Personawork.com™

Managing the Metaphors, Gestures and Symbols of Daily Success

Welcome to the Personawork website!

Here you'll get a bird's-eye view of the three areas in which we offer seminars and, on a limited basis, coaching for individuals:

Body Language and Persona: How nonverbal behavior creates a bridge between inner life and the outer environment.
Psychological Type: How temperament affects individual and team achievement, happiness and interpersonal effectiveness.
OC (Organizational Culture) Toolbox: How to parse and manage organizational culture, then develop skills to translate the organization's vision into practical action.

Okay! You've been welcomed! Now comes the warning.

Shopping for a Consultant

Shopping intelligently for a consultant to help you with your training or coaching needs can be difficult. Arguably, it's more difficult now than it's been anytime in the last fifty years.

Consumers are faced with a troublesome disconnect between modern scientific psychology and most public discourse about psychological matters. This website won't be of much use to you if you don't acknowledge that disconnect right at the start of your visit. It's a disconnect that creates problems for both clients and providers of psychological services.

Throughout most of the twentieth century, the major theories of psychology were expressed in language and metaphors that were only one step removed from everyday discourse. An intelligent consumer with a decent liberal arts education could easily grasp concepts like Id and Ego, reinforcement and reward and punishment, authenticity, self-actualization. Both consumer and consultant had a foundation for evaluating the match between services needed and services offered.
Now psychology's knowledge of the mind is expressed in a discourse that sounds foreign and dense to the consumer's ear. We have to deal with terms like hindsight bias, schema, representativeness heuristic, priming, framing, adaptive unconscious. When an executive searches for a results-oriented training program, terms like these are not likely to be part of his or her working vocabulary.
Thus consumers typically operate with impressions of psychology that are faulty or obsolete. In many cases, they don't even know what kinds of questions to ask in order to determine whether the services provided by a consultant, coach or therapist will be useful for them.
Meanwhile, service providers face greater challenges in their work to develop metaphors and activities that are evidence-based yet reasonably easy to translate into everyday, practical action. Psychology's new knowledge of the mind is is complex and often counterintuitive.

This website is designed to help you become a more informed consumer. It's important for you to see the rationale for our activities as you decide whether or not there's a good match between your needs and the seminars and services we provide. That's why so much of the content of the site is material which conveys the vision which guides what we do rather than the operational details of our services.

The Personawork seminars have reached a mature state of development. They do a good job of translating ideas into practical action. They can be easily customized to suit a wide range of organizations. If you find that our vision of what we do resonates with your vision of what you want to accomplish, operational details congenial to your vision will be easy to work out.

Personawork...

Literally, working on the persona. Developing attitudes, knowledge and skills that enhance the interface between inner and outer worlds.
Uses evidence-based methods to illuminate how signs, symbols, habits, temperament and interpersonal behaviors interact in both personal and business life.
At the individual level: Enlarging the persona to include representational and coping skills that lead to higher levels of happiness and accomplishment.
At the organizational level: Developing representational systems which translate cultural values into practices that stimulate effective teamwork and promote business success.

Personawork.com™...

Need outstanding seminars on using nonverbal behavior to boost interpersonal effectiveness? Find them here.
Looking for tools to help your organization revitalize itself and manage growth wisely? We can help you enrich your culture with targeted training and coaching.
Contact: Get Info From DrJoe.

"There is nothing as practical as a good theory..." Kurt Lewin (1890-1947), Social Psychologist