Welcome to PeopleSmart Academy and your “Journey of DISCovery”, that’s all about yourself for who you are – and the others you interact who are different than you!

Now that you are on your Journey, you have the gift of being guided and taught by two of the most well trained, DISC “Masters” – Carol and Sandra – who will take you by the hand and lead you through every step you need to take. They will teach you everything you need to know to be able to read a DISC report by yourself and get EVERYTHING you would want or need to know about yourself, what your strengths and weaknesses are and how to adapt your style to bring out your strengths. Others will feel confident that you know how to “read people like a book.” 

Carol’s Journey in Pursuit of Answers to Universal Human Questions 

As an inquisitive, intelligent young Junior High School and High School female I wanted to be as popular as some of my other girl friends at school were. I thought maybe it was because I didn’t wear the right clothing labels. Even after two University Degrees and 15 years of teaching, while I loved people and had a lot of friends, I also had a lot of questions which often kept me up at night wondering:

  • “Why doesn’t (name) like me?” 
  •  “How can I be as popular as (name)?”
  • “Why do I feel so dumb when I am around (name)?”
  • “Why don’t people see things the way I do? Is it me or are they just stupid?”
  •  “Am I invisible? Why don’t both my own parents understand me? Dad does, sometimes – but Mother… almost never!”
  • “Is there anything wrong with me if I don’t enjoy being around (name)?”  “Why people act and do things the way they do? Why don’t they see that how I do things gets the job done better and faster?” 

When the student is ready, the teacher can appear, and in 1979, without really expecting anything special, I went to a ½ day seminar on the Universal Language of DISC!  “WHAT? WAS THIS A NEW SCIENCE?  To my total amazement that answer was YES… and NO…  but more YES than NO because people did not know how to find out first about themselves! Since then, now that I know the questions, my life and career, and that of all our PeopleSmart websites and programs, has been continuous and enthusiastic research and testing, trial and error explorations. 

Sandra and I both hope that by allowing us to guide you in through your own “Self-DISCovery”, you will also find enough insights to fill your own life with answers and want to help others find theirs too!

So, all aboard! This adventure is sure to increase the quality of your relationships and life in so many ways! 

You will:

  • Have a much higher level of self-confidence and ability to recognize and relate to the gifts that the other people around you bring. 
  • Be able to understand yourself, family members, co-workers and friends and become a better communicator with each of them.
  • Realize you suddenly have skills needed to minimize and even prevent conflicts from starting when you understand the behavioral needs, emotions and fears that lie at the epicenter of every individual. 
  • Be able to identify each person’s differences and be able to express your appreciation!
  • Have new awareness of what those emotions, needs and concerns are, that run rampant in all of us until we can see them, name them, and put them to rest.
  • Become fluent in a new language – related to people – that you will suddenly see everywhere! 
  • Become People-smart, our favorite word – and know how to create a “PeopleSmart Culture” of your own, taking these tools and learnings with you everywhere you go! 

All people really want is to be SEEN, HEARD, VALUED, and UNDERSTOOD. This is what Oprah said at the end of her 25 years of hosting thousands of interviews on her TV show. There are many ways we can all show up with more LOVE in our hearts. Steve Farber, another DISC client, documented this in summarizing the case studies he collected after keynoting at business conferences for over 30 years. He named his system “LEAP” and says that when you can “Cultivate LOVE, Generate ENERGY, Inspire AUDACITY, and Provide PROOF, you understand what his other clients proved, featured in his best-selling business book, “Love is Just Damn Good Business.” 

It is so easy to offer the LOVE people want when we show them that we understand and appreciate their special behavioral styles – even when theirs differs from our own. Love is really involved in every personal or business relationship if we are living from our Passion and Purpose. With successful completion of this course, you can look forward to all these benefits… and more!

What Assumptions and Values does a PeopleSmart Culture Include?

