Welcome to your Discus Personal report

This report will give you some vital pointers to help you understand the way you currently behave, and to help you build an effective strategy to help you reach your goals.

We don't claim that this report can give you all the answers, but based on your responses to the Discus Personal questionnaire, we hope you'll find some important insights and useful life tips in this report.

What's in this report?

We've broken down the information in this report into a series of different sections, with each covering an important element of your personal behaviour.

Important information about this report

Your report has been compiled from your answers by an automatic process based purely on the answers you gave to the questionnaire. That means that it's completely objective, and it's also direct - in assessing your existing strengths, and also in making suggestions that might help you develop towards your goals.

While reading your report, it's important to be aware of a subtle effect that psychologists call confirmation bias. In the context of a report like this, that means that most people will tend to agree with the most positive comments about themselves, and reject less positive remarks. Often, though, it's exactly the suggestions that challenge preconceptions that are the most useful, so try to weigh the contents of the report accordingly.

That doesn't mean that we insist everything in this report must be true! The details given here are based on your answers to the questionnaire, and we hope you'll find them truly useful in helping to understand yourself, or at least give you some important topics to think about. However, the personalities of human beings are immensely variable - probably infinitely so - and a simple test like this can only cover a finite number of possibilities.

With all that in mind, we hope you find much in your report to engage your interest and suggest possibilities for the future.

What are the most basic elements of your personality?

We analyse the answers you gave to the questionnaire to work out the values for four fundamental factors in your personal style. From the combinations of these values, we can tell a great deal about your personality. These four most basic factors are shown in this graph:

So, what does that mean in practice?

You're a spontaneous type of person, and you tend to act on your feelings or ideas without undue contemplation or analysis. Your approach is informal and empathetic, so that others (especially those who share your positive and confident style) will often find you to be pleasant and easy-going company.

What are your most important traits?

Some of the most prominent personality traits in your style are listed here:

• Talkativeness
  Showing an expressive and socially outgoing attitude.
• Cheerfulness
  Maintaining a positive and optimistic attitude to life.
• Informality
  Approaching others with a positive and familiar personal style.
• Charisma
  Possessing a natural sense of self-confidence and an easy communication style.
• Persuasion
  Using effective communication to change another person's mind.

What are your most important values?

Personal responsibility is important to you: you seek it for yourself, and you tend to judge others - at least in part - on the level of self-reliance they show in their own lives. You look for opportunities to express yourself and take control of matters, and you can become frustrated in situations that limit your scope to do this.

Values are an important feature of any personality, and you can find out more about your particular set of values in the 'Core Values' section later in this report.

More about your general approach

Here's a selection of 'Style Keynotes' that highlight various important features of your personal style:

• You're open to feelings, both your own and those of others, and you're ready to make judgements based on those feelings. Your open and informal style means that you often act in a spontaneous way, but you can also be extremely loyal to those around you.
• Openness is the defining feature of your style: you're ready to accept others' thoughts and feelings, and open-minded regarding their viewpoints and ideas. You tend to be socially outgoing and gregarious, but you're also receptive to others, and ready to sympathise with their points of view.
• You tend to take an optimistic view of things, and even in difficult situations you'll look on the positive side. Your pleasant and generally trusting approach means that you're often able to help resolve conflicts between others.

How does your personal style compare with other people?

The chart below divides personalities up into twenty-five blocks, and is set up in such a way that people are divided more-or-less equally across the chart (that is, each block generally contains about 4% of the population as a whole). We've marked the block that contains your style so you can see how it compares with the other possibilities.

Your style is highly Assertive, and quite Open.

What are 'Core Values'?

For most people, the driving forces behind their approach to life can ultimately be summed up in terms of a few brief concepts. These concepts are referred to here as 'Core Values': they're the internal 'signpost' we use to judge situations, and work out how to react to them.

How do Core Values work?

For example, let's say you're a person who values 'Challenge'. If that's the case, you'll actively seek out situations that provide you with the challenging conditions you prefer, and avoid those that don't. You'll also tend to judge events and people depending on the extent to which they fulfil this particular need.

What are your Core Values?

In this section, we've selected a few Core Values that closely match your own personal style. These are the kinds of values that underlie the way you look at life, and the way you form judgements about the events and people in your life.

• Positivity

  As an energetic person who's ready to act directly and dynamically, you value a positive outlook from those around you. You look for this kind of energy in others, and you're attracted to situations that give you scope to express your own independent style.

• Pleasure

  You're a person who believes that life should be enjoyable, both for yourself and for those around you. You're a highly sociable type of person, and you enjoy developing positive relationships with those around you - something at which your outgoing and optimistic style makes you very effective.

• Optimism

  You're a person who likes to see the positive side of things, and you'll wish to use your outgoing and informal style to spread an equally positive attitude to those around you. You tend to take a confident and broad view of events, rather than concerning yourself with questions of detail or technicalities.

