by You’ve set a goal and you’re working on achieving it. Your Knower/Judger is making rules that will help you achieve that goal, like I won’t eat any sugar or I will make 10 outbound calls a day. But it’s not working. If the K/J is so strong, why can’t you stop breaking your own rules?
The K/J is not inherently a bad or even a nonproductive persona. Many of the rules of life that we carry around in our K/J serve us very well. Many do not.
The challenge is to recognize the ones that don’t. I sometimes see clients who aren’t doing this with their DISC profiles. “I’m a high D. Dominant. That’s just who I am.”
Unless they are in the Learner/Researcher enough to see that their direct reports are frequently un-collaborative or rebellious, they may not see that a majority of the world doesn’t respond well to people who order them around. At some point, if they’re in their L/Rs observing and analyzing the data, they see that adjusting how dominant they are can improve their connections with the people around them.
I have a K/J rule about awesome egg custards from St. Louis. My rule is that I only have one a year. I don’t stick to it. My actual rule is that it’s OK to have more than one, or I’d be working on the year 2086! My health, weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol would be far better served by the original rule if my L/R could just convince me I want to weigh 175 pounds more than I want the temporary emotional satisfaction of slurping down a large chocolate-chocolate-chip concrete.
Salespeople I work with have a rule of making 10 outbound prospecting calls a day. But they have another rule that says that almost everything’s more important than the 10-calls-a-day rule. So their pipelines are shallow.
Executives report that that they have a management style they learned from years at the school of hard knocks. But they are blind to the evidence that employees aren’t doing what’s necessary for the company to grow.
Golfers I know have a rule about “manning up” and clobbering their drives farther than any of the rest of their foursome. A muttered string of profanity usually follows while they march off to find their ball in the poison ivy.
The neat part about this is that we almost always recognize that the results are unsatisfactory. Weight gain, low sales numbers, unacceptable levels of cooperation, and ridiculous slices aren’t what we’re after. Then we put blinders on and blame luck or the stars or the other guy. I can’t say it enough. Pogo was right: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
This is where the K/J really is the bad guy. It just knows it’s nothing we did wrong. It’s all those external things conspiring against us.
So what’s not working? I urge you to look at your rules of life and connect some of them up with the unsatisfactory results you’re getting. Decide from your L/R, with good, accurate data, to change your rule.
I’ve seen this change lives overnight. It is all about the balance between keeping the rules that work for you and jettisoning those that don’t. Seeing the connection from the L/R is the primary. Giving the K/J the most productive marching orders makes it work.
