Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 5: Building trust and fostering empathy
216 Plays5 months ago
Listen to how our practitioners are making a difference in the world!
From radio DJ to author and coach, Matthew describes how Insights has been transformative in his work with individuals and teams, particularly in the context of building trust.
Chatting with Marcus Wylie, Head of Culture, Matthew discusses the difference it makes to treat people how they wish to be treated according to their preferences and some of the common mistakes we can make when trying to adapt our behaviours.
Matthew recounts his experiences of learning to adapt his communication style based on others' colour energies, He explains, "I learned with my opposite energy to adapt to connect."
Unwind and tune in…
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Focus
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello to our Insights community who continue to change lives around the world. My name is Marcus Wiley and welcome to the Voices with Insights podcast. I hope you're feeling colorful to your core today as you join us on a ride of discovery. We will chat with practitioners from across the globe to discover their fascinating untold stories.
00:00:21
Speaker
Whatever you are doing listening to our podcast, let's see if we can uncover an idea or two that will help you to create high performing teams through awareness of self and others in a powerful and simple way.
Meet Matt Davies and Color Energies
00:00:35
Speaker
Well, I am joined today by Matt Davies. How are you today, Matt? Well, I am overwhelmed to be in the epicentre, the core of Insights. I feel like Dorothy at the Wizard of Oz, and I've arrived at this this amazing sort of Disney castle. ah So it's amazing to be here um at Insights HQ. Fantastic. It's brilliant to have you here. Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz, that just sounds wicked.
00:01:04
Speaker
and So, before you tell us a bit about yourself, Matt, and your day-to-day role, let's start with something that's familiar to our communities at Insights here, and that's the color energies. But not your view on color energies. what ah What about somebody who knows you best? How would they describe you through the lens of the Insights color energies?
00:01:25
Speaker
Well, when I did in Insights many moons ago, I came out ah with a clear preference towards the sunshine yellow, and that's how everybody would describe me. But the interesting thing is, Marcus, those closest to me would also recognize my earth green.
00:01:45
Speaker
and And that was something that really inspired me to move into insights more, because I always thought there was a dichotomy ah about me, you know, I'm an extrovert, I'm an introvert, well, I can be a bit of both, really. And that always troubled me with with other assessments, but with insights,
00:02:05
Speaker
and my friends would say, oh, he's a laugh, but he can also have a deep conversation and he has some firm values. And so when I did insights, I was like, yes, it actually shows that.
The Trust Triangle and Managing Trust
00:02:16
Speaker
And that was, that was a real Eureka moment for me. I love that. I just love that combination of the introversion and extroversion. So you followed the yellow brick road to the Emerald city of earth green energy a little bit. There we go. Would that be accurate?
00:02:31
Speaker
spot on mr wizard spot on well i don't know about the wizard but there we go and so can you briefly tell us a bit more about yourself who you are and and your company and what it is that you do in the world yeah so i run a company called the trust triangle i wrote a book a couple of years ago called the t trust triangle how to manage humans at work. I was a HR director for a couple of years. And I was trying to find a management program that focused on trust. And I could not really find one. So I started to put together a PowerPoint presentation for an hour. And I got hooked, I started to find research like 70% of professionals don't trust their managers. And I talked to HR directors every day. And theyre yeah they're like, yeah, that's about right. I was like,
00:03:18
Speaker
I'm surprised you're not like blown away by that statistic.
Community and Shared Knowledge at Insights
00:03:22
Speaker
Imagine if only 30% of your laptops worked and the others hadn't had an update for 10 years, the keyboards were stuck and the screens were flickering, they'd be big trouble, wouldn't they? But everybody sees the importance of trust, Marcus, but um very rarely do they actually want to do something about it. Trust is a theory, isn't it? um But it is the foundation of all meaningful relationships.
00:03:46
Speaker
So it was that that made me write the book. and And then the books gone down quite well. And now I spend all my time talking about the importance of trust. Fantastic. That's great. And I guess in our insights community here, you would be tagged as having the role as a partner, so a practitioner of and some of the products, but one of our partners, would that be fair?
00:04:10
Speaker
ah In the sense of, and you'll have to forgive me with some of the language, I've got an association who works for me who um I talk to about getting some tokens and stuff from them, and I work closely with them, and they are absolutely fantastic.
00:04:30
Speaker
Daniela and Audrey from Profitura, they've just been awesome. And if I'm unsure about something, I'll get on the phone to them and and and we'll talk about certain issues. I do some confidence coaching as well. And I've come up against some interesting reflections that I've shared with them. And So I am well up for a community at insights Marcus, because I don't know all the answers. And when I was trained on insights, I was told I don't need to know the answers, we we kind of share ah the results um and ask the client to work out for them, what's important, you know, we show them the framework,
00:05:12
Speaker
but But they live their lives.
From Media to Coaching: Matt's Journey
00:05:14
Speaker
And i've only I only know a grain full of knowledge about their beach of life. And so, you know, getting more community and insights is fascinating. And I use all that information that you have on on your website for the community um to learn more stuff and to understand more about insights.
00:05:35
Speaker
I love that. And I mean, the power of connection within community and bringing what you bring and learning from others. And then also the way that you bring that to to your customers and your clients. That's brilliant. So let's go back a little bit, Matt, if that's okay. And tell me about what you did before you were introduced to insights and the but the part that we play in your life. What what were you getting ah up to then? And then what were some of your early experiences as you came in touch with discovery and insights?
00:06:03
Speaker
So I used to be on the telly in my 20s, I was a kids TV presenter, I've had therapy, I'm all right now. And then I i went on to radio and I enjoyed a career with the BBC. But by about the age of 30, I've done about 3000 radio shows. And I had nothing else to say. and And literally,
Insights vs. MBTI: Emotional Intelligence Benefits
00:06:23
Speaker
an editor at the BBC said, Would you mind teaching some presentation skills to um some newbies?
00:06:30
Speaker
So i did it and i loved it so i retrained as a coach and then and ended up working in learning and development and and then in in hr more widely psychometric assessments had always been part of the conversation and i trained initially in mbt i.
00:06:49
Speaker
But ah although it's a great tool, and I'm not here to to knock it, for example, as I mentioned earlier, the extraversion and introversion dichotomy in MBTI is um it it doesn't offer me that well, I'm a bit of both. And I was looking for something that was easier to understand as well, because people were forgetting their their letters. And I'd heard about insights, of of course, you've got one heck of a reputation.
00:07:19
Speaker
And I was talking to a fellow coach, and she said, Matthew, you know, you've got to try insights, because once you've tried it, that'll be it. So I did a profile with her. And that's when the Eureka moment started. And that's when I was like, I love insights. You know, the language of the heart is is so important. I spent a lot of time with professionals who are working on their IQ. And the issues aren't usually there. i'm I'm not trying to make them a beck at better marketeer or accountant. Where I'm helping them is with their EQ. And it's said that leaders are hired for their IQ and fired for their EQ. But there's, you know, having a language of color around emotional intelligence is super helpful.
Using Color Energies in Coaching
00:08:10
Speaker
And it really fast forwards the coaching conversation.
00:08:14
Speaker
And because it's so separate from the IQ sort of language, they embrace it. And we we start talking in that language about themselves. And also others, they'll be saying, Oh, my boss is very fiery red. And I'll say, No, they're not fiery red. This is my training. They have fiery red energy. Oh, look at you, man. You're showing off now, eh?
00:08:42
Speaker
ah yeah and Yeah, so so I'm just a um' I'm a big fan. I think it's it's great. You know, I don't think any psychometric assessment is exact science. um So I always talk in broad brushstrokes, but it doesn't half fast forward the conversation. And it's absolutely fine for me if somebody says, Oh, well, I'm not jiving with that part of the report. I'm saying, well, it doesn't matter really, because it gives you something to work towards or against and say, well, I'm not that, which means I'm this, which is where we want to get to. So yeah, it's brilliant. Good. And so love, love all of that. And and were there some early stories that you had as you got started that were like real positive experiences for you that you that have stuck with you over the over the while? The biggest one for me, Marcus was
00:09:35
Speaker
So I'm a sunshine yellow. ah Well, sorry. i dog you have and yeah yeah had them Whenever I'd be working with somebody who displayed cool blue energy,
00:09:50
Speaker
What I used to do was I would turn up my sunshine yellow energy and go into performance mode trying to crack the cool blue, right? And I always wondered why that didn't work. And until I was in insights and I had that language, I was like, oh my goodness me, that's why it doesn't work.
00:10:14
Speaker
And I learned to instead of connect to adapt, I learned with my opposite energy to adapt to connect.
Building Trust and Empathy in Organizations
00:10:22
Speaker
And that was a massive Eureka moment for me. ah Because in the past, I didn't know how to say it. I didn't know, you know, I'd meet somebody who was called Blue. And my initial reactions was they don't like me. They're not engaged. They're not contributing. But now I'm i'm totally different. I get it.
00:10:42
Speaker
I love it. It sounds really simple as as you say it but it is a huge learning point isn't it because there is this tendency to double down on what you know is you so you add more of what is perhaps getting in the way but I love the way you described how you had that awareness and just through the framework allowed allowed you to navigate that. so i guess that was I guess that was a hurdle that and you overcame or went around. Were there any other hurdles as you got started working but beyond MBTI and started working with Discovery with some of your clients?
00:11:15
Speaker
yeah i think you know the the four colour energies are so simple but when you go into director and the the rest of those um it it has been tricky for me if i'm being absolutely honest for that to really take hold and and for me to thoroughly understand it however in team workshops it is transformative when you put the big mat down and she was
00:11:47
Speaker
showing a very strong preference towards earth green and everyone else was in the fiery red area. yeah And what we got was they were desperate for her just to be brief, be bright, be gone with her reports. But her presentations were very lengthy, quite detailed. Her second dominant color was is cool blue. And she, she had such a eureka moment from from that to to discover that, actually, what I need to do is change my communication preferences.
00:12:27
Speaker
Listen, when I'm coaching other people, one of the big things that I say to them is that we were all brought up to treat others the way that you want to be treated. Yeah, when I say how many people have have been taught to treat others the way you want to be treated, and everybody puts their hands up and I go, although I love Brindley and Mary, my my parents, they were wrong. It's completely apathic ah to treat others the way that you want to be treated. Why would I want to treat somebody with cool blue energy as somebody with sunshine yellow energy, which i yeah yeah I need to treat others the way they want to be treated. So that's why I love insights as well. It's a shortcut for individuals, teams and organizations start to get to know how others want to be treated. Because once I treat others the way they want to be treated, Marcus, for me, that's true empathy.
Integrating Insights with the Trust Triangle
00:13:21
Speaker
ah that's been able to meet them where they are and have the capacity to dial down that that sunshine yellow and dial up that cool blue, just as an empathic move to say, you know, I see you, I hear you, and I'm going to be with you where you're at. You don't have to come to me, I'll come to you.
00:13:42
Speaker
Yeah, and I guess if your focus is around the foundation of trust and the trust triangle that you mentioned you've written a book about, um how has that framework played out in helping people to establish empathy and trust in the different elements of trust?
00:13:59
Speaker
Well, in when it comes to insights, every single one, there's there's three domains in the trust triangle, what you do, how you do it and who you do it with, right? So there's expertise, there's energy, and then there's empathy. But for example, one of the disciplines is setting clear expectations. George Bernard Shaw said the biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place. So for example,
00:14:26
Speaker
say, a fiery red may just be give two, three bullet points. And that cool blue will be like, no way better off. They they they need more detail, right? So although that fiery red energy thinks that they set clear expectations, that they haven't. So that's a ah great conversation to have building psychological safety.
00:14:53
Speaker
and The ability to have a culture of learning, to be able to say, how can we learn from this? you know Amy Edmondson's brilliant TED Talk, which I'd highly recommend, if you want to know how to to build psychological safety. But each one of those disciplines, you can weave insights into and talk about not only your self-awareness, but the awareness of others. Because leaders who I work with, all of them are self-aware.
00:15:20
Speaker
But as we know, there's four areas to emotional intelligence, not just one. And um in Tasha Urich's book, Insight, she discovered that 95% of people believe that they're self-aware. Now, when you're at at the beautiful age that we're at, you know, when I was 16, I knew everything. Now, at my age, I know nothing. ah That's the green of sand, yeah. Yeah, it's it's it's it's it's fascinating. um as a coach