What you'll find in this section

Every different type of personality has its own distinctive strengths, and its own distinctive abilities that stem from those strengths. Those same strengths and abilities are always - without exception - balanced by limitations and disadvantages. The key to making the most of your personal style is understanding where your strengths and limitations lie. Armed with that knowledge, you can take maximum advantage of your strengths, while avoiding potential problems arising from your personal limits.

In this section, you'll find a breakdown of your most important areas of strength, each shown with all its related advantages, abilities and limitations.

Confidence

Strengths Communication skills lie at the heart of your personal style: you're open, expressive and socially motivated. You're at ease with others, even in unfamiliar or unusual situations, and you have the confidence to put ideas across and to enthuse others.

Limitations Precisely because of your confident attitude, you don't always take time to plan your actions or comments, and this tendency can occasionally lead you into difficulties.

Openness

Strengths You communicate in a free and confident manner, and you're able to interact positively with others to build strong relationships. You're concerned with others' feelings, and you can be effective in helping to resolve personal difficulties or disagreements.

Limitations While your concern for others often helps you relate in a positive way, you can be reluctant to act in ways that might risk disapproval or confrontation. This can mean that you tend not to deal well with more pressured or stressful situations.

Influencing Others

Strengths In most groups of people, you will be one of those who stands out as an influential character. It's part of your natural style to take centre stage, and bring others on board with your ideas through confidence and force of personality.

Limitations However strongly persuasive your personal style, it's important to be aware that there will always be individuals who fail to find you persuasive. It's important not to take inevitable setbacks like this too seriously.

What is 'personal development'?

As well as building a picture of your personality as it stands at the moment, the Discus Personal questionnaire can also extrapolate from that picture to identify the kinds of changes or adaptations you'd likely want to see in your approach. These adaptations are typically due to your perceptions of how you ideally need to behave to fit into your current life situation.

Personal Development is the process of adapting your personal style to meet these perceived requirements. In this section, we look at the kinds of directions you seem to be wanting to develop your style (based on your answers to the Discus Personal question set, of course). Where possible, we also offer a range of helpful advice to guide you towards those goals.

Changes shown in your results

This chart shows the changes in terms of your four main personality factors: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Compliance. Longer arrows indicate greater potential for change in your approach, for that particular factor. Values increase to the right of the graph, so arrows pointing right indicate that you're seeking to increase the factor in question, while arrows pointing left suggest that you're looking to decrease the factor's importance.

What these changes mean in practice

In terms of personality shifts, the most prominent features of your style seems to revolve around a perceived need to demonstrate a more flexible and responsive approach. You seem to feel that a less persistent and dogged style would suit your current conditions, and you're looking to show a more receptive and open attitude to the people and events around you.

Making a change

A useful way to approach change like this is to break it down into simple steps, and think about applying each of those steps in your work and home life. Based on this assessment of your personal development targets, these are some simple approaches to change that you might find effective:

• For the types of changes suggested in your profile, it's important to be able to assess the reasons behind a conclusion, rather than forming it on instinct or experience. Next time you're faced with a decision like this, try to examine the reasons behind it to find how well founded it is, and be ready to change your position if those reasons don't fit the available facts.
• You'll find a more open-minded and receptive attitude valuable in the kinds of changes you seem to be looking for. Try to consider others' positions from their own point of view, in the best light you can, and be ready to take their opinions and ideas into account.
• The key to developing a more factually-based approach is to learn to recognise and avoid the more personal or emotional elements of your judgements, and attempt instead to concentrate on taking a more objective and informed view of other people or their opinions.

How do we relate to one another?

Relationships with others are probably the key component in any discussion of personality: in fact, how we perceive others, and how others perceive us, lie at the heart of what 'personality' means.

When it comes to relating to others, it's simply not possible to understand their motivations and intentions directly: instead, it's normal to consider others' behaviour through the filter of your own attitudes and presumptions. This 'filtering' effect can have an enormous effect on the way you understand others, and on the way that others see you.

Understanding others

In this section, we look at the most important aspects of your personality when it comes to understanding and judging those around you. These are the most important things you look for when you're interacting with others, and they also help to define the kinds of preconceptions you bring to bear in communication.

• You're a person who approaches others easily, and you're usually capable of interacting on a positive and engaging level. Especially in more familiar circumstances, you have a persuasive and positive style. Your personality also includes a more direct and assertive element, and that elements is more likely to emerge if you find yourself in more difficult or challenging circumstances.
• You are a confident and open individual who enjoys the company of others, and actively seeks out positive and friendly relations with the people around you. You communicate easily, whether the people around you are familiar or not, and you're not afraid to occupy the centre of attention.
• You communicate confidently and directly with others, and you're not often concerned about expressing your ideas or feelings. Because of your independent approach to life, however, you can sometimes fail to take others' reactions into account, or to consider how they might be affected by your actions.

How others relate to you

Your own presumptions will necessarily affect your understanding of others' personal styles, but this is equally true of everyone else. In the same way that you tend to interpret others' attitudes in your own terms, those around you will also be applying their own 'filters' to your behaviour. Those filters can be extremely varied, and there isn't space to go into all the possible combinations here, but it is possible to make a few general comments.

