Myers-Briggs theory, they are a way of receiving information or making decisions). In addition to this, less developed functions will not stand out when interacting with others.

Extroverted? How to practice your introverted side

Most of us have two ears and one mouth. In your next interaction with another person, try to focus your behavior to match that ratio. Listen to others twice as often as you are used to.

This works on both a group and individual level. Be aware if you are talking too loudly and try to reduce the volume so that you speak only half (or less) of the other person. And don’t worry if there are long breaks or periods of silence. Many of us find silence uncomfortable, and largely culturally influenced.

According to MBTI experts, in a group context, most people with introversion preferences think first before expressing themselves aloud.

Explore your second favorite function (also known as introverted function)

All those with extraversion preferences have a part of their personality that is introverted. If you know your MBTI personality type, check the list below and try to focus on that part of your personality over the next few days. Try to use this inner part of your personality in your daily interactions.

ESTP

His second favorite function is introverted thinking. You usually use this part of your personality when you think quickly and logically to solve a practical problem.

The next time you need to solve a problem, try to solve it internally first, from start to finish, before expressing it verbally. But after solving it, don’t forget to let others know the answer.

ESTJ

Her second favorite feature is introverted sensing. Typically, you use this part of your personality by storing specific, realistic data about the real world to refer to when you need it.
The next time you’re doing something that has a sensory component (exercise, cooking, crafts, etc.), pay special attention to details and try not to think about details.

ESFJ

Her second favorite feature is introverted sensing. You tend to use this part of your personality when storing detailed and specific information about people.

The next time you meet someone in person, take a moment to think about what you did the last time you met them, or the last time you were in a similar situation.

ESFP

His second favorite feature is the introverted feeling. You usually use this part of your personality to set priorities that relate to people and their needs.

The next time you are working with someone else, think about what they might need or what would help them the most. Take a moment to reflect on what might be important to her and to you. However, don’t express it verbally, but make a mental note so you can recall it later.

ENFP

His second favorite feature is the introverted feeling. You use this part of your personality when organizing information and perceptions about other people in order to help them and build a better version of them.

The next time you are in a group context, choose some of the people closest to you and think about what you concretely know about them and how you could help them reach their potential. What can you know about these people that maybe they don’t know themselves?

ENTP

His second favorite function is introverted thinking. Typically, you use this part of your personality to find errors or problems logically.

The next time you’re working on a project, notice when you’re mentally critiquing it. Don’t voice these criticisms at first, but when the time comes, let others point out what problems they see, comparing them to what you thought about.

ENFJ

His second favorite feature is introverted intuition. Use this part of your personality to think about possible ways for people to reach their potential.

The next time you meet someone in person, think about what that person’s ideal future might look like. And what kinds of things do you know about her that can help her get where she wants to go.

ENTJ

His second favorite feature is introverted intuition. You use this part of your personality when seeing patterns and potentials in the present moment and in the future.

The next time you’re working on a project, try to map out the project’s possibilities in your mind. What is the best scenario for success on this project? What’s the point?

Original article: Extraverted? Here’s how (and why) to be more quiet and reflective… | by Myers-Briggs Editor | Myers-Briggs Magazine |

Build your resilience

22 October, 2021 por P4S

Imagine going on a raft trip on a river. The map on which you are guided shows that you will find more curved and unavoidable places. How would you make sure you can safely cross the turbulent waters and deal with any unexpected problems?

What is resilience?

Life may not come with a map, but everyone will experience twists and turns, from everyday challenges to traumatic events with more lasting impact, such as the death of a loved one, a life-altering accident or a serious illness.

Each change affects people differently, giving rise to different thoughts, strong emotions and uncertainties. Still, people tend to adapt well in time to life changes and more stressful situations – thanks in part to resilience.

Several psychologists define resilience as the process of adapting to adversity, trauma, tragedies, threats or significant sources of stress – such as family problems, relationships, health problems or financial or workplace stressors. As much as resilience involves being able to “recover” from these difficult experiences, it can also involve deep personal growth.

While these adverse events, like the turbulent river waters, are certainly painful and difficult, they need not determine your life outcome. There are many aspects of it that you can control and modify, while it can grow. That’s the role of resilience. Becoming resilient helps you to overcome difficult circumstances, as well as empowering you to grow and even improve your life in the long run.

What is resilience not?

Being resilient does not mean that a person will not have difficulties. People who have suffered great adversity or trauma experience emotional pain and stress. In fact, the path to becoming resilient is likely to involve emotional pain.

