Case Study: Adam's Story
Adam is 14 and lives on a council estate in Oxfordshire. His mother is a drug addict and he has four siblings, all with different fathers. When I first met him, just a few months ago, his life had little structure, he missed great chunks of school and he had no expectations that his life would ever be any better. He had no aspirations or goals.
Adam’s mentor had suggested he might be willing help pilot a new programme I was taking into UK schools and give his honest feedback as to its likely success in classrooms around the country, as a last ditch attempt to get him interested in something. Basically, the thinking was, if it could work with Adam it could work with anyone.
Path4U is being used with great success in the US – by the LA police department, in schools, by judges who are recommending that young offenders take the programme as part of their rehabilitation and in church youth groups. I’m rolling it out in the UK and wanted some honest feedback from the age group it’s intended for.
It looks at three questions – Who am I? Where am I going? and How will I get there?. Adam answered these questions simply, with a ‘no-one’, ‘ nowhere’ and ‘won’t’ and I wondered why I’d thought speaking to someone who spend most of his time in an inclusion unit would be a good idea!
I have a secret: I’m a compulsive people watcher. Whether in the supermarket or Starbucks I’ll spot an individual and imagine a life and personality for them in five seconds flat. Any amateur people watcher is aware of how varied we all are as human beings and it’s often these differences that cause the difficulties in our personal and work relationships.
Diversity, after all is one of our society’s current obsessions. Millions of pounds are poured into training professionals in issues of age, gender, race and religion in an attempt to make us all more tolerant and less judgemental of each other. We’re all very conscious of the need to use the correct language when talking about different people groups and the press often runs stories about those who have not been careful enough, which has resulted in diversity retraining at best or even court cases and prison sentences in the most extreme situations. Yet it seems that with all the talk of diversity, one of the most important areas is overlooked -differences in personality.
Way back as far as 460 BC, ‘personality’ was big business. Hippocrates realised that people could be identified into four specific groups by their behaviours and he used words which sound more like medieval diseases than a description of human characteristics – phlegmatic, sanguine, choleric and melancholic to describe these. Throughout history philosophers and psychologists have agreed that people can be divided into four basic personality types and Carl Jung’s work in the 1920’s is the basis of much of what is used today in the many different personality profiling tools available.
I’ve done most of them as part of a quest to understand myself and others better - I’ve been on courses, gone on line and paid considerable amounts of money to understand what makes us tick and how we can all understand each other better.
The building blocks of the universe are contained in the elements- earth, water, wind and fire so what better words to help us understand the elemental make up of our own personalities and those of our teams, whether in the workplace or the family.
So, it was this simple and visual profile I used with Adam to help him begin to understand what type of personality he was. He was fascinated. As I brought up a variety of descriptions of the different elements, Adam began to show an interest and after a bit of humorous interaction he decided he was a ‘water’ type personality – a great team player, loyal, likes stability (although he actually got precious little of this) patient and sensitive (characteristics that weren’t immediately obvious to the average passer by).
Next, in the ‘Where am I going section’, I started by taking about the mission statements of Adam’s favourite football team, Mc Donald’s, Asda and others and he certainly knew his stuff as he matched the mission statements to every one of the organisations, correctly. We then chatted about what it might be like if he had his own personal mission statement for his life – giving him something concrete to measure his decisions and his life choices against. He looked a bit bemused but agreed to give the process a try. This begins with choosing a core value and Adam found it surprisingly easy to find his top core value – it was ‘healing’. There wasn’t time to unpack why this was as we went on to talk about what he’d like to do if there were no barriers to his future career and he said he’d like to be a sports physiotherapist.
When I showed him how well this fitted with his personality type and his mission statement, he was amazed. I had his full attention by now and he wanted to be reminded what the third question was. ‘How am I going to get there?’, I said and I told him that having an idea of his personality type and with a new personal mission statement , by looking at ‘How will I get there’ we were going to work out how to make his mission a reality – basically, to work out a vision for his future.
For Adam, his vision had to begin with returning to school regularly! We’d looked at the exam results he’d need if he wanted to train as a sports physiotherapist and what colleges he could apply to. Adam was ....excited! In a two hour slot, he’d got a real idea of who he was, where he was going and how he could get there. And returning to school on a regular basis came out of Adam’s own desire to achieve what he wanted, not because someone was hassling him.
Adam’s story is being repeated in many different venues around the country, from NEET’s to sixth formers and teachers to business men. It's something which gives each of them, no matter what their situation, a focus as they look to the future and it helps enormously with decisions about course choices, employment possibilities and even career changes.
One of the helpful aspects of this unique profile is the ability to provide a matrix between any two people who’ve taken their PEP profile. As a ‘Fire/Wind’ personality (both fast paced elements), I’ve been married for 36 years to a Double Earth (precise, detailed, cautious, factual) – a totally opposite personality type to my own. It would have been so helpful if years ago we had understood that our perceived ‘challenges’ in each other were in fact opposing strengths which, when realised and understood this, made us a great team – something that was often lost on us, in our very different ways of processing pace and the way we approached change.
If you want to know more about Path4U – or maybe you’d like to take the profile yourself (£30 online), or with your team to improve the working relationship between you all and look at some team training then contact Ruth Adams at ruth@in-your-element.co.uk or take a look at www.in-your-element.co.uk