  • Each one of us is a unique individual, born with capacities to be, do, have, and enjoy much more than we ever thought possible. 
  • With the time, training resources, and help from your PeopleSmart instructor you will gain a new perspective on your previous perceptions and stories about yourself and the others that you identify as your friend, family member, or other relationships. 
  • You will start understanding yourself and the values that define your behavioral preferences.
  • You will and gain a new sense of self-appreciation through an awareness of what is important to you… something you may or may not have totally understood before. 
  • You will feel safer around other people, have compassion and be able to express yourself fully because you know who you are. 
  • Each relationship you have will become even stronger and potentially more successful. 
  • Parents will gain a new perspective on their children because they suddenly recognize how each child is unique in their own special ways. 
  • Once recognized, it becomes easier to honor each other’s differences.
  • Your whole family can celebrate your ability to develop emotionally, intellectually, and socially together, thus a tight group of happy, self-confident human beings. 
  • Positive givers and receivers will find that conflict magically disappears. 
  • The greatest possibility for all our futures is a world that works for everyone – every adult who impacts a child’s life speaks a common people-smart language like DISC. 
  • Younger family members who are introduced to the Kids DISC Bird styles by the second or third grade will grow up, confident of who they are, knowing instinctively how to recognize and acknowledge the special style of other children. Bullying behavior will, therefore, disappear because they cannot be fooled into thinking they should be different than who they already know they are! 

If this is the culture and type of environment you want for your life, you are in the right place and as one of our “Family” you will have a wonderful opportunity to continue to learn, use, and even teach, if you want to, this system for self-education to others – either in ours or your own live trainings or webinars and on-line programs because you have included it in your own special interest curriculums. (See the final module of this course for specific opportunities to Partner with PeopleSmart). 

If you found this course because you heard Founding Partner, Sandra Davis on a Podcast explaining personality by using scenarios and examples of the four styles of behavior using four popular dog breeds, welcome! We know how precious these fur babies are and you already know they each have distinct personalities – so use this course to get clear on why you love yours the way you do! You can read about the DISCeez Pack in Module 2.5.

For you who are parents or grandparents or loving aunts and uncles, we invite you to include all your children of reading age into family discussions about the behavior of each child you have, having been introduced to the four DISC styles. We are so happy to finally have a validated KIDS DISC PROFILE based on recognizable birds – the Eagle, Parrot, Dove and Owl – and see how much easier it makes learning the DISC differences once you can relate it to a bird name – even more than just the Letters of DISC. 

What is DISC? 

DISC is a model used world-wide – a shorthand identifier of the four possible Primary style preferences we each choose to invest life energy into. This is our favorite way of being when we feel most comfortable doing what we do, and which other people notice is our preferred “style” – the behavioral style lovingly referred to as our four DISC Styles. 

It’s recognized globally as a “Language” we can use to describe people, their style, attitude, their speed, and focus. It’s a short-hand for the words describing our favorite way of acting and the one we invest more of our energy into doing – words which the report fully translates into the one or two styles which, combined in us summaries our answers, shown in our assessment that takes 10-15 minutes to take. The software for this on-line assessment, calculates the occurrences of behaviors we identify with most and are observable to others. It helps us focus on understanding our own communication style, and how to enhance communications with others. 

What DISC is NOT. DISC does not stand for or measure your intelligence, values, or performance. In learning everything we can about what our answers showed, we can become increasingly “people-smart.”

DISC refers to the first letters of the four scientific words used to describe patterns of observable behaviors and the four DISC Personality Styles others can see by our patterns of observable behavioral – Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientious/Compliance. Throughout this course you will learn more about each one from taking your own assessment. 

Using Four Birds to Describe Behavior 

One of our reports using the same assessment questions, the DISCovering Me Birds Report comes from our relationship, with Merrick Rosenberg. An experienced 20-year DISC consultant, Merrick had always been successful teaching Team Building using DISC. However, upon returning to former clients, he found that people had forgotten their own style and what each DISC letter referred to! 

It suddenly came to Merrick that he could apply the science of mnemonics – “any memory technique that aids information retention and retrieval in human memory for better understanding” and BINGO! Merrick saw that if he used the analogy of the observable behavior by relating it to four quite different but easily recognized BIRDS – Eagles, Parrots, Doves and Owls – this made it easier, and more fun, to remember! A breakthrough occurred and this new version of a DISC report was launched. 

When another version for KIDS came out called the KIDS DISC Report – a collaboration between a team of experts in Child Development, Parent Education and Social/Emotional Learning, Carol and Sandra celebrated. They finally could use this revolutionary way for teaching something so basic that could shift people’s awareness and acceptance of their differences that not only kids, but adults found helpful and appealing.

The Language of DISC – Carol and Sandra’s Journey 

Here’s why this breakthrough was so important to Carol and Sandra. For over 40 years of their working with the DISC model, they have provided DISC assessments to seminar companies all over the world. In doing so, they had taught, debriefed, and consulted to literally thousands of people, ranging from individuals, couples, families, classes, and Executive Leadership teams. All became People-literate and were able to “read” and recognize how the characteristics from this four-quadrant model so accurately represented them just from 30 “Most” and “Least-often” behaviors they could see that they used daily. 