While certain factors can make some individuals more resilient than others, resilience is not necessarily a personality trait that only a few people possess. Rather, resilience involves behaviors, thoughts and actions that anyone can learn and develop.

The ability to be resilient is one of the reasons research shows that resilience is common, not extraordinary. One example of this is the response of many Americans to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and their efforts to rebuild their lives after the tragedy.

Like building a muscle, increasing your resilience takes time and intention. It is important to focus on four main components – (1) connection, (2) well-being, (3) optimistic thinking, and (3) giving meaning to circumstances.

Build your links

Prioritize relationships:

Connecting with empathetic and understanding people can remind you that you are not alone in your struggles. Focus on finding trustworthy and compassionate people who validate your feelings.

The suffering that arises in the face of traumatic events can lead some people to become isolated, but it is important to accept help and support from those who care about you.

Join a group:

In conjunction with personal relationships, some people find that being active in civic groups, faith communities, or other local organizations provides social support and can help them regain hope.

Promote well-being

Take care of your body:

Self-care is a legitimate practice for mental health and for building resilience. This is because stress is both physical and emotional.

Promoting positive lifestyle factors such as a balanced diet, sleeping well, hydration and regular exercise can strengthen your body to adapt to stress and reduce the impact of emotions such as anxiety or depression.

Practice mindfulness:

A mindful journal, yoga, and other spiritual practices such as prayer or meditation can also help people build connections and restore hope, which can prepare them to deal with situations that require resilience. When recording, meditating or praying, mulling over the positive aspects of your life and remembering the things you are grateful for are key techniques for developing your resilience.

Avoid negative outputs:

It may be tempting to mask your pain with alcohol, drugs, or other substances, but it’s like putting a bandage on a deep wound. Instead, focus on giving your body resources to manage stress.

Find a purpose

Help others:

Whether you volunteer or simply support a friend in a time of difficulty, you can muster a sense of purpose, promote self-esteem, connect with others and help others in a tangible way, all of which can empower you to develop resilience.

Be proactive:

It’s helpful to recognize and accept your emotions during difficult times, but it’s also important to help you promote self-discovery by asking yourself, “What can I do about this problem in my life?” If the problems seem too big to be solved, break them into parts.

Address your goals:

Develop some realistic goals and do something regularly – even if it seems like a small achievement – that will allow you to move toward the things you want to accomplish. Instead of focusing on tasks that seem unattainable, ask yourself, “What is one thing I know I can accomplish today that can help me move in the direction I want to go?”.

Look for opportunities for self-discovery:

People often find that they’ve grown in some aspect as a result of a hardship they’ve gone through. For example, after tragedy or suffering, people reported better relationships and a greater sense of strength, even when they felt vulnerable.

“Embrace” positive thoughts

Keep things in perspective:

How you think can play an important role in how you feel – and how tough you are when faced with obstacles.

Try to identify areas of irrational thinking, such as a tendency to catastrophize difficulties, and adopt a more balanced and realistic thinking pattern. For example, if you feel overwhelmed, remember that what happened to you is not an indicator of what your future will be like. It may not be able to change a highly stressful event, but it can change how you interpret and react to it.

Accept the change:

Accept that change is part of life. Certain goals or ideals may no longer be achievable as a result of adverse situations in your life. Accepting circumstances that cannot be changed can help you focus on circumstances that can actually change.

Keep a hopeful perspective:

It’s hard to be positive when life isn’t at its best. An optimistic perspective allows you to expect good things to happen to you. Try to visualize what you want rather than worrying about what you fear. Along the way, notice how you feel about dealing with difficult situations.

Learn from your past:

By looking back and noticing who or what was helpful in adversity, it can allow you to discover how to respond effectively to new difficult situations. Remember where you found strength and ask yourself what you learned from those experiences.

Seek help

Getting help when you need it is crucial to building your resilience. For many people, using their own resources and the types of strategies listed above can be enough to build their resilience.

A psychologist, for example, can help people develop appropriate strategies for moving forward. Remember that different people tend to be comfortable with different styles of interaction.

The important thing is to remember that you are not alone! While you may not be able to control all your circumstances, you can grow with them, focusing on the most important aspects of building your resilience.

Original article: Building your resilience

Why is knowing your personality type critical to creating a constructive mindset?

6 October, 2021 por P4S

Promoting a “growth mindset” is critical to success for both individuals and organizations.

If you believe that your skills are innate and cannot be developed or improved, your mindset can be described as “fixed”. As a rule, you tend to explain your failure due to your lack of aptitude or consider that a task, for example, is not suitable for you.

While acknowledging the existence of fitness, a healthier perspective involves recognizing that improving a person’s life often requires adapting, learning new skills, and staying flexible.

Carol Dweck, in the book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, addresses the theme of the “constructive mindset”, demonstrating that a constructive mindset arises when you believe you can acquire different skills through continuous work, thus increasing your ability to cope new challenges and several setbacks, with success.

Self-awareness provides a reference for a constructive mindset

Effectively, you cannot develop your mindset without understanding and knowing it. After all, that’s why companies set key performance indicators. At the individual level, it involves self-awareness.

Personality type, explored using the Myers-Briggs Assessment Tool (MBTI), is one of the quickest and most powerful ways to gain self-awareness, helping you gain insight into yourself and your personality preferences. This process is carried out along four dimensions of personality:

Introversion/Extroversion: Do we tend to focus our attention on the external world and activities (extroversion) or on the internal world of our thoughts and feelings (introversion)?
Sensing / Intuition: Is our first instinct to trust the collected information (sensing) or through more abstract information, based on patterns and possibilities (intuition)?
Thinking/Feeling: Does our natural inclination take into account our decisions around an objective logic (thinking) or does it consider our values and priorities (feeling)?
Judging/Perceiving: Do we prefer to have things under control (judging) or do we prefer to keep our options open and remain spontaneous and flexible (perceiving)?

It is important to recognize that the natural preferences identified by personality type influence our behaviors but do not dictate them.

In fact, the more we are aware of what our natural inclinations may be in a given situation, the more we can change our behavior in order to improve and adapt it to the circumstances.

A case of growth: introversion / extroversion and the company brainstorm

Let’s consider an example that most employees in an organization should participate in: the team brainstorm.

How a person participates in a brainstorm is highly influenced by their preference for extroversion or introversion. Likewise, your growth in this area must also take into account your own personality preferences.

Those who prefer introversion like to think about things in order to understand them, keep their thoughts until they are (almost) perfect and, most of the time, like to stay in the background.

On the other hand, those who prefer extroversion tend to like to talk, prefer verbal over written communication, share their thoughts freely and find it easy to put themselves in the foreground.

If you are aware of your preferences, you can change your behavior to grow and develop in different directions.

By having a preference for expressing your feelings, you can train to pause them by verbalizing them, listening to others and asking questions, deepening the insights of other members of your team and building more satisfying relationships.

The type of personality that helps us chart a path to growth

In all cases, self-awareness about personality preferences facilitates a constructive mindset. If we can identify where we need to improve and grow, understanding the extent to which our natural personality preferences can be a drag, we can chart a more effective path to success and get to where we want to be faster.

Build Resilience into your Organizational Culture

20 August, 2021 por P4S

In times where change becomes a process, sometimes unavoidable, it becomes pertinent to strengthen our capacity to adapt. One way to do this is to increase your resilience or improve the way you handle stressful situations.

“Hardy” leaders have a strong sense of commitment to life and work, greater control of situations and are more open to change and challenges. Although they are not “immune” to the harmful effects of stress, as they have greater resilience, they will be strongly resilient, as they tend to interpret stressful and painful experiences as a normal aspect of human existence.

The development of your resilience among leaders and the incentives drawn from a robust work environment, set the necessary stage for success in organizations.

Demonstrate a strong sense of commitment, control and challenge when responding to stressful circumstances:

Stress can be relevant and important in certain situations, at least to promote the opportunity to learn and grow. Employees usually observe their leaders and tend to follow their example. So it’s important that it be visible. Show passion for the work and interest in those who do it. Thus, it shows the importance of who does it and how they know how to do it.

When crisis or challenging situations arise, these can be golden opportunities for leaders to demonstrate resilience when reacting to stress.

It’s important to design a calm approach. Assess the situation, form an action plan, and show interest in learning from the experience.

As a group, discuss mistakes and failures in a positive way:

Do we usually accept responsibility for our mistakes and try to learn from them? Or do we blame others and avoid responsibility (and learning)? Generally, leaders build resilience by setting high standards while treating failures as opportunities to learn and improve.

Make your team succeed by providing them with recognition, awards and opportunities to reflect and amplify positive results (such as photos, company stories, awards for best employees or teams).

Provide opportunities for constructive performance feedback:

It should open the “door” to opportunities for growth and learning as soon as appropriate. Make sure you have the right team members who accept your feedback and are eager to take constructive action when necessary.

Setting reasonable goals and standards of achievement can also help keep employees more interested. Here, it is also important to show that, as a leader, you are open to comment and change. This means you can offer your team meaningful opportunities to express their own opinions.

Offer opportunities for socialization and interaction on and off the job:

In the work context, provide comfortable areas where workers can meet informally, such as cafeterias and break rooms. Sponsor activities with outside teams, such as sports competitions, community and charity projects, or even professional development trips. They also serve to build organizational cohesion and social commitment.

The support of co-workers is also considered an important factor in dealing positively with stress and reinforcing the capacity for resilience.

Use these tips to build a work culture where dealing with stress constructively and resiliently becomes the norm.

Original article: Build “Hardiness” Into Your Organizational Culture

Four Steps to Increase Psychological Safety in Your Workplace

12 August, 2021 por P4S

Psychological safety is, nowadays, essential in any context, such as health, technology, economy, among others. After the existence of the Covid-19 pandemic, psychological safety gained greater relevance in terms of agility, diversity, inclusion and online work. But because of this omnipresence comes misunderstanding. A crucial misconception among business leaders is that psychological safety will be present in any healthy work environment, such as freedom from harassment or a commitment to keeping workers free from accidents. In fact, psychologically safe work environments are rare.

Creating psychological security, that is, the confidence that openness and vulnerability are welcome – in a workplace, it’s really challenging and requires a high degree of commitment and skill. The reason for this is simple: it’s natural for people to hold back ideas, don’t ask questions, and avoid disagreeing with their boss. Given this tendency, the free exchange of ideas, concerns, and questions is hindered—far more often than most bosses realize. To reverse it takes focus and effort. It becomes a process to help people develop new beliefs and behaviors.

But what explains the success in promoting psychological safety? In this article, we identify four essential elements, based on the SEB study, that were put into practice with different techniques that helped management teams to focus on their perspective, while considering the others, their frankness and its vulnerability.

Focus on Performance

First, think about what most executives want, namely, performance. Building a psychologically safe work environment begins with changing the narrative of the cultural change intervention or interpersonal skills, with the goal of demonstrating that the quality and openness of the conversation is important to the results.

In contrast, it’s harder to create change when the goal is stated as “helping people feel safe” or “becoming better listeners.” These things matter, but they are means and not ends. Senior executives believe in the importance of psychological safety when they appreciate its role in solving complex problems.

Still, insight alone does not produce behavior change. First, it is necessary to help a team at an individual level, in order to progress on the most important challenges, practicing new interpersonal skills in safe and regularly scheduled sessions.

Second, it is important to help participants who have experienced progress in difficult situations to spread to other teams, starting with those they lead. Encourage them to share stories that portray how openness, vulnerability and perspective-taking enabled successful outcomes.

Train both individuals and teams

To train individuals and teams, it is necessary to develop individual skills and their perspective, as they facilitate the frank sharing of ideas and concerns.

But these skills gain strength when teams practice them together, that is, participating in dialogues between teams (conversations where multiple perspectives are integrated to generate new solutions) on complex, structured and facilitated topics.

Incorporate visualization

Visualization is used in a variety of contexts, from athletes looking to set a world record to therapists trying to help individuals change problem behaviors.

Visualization techniques emphasize details. The idea is that by imagining and writing specific, tangible situations, people are better able to internalize new skills and put them into practice. While it is difficult at an early stage for executives to present examples, it becomes easier over time as they become better at seeing positive and more deliberate examples.

Normalize vulnerability related to work

It is normal to experience mild anxiety as a result of feeling vulnerable. Several studies on anxiety show that practicing small vulnerability behaviors helps to reduce levels of anxiety.

By focusing on performance, working at the individual and at the same time the group level, using visualization, normalizing vulnerability and (above all) using real problems to develop skills while progressing in more complex situations, constitute a powerful approach to changing the working environment and habilities of any team.

It should be noted that it is hard work, but it becomes a powerful competitive advantage. Building capabilities related to psychological safety and perspective taking cannot be considered “basic”, but it becomes increasingly pertinent to achieving excellence in challenging business contexts.

Original article: 4 Steps to Boost Psychological Safety at Your Workplace