Surrounded By Idiots Book Summary

Book Summary

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Brief Summary

Understanding the four personality types is the first step to making your words impactful. The red personality type is dominant and assertive, the yellow is spontaneous and charming, the green is calm and dependable, and the blue is analytical and cautious.

Next, you can pair up reds and blues or greens and yellows because they complement each other. Look for how a personality operates. Both reds and blues are task-oriented people. It’s just the way they get things done is different. Similarly, greens and yellows are people-oriented. Ensure when you team up with someone, their overarching goals align with yours.

Lastly, each personality has something that stresses it out. Be mindful of these stressors. Stressors for reds include taking authority away, lack of challenge, wasting resources, and repetitive tasks. For yellows, feeling invisible, isolation, and public humiliation are stressors. Greens get stressed by uncharted territory, rapid change, lack of privacy. And lastly, blues get stressed by spontaneity, risky decisions, and overly emotional people.

At the end of the day, it’s all about understanding how a person ticks and adapting to their personality so that your words have maximum impact.

About the Author

Thomas Erikson is a pioneer of the DISA system and has worked as a behavioral and communications expert for over two decades. DISA stands for Dominance, Inducement, Submission, and Analytic ability — the four personality types discussed above.

Erikson has trained more than 5,000 executives in his career, focusing his efforts on how leaders can have a greater impact if they master the art of communication. The first step to doing that is understanding the listener.

Topics

Sex & Relationships

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Key Insights

You step into a room and try to talk to people, but no one gets you. It’s normal to think you’re surrounded by idiots. But most of the time, that’s not the case and there’s simply a disconnect between you and the listener because both of you have very different personalities.

To overcome this disconnect, be attentive to the listener’s personality. The more you adapt to them, the more likely they are to listen to you. The DISA model color-codes four basic personality types — red, yellow, green, and blue. Each color is a personality with a unique set of traits.

Communication happens on the listener’s terms

Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. The same is true for communication. The power of your words always depends on the listener’s perception. Try it out — show a half-filled glass of water to two people. There’s no way they’ll perceive it the same way. One might see a half-empty glass while the other sees a glass-half-full.

Now, you can’t really do anything about how people perceive you. They have their own lens of seeing the world, but you can make sure that the listener perceives you the way you want them to. It all comes down to gauging the listener’s personality and framing your words in a way that’ll strike them.

Knowing the four personality types

It can be annoying when people just don’t get you. The key to connecting with others is to understand the red, yellow, green, and blue personality types.

The red personality is ambitious, dominant, competitive, decisive, and temperamental. Reds are rebellious. Their free-spirited nature enables them to freely speak their mind. They are often irritated by conventions and traditions.

On the other hand, yellows are optimistic even when things aren’t looking good. That’s because they see through all the possibilities and find ways to be optimistic about almost any situation. You can spot a yellow from a mile away. They have a knack for giving answers to hard questions on the spot.

Unlike yellows, greens are more listeners than talkers. They have a calm and easygoing demeanor, which makes them great team players. Notably, greens aren’t risk-takers, don’t enjoy being in the spotlight, and like the traditional way of doing things.

Lastly, blues are the melancholic and silent types. They’re pessimists or realists and highly analytical of everything around them. However, they’re silent observers. They don’t speak their mind unless they really have to, which is why they formulate their words very carefully.

While everyone is distinguishably one of the four types, that doesn’t mean if a person is red, they can’t have attributes of other personality types. An overlap is certainly possible.

How you perceive a personality type matters

While you can define each personality’s traits, how they’re perceived is another matter altogether. You can say reds are opinionated, but greens might perceive them as loudmouthed control freaks. That’s because confrontation is refreshing for a red, but a green’s worst nightmare.

Same with yellows. People can think yellows are too talkative and bad listeners. Again, blue personality...