Since Mother’s Day has recently passed, we want to talk about parenting for this month’s DISC Insight. Naturally, a parent wants their children to be happy, healthy, and safe, but since parenting comes with no clear set of rules, how do we set about accomplishing this? It has much to do with what we choose to incorporate from our own parents, our values systems, our support systems, and our situations in life. But also, our personality style and natural tendencies in communication. To go one step further, our children are people too, so they also have personality styles, specific needs and fears, and natural tendencies in communication. By understanding our own styles and those of our children, we can increase communication, anticipate insecurities, and avoid some very predictable conflicts. Below is a very brief breakdown based on primary DISC styles.

People often wonder, what exactly is a DISC assessment?  Let’s start off with a little background on DISC and the man who created it, Dr. William Marston(pictured above).  He was a Harvard scholar and published a book in 1928 called Emotions of Normal People which explains his theory of how one’s normal emotions leads to behavioral differences, and that each persons behavior might change over time.  In his work he also came up with four behavioral styles: Drive, Influence, Submission, and Caution. These four styles became the building blocks to the modern day DISC assessment, although we have renamed submission to Steadiness and we now use Compliance instead of caution.  Although Marston built the groundwork for DISC it wasn’t until the 1940′s that an actual personality profile test was created by Walter Clark, an industrial psychologist.