People were amazed at the difference it made in their relationships and their own self-confidence.  They finally knew WHY they did what they did and what the EMOTIONAL SOURCE was that created their unique behavioral patterns, and now knew how to adapt to other styles. 

Once they understood which needs, emotions, and fears were typical for each style, they no longer felt they were “alone” in doing and thinking the way they did. They stopped comparing themselves to other people and judging themselves – and others! DISC-literacy simply provided them with the key to interpersonal communication and compassionate relationships.

Once people realized that just because they were PeopleSmart or DISC-literate, it did not mean they went about “analyzing” everyone or even trying to predict what the “story” behind why a person did what they did was! 

Other Points to Acknowledge 

DISC is a simple system to use for loving and understanding yourself and others. We all have within us access to all four styles of behavior – and we use each of them daily investing differing levels of energy in each activity we take on. It will soon become clear that DISC gives you a social advantage the better you understand yourself and the others you relate to. When people-reading and relating, a bond grows from how authentic you can be with others. 

Each letter of this abbreviation, DISC, stands for the words which immediately indicates vastly different instinctive style preferences and tendencies which are based upon:

  • Priorities – what a person likes to focus on first – Tasks or People.
  • How a person communicates with others.
  • The Styles of other people they are with. 
  • Mindset – in how safe a person feels in approaching Life – either optimistic/open or guarded/skeptical. 
  • The specific focus which generates a person’s personal energy and motivation.
  • A person’s observable behaviors and Behavioral Style Priorities:
    • Dominance – Problem Solving and prefers making quick decisions. 
    • Influence – People Involvement and prefers to actively engage with others.
    • Steadiness – Environment and Planning and prefers slower, steady, systematic approaches.
    • Conscientious and Compliant to procedures and prefers Rules to Follow and making sure they have all the details.

DISC additionally, provides insightful instructions on treating and communicating with others the way they want to be treated. You’ll learn more about this later. Dr. Tony Alessandra calls it wise counsel – The Platinum Rule® – very different from the Rule we were all taught as children about behavior – the Golden Rule.

Assessment Standards

In your Journey of Self-DISCovery, Level 1, our goal is to prepare you to be comfortable working with any of the DISC reports found on all our PeopleSmart Enterprises.com websites, because there are many different personal behavioral style assessments claiming to be “the best”.

In 2020, we were excited to learn that the ASI Assessment Standards Institute had done extensive investigation and testing of the programming involved in Assessments24x7, the assessment platform and provider of all our assessments. We are also one of Assessments24x7’s Master Licensees. 

Out of 90 different DISC publishers they evaluated, they put the ones we use in the top 5 with validation in “Construct Validity, Reliability, and Disparate Impact!” So, we are proud to know that any assessments you purchase through us has this qualified scientific authority behind it ensuring the trust and confidence for all our users world-wide, knowing we are using only the industry’s most accurate, and class protected assessments! 

We’re very excited about that and the fact that as of summer 2021, we can now provide access to three different options for your DISC assessments which you can also see samples of at PeopleSmartWorld.com/sample-reports.html: 

  1. The Standard DISC report –for ages 13 and up – and all its translations as well.
  2. DISCovering Me Adult BIRDS version of DISC. 
  3. And most exciting to us is our new KIDS-DISC Assessment which uses descriptive phrases that children 8 years or 2nd grade reading vocabulary can recognize and relate to: 
    1. The report is given in Birds style-types – beautifully illustrated with a report for the KIDS themselves.
    2. This report also has 10 pages for the Parents filled with tips like “This is how your (bird-style) child can be expected to naturally behave because they have similar strengths and superpowers as their bird style(s) are known for.
    3. 10 “how to” pages for Teachers and 5 pages for after school activity leaders or “Coaches” with suggestions teaching any adult who works with the child, in school or after school.

This report is also colorfully illustrated with pages and uses BABY BIRD examples of the four styles of BIRDS – Eagles, Parrots, Doves and Owls. Because, like humans, they are different from each other it makes it easy to suddenly see and relate to the ways in which human beings behave!

NOW, children can grow up knowing WHO they are, WHAT their inherent strengths are, and HOW they can best collaborate and share their own gifts with others who bring different strengths from theirs – making collaboration and cooperation and self-and-other-understanding a REAL POSSIBILITY! 

So, we have covered a lot already! Now it’s time to take a deeper dive into the Advantages of DISC and how to create a DISC-literate culture at home and at work.