• Because you are both direct and open about your feelings, you'll often tend to assume that others take a similar approach. Many people, though, are often much more reticent about expressing themselves, especially to someone as comparatively assertive as yourself. Take care, then, not to assume that others agree with you about something just because they don't openly question you. You'll gain a more positive response if you take some time to investigate their feelings more closely, and to take their suggestions on board where appropriate.
• Others' perceptions of you will tend to vary according to the situation. In general, you're a confident and informal individual who's open to those around you, but always ready to express your own ideas and opinions. In more demanding situations, though, you can become rather demanding yourself, and in conditions like these, others can find it difficult to adapt to your more assertive and independent approach.
• You're a person who's ready to trust your own instincts, and the fact that you have a dynamic style means that you're confident enough in your own abilities to act on impulse from time to time. To those with a more ordered and cautious approach to life, though, this direct style can seem rather unplanned and disorganised, and you might need to take time to justify your conclusions if you want people like this to accept them.

Learning to communicate more effectively

You're a confident and dynamic communicator, and an original individual who's rarely concerned about following convention. In communication, you'll tend to take a central role or a controlling stance, and you tend to dominate interaction with those around you.

This approach to communication can be useful when a group needs to be organised, but in more informal situations, it can lead to others feeling neglected. A more inclusive attitude, and a readiness to take account of others' needs, will aid effective communication in situations like this.

What is your 'work style'?

Success in the work arena is as dependent on your personal style as any other aspect of life. In this section of your personal report, we look at the ways your particular defining characteristics will tend to affect the way you operate in a working environment. We also look at how you're likely to behave in some common working situations.

Your most important work skills

Every different personality type has its own associated set of work skills, and of course there are very many of these, depending on the detailed circumstances and the requirements of a particular job.

Here, we select some of the most important work skills suggested by your profile style.

• Informality
  You have a relaxed and informal attitude to life in general, and in a work situation this can help you to build effective relationships, and to foster innovative ideas. This kind of positive style can be especially effective in roles that depend on developing strong relations with others.
• Persuasion
  You have a strong set of communication skills, and in combination with your self-assured and dominant approach, these will usually give you the abilities you need to bring others round to your point of view.
• Positivity
  Working in conditions that are open and generally favourable is important to you: you like work to be a positive and enjoyable experience for yourself, and for those around you. Your cheerful and outgoing approach will often help to foster positive working conditions of this kind.

Performance in a leadership role

Your style of leadership will tend to vary according to your general working conditions. Where you feel that your team is operating in a productive and committed way, you can be open to building positive social relationships with those around you. However, you're also a determined and demanding individual, and if you feel others are failing to apply sufficient effort, you can become rather more antagonistic in leadership style.

Performance as part of a team

As a vociferous and independent type of person, who's unafraid to speak your mind, it's likely you'll seek a prominent position of some kind within a team. You have a strong sense of drive and motivation, and this can help to move the team forwards and give it a sense of cohesion. However, you tend to place little emphasis on matters of detail or planning, and in these areas you would be well advised to consider the opinions of more cautious, analytical types.

What types of roles suit you best?

The key to successful career planning is to identify roles that match your natural abilities, so that they can provide a working environment where you not only feel engaged and motivated, but also make the most effective use of your natural talents. In this section, we look at some of the types of roles that will suit your style particularly well.

Remember that this analysis is based specifically on your personality style, and no other factors. Many of the roles or careers that we discuss here will also involve specialist interests, abilities or skills that lie outside the realm of this assessment. Those factors aside, these are the types of roles that match your particular personal approach.

• Broadcaster
  Your extremely confident style may be suited to work in a broadcasting environment (as a radio or television presenter, for example). This kind of work needs a strong sense of commitment and self-belief, as well as a capacity to perform in a polished way without feelings of nervousness or uncertainty.
• Politician
  You have a relatively ambitious style, and an approach to communication that's relatively energetic, though you're also capable of showing self-restraint when needed. This combination of a desire to achieve results with other important capabilities suggests that you might suit the role of a politician, or perhaps some other kind of official representative.
• Sales Representative
  A sales representative's role is based around communication and persuasion, as opposed to the more assertive and self-reliant attitude required by 'direct sales' roles. As a representative, your task would be to reinforce a sales message, and provide a point of contact and support, so helping to build relationships with customers. That combination of factors suggest that the representative's role is one to which your style would be extremely well suited.

Using this report in your CV

When preparing a CV (or résumé) many people include a short summary of their personal style as part of their self-description, and the contents of this report should be helpful in defining the type of information you could include in your own CV. If you want to create a self-summary like this, the following template is tailored to your personality style, and should provide a helpful starting point.

Confirmation bias
A common tendency to focus on comments that reinforce preconceptions, and disregard or reject those that challenge existing ideas.

Core value
One of the most fundamental underlying values of a personality, from which actions and behaviours tend to ultimately originate.

Filter
A series of expectations and presumptions applied by one person to another's behaviour, based on their own personal style.

Role
A set of expected or required behaviours related (for example) to a particular job.

Trait
A general term for any identifiable factor or element of the personality.