Interpreting the Effectiveness Profile
Interpreting the Effectiveness Profile is a matter of understanding intensities and extrapolating reactionary behaviors from them.
To the degree (intensity) one is inhibited, one has difficulty performing. To the degree one is impelled, one has difficulty restraining oneself. In fact, as the intensities enforcing one's inhibitions and impulsions increase through Strong and into Extreme, one acts or fails to act without thinking and cannot find "the reason" through casual conscious thought.
Note that simply doing the Effectiveness Profile without in-depth analysis and a follow-up program will not give one the reasons either: it will only provide insight into the patterns of one's counter-productive and destructive behaviors. That may be quite sufficient for mild and even Moderate intensity problems, which can often be overcome by force of will, if one is willing to work that hard and pay that much attention, a very real distraction from one's focus on one's objectives in any case.
The good news is that through the acute insight gained in a proper interpretation of the profile and subsequent development of a corrective program many so-called psychologically-based barriers may be set up for quick removal, depending on the corrective technology that is applied. (See below, How to get an In-Depth Analysis, for more on this.)
The most intense impulsion plays against the most intense inhibition to give rise to automatic solutions which then bind one into certain roles and away from others.
For obvious example, Inhibited Listening - Impelled Speaking; this combination results in one thinking one already knows what others are saying, and talking prematurely or even out of turn. Here one can be expected to be thinking ahead and not really hearing what others are saying, interrupting, or just lecturing. In business, two of the common symptoms of this combination are reverse delegation by management who do the work themselves instead of build their people into competence, and lost sales by salespeople who are not attuned to their prospects and customers. In parenting it's being overbearing, in friendships pushy, and in politics, meddlesome.
A slightly less obvious but equally common example is Inhibited Integrity - Impelled Assertiveness. Here, one is impelled to act but restrained from considering the moral and/or legal implications. This is where the slogan, "Whatever it takes," puts the lie to cultivating or hiring for assertiveness as a primary value.
An even less-obvious example is the reverse: Inhibited Assertiveness - Impelled Integrity. This is a person who does not act out of an apparent excessive concern, but who is actually unconsciously relying on his high sense of ethics to justify his inhibition.
This last example leads to a very important point, both in interpreting the Effectiveness Profile and in understanding the biggest mistake in our post-secondary educational system.
People tend to find refuge in their "strengths" and use them as compensators in avoiding their "weaknesses". Great careers may be built on the power of an intense impulsion, as with Speaking leading to success in politics. However, those careers are never as fulfilling as they would be if the individuals pursuing them were not also haunted by secret "failings". Or not-so-secret, depending on circumstances. Thus the plague of management and politics world-wide: we tend to reward smooth talkers with promotions and elections, and too often fail to attend to the counter-balancing inhibitions that undermine their potential benevolent success. Worse, our educational system is designed to maximize one's so-called strengths at the expense of neglecting the correction or at least the stabilization of so-called weaknesses. The result of this is that one becomes "trained into" an operating basis which, however powerful the position it leads to may be, does not include the resources to break out, but retains all one's inhibitions and magnifies one's impulsions.
The Effectiveness Profile is successfully interpreted by applying two factors. First, an accurate comprehension of what each attribute means and how it manifests as inhibited or impulsive. Second, experience built on the feedback of people who have done the Profile and gone through in-depth discussion of how the various scores and combinations manifest in moment-to-moment and ongoing situations.
This is as far as this website alone can take you at this point in time and the development of the PHP version of the Effectiveness Profile. The Visual-Basic version used by our consultants goes one step further, to provide an expert-system analysis of the most intensely opposed pair of attributes. We hope to bring this PHP version up to that point soon.
Beyond all this, there are the Written Synopsis and the Analysis & Strategy Consultation. Follow the "getting an in-depth analysis" link on our home page.
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