Amusing (but Informative) Day at Uni

We had a three hour workshop entitled “Knowing Yourself & Others”. It was comprised of working with the DISC model. Everyone in the class got to choose which dimension they felt best represented their qualities and behaviours.

Red (Dominance); Decisive, independent, results driven, goal orientated, competitive, high self esteem. Authoritative, narrow minded, easily frustrated, lacks diplomacy.

Yellow (Influence); Optimistic, energetic, outgoing, encouraging, motivated, persuasive. Impulsive, disorganised, unrealistic goals, inattentive.

Green (Steadiness); Empathetic, cooporative, team player, good listener, patient. Dislikes change, lacks urgency, quiet.

Blue (Conscientiousness); Critical thinking, well disciplined, thorough, precise, organised, focused, logical, systematic. Perfectionist, tunnel vision, methodical, doesn’t delegate work, yields position to avoid controversy.

I chose Blue because everyone knows that I’m ridiculously organised and structured. Listen, I’m a guy whose wardrobe has to be structured not only into articles of clothing, but sub-sections, and then organised in order of how often I wear each piece of clothing. I categorize my underwear drawer based on what type of trousers (jeans, chinos, smart trousers, etc.) I tend to wear them with. Hell, even on Tumblr I always have a queue that posts something twice a day, and I make sure that certain days have certain types of posts (John Frusciante on Friday, politics at the weekend, etc.). So clearly that was an easy choice.

The amusing part was my (and my groups) behaviour during the workshop when we were doing several exercises. The first was us writing three things that irritate us when working in groups. Despite the woman explaining it and it being written on the board, my group still had to call her over just to clarify exactly what we had to do in case we were to do it incorrectly, which is typical blue behaviour! Then we got given a bag full of descriptions on paper like “I naturally take charge” and we had to choose the four that best described us. We had 4 minutes to do so. Obviously my group over-analysed the entire thing and we ended up with a pile of like 9 pieces of paper because we just took too long trying to be as accurate as possible (“Well this one is sliiiightly more accurate, like 5% more I think”). Then we had to write on a big A2 piece of paper the general strengths and weaknesses of our groups traits. As Blue’s, naturally we divided the paper into sections and made structured lists, whereas other groups tended to make their paper pretty with things like spidergrams and drawings  and different coloured writing for the different sections. Then we were having a class discussion and we were thinking of examples of our behaviour that we can now recall, and I had the perfect one this morning! I got an email about a flat inspection with an attachment that listed the possible fines and how much each was. So I just had to open it and methodically go through it and analyse which one’s we might, ever so slightly, be liable for if we didn’t do a sufficient cleaning job, and total up the cost, and freak myself out, and cry a little.

So the entire workshop was simply an illustration of my character traits, haha. Really made me aware of how INSANE I can be. It was also supposed to highlight to you how others may perceive you based on their own dimension, as they might pick up stronger on your negative aspects or interpret what you consider to be a positive as a negative, and how to best work together.

It’s meant to relate back to our group work in class for this module where we have to create a business plan for a theatre company putting on a three week production at the Edinburgh Fringe. My group has 2 Blue’s, 2 Red’s, and a Green. My group is awesome; we have meet-ups where one of us will cook a big dinner, another will cook dessert, and we will periodically do some work. We had one last night and it was a jolly good laugh. The final amusing anecdote is that I immediately wanted to be in charge of finance and accounting for my group. Typical Blue strikes again. I just like mathematics and numbers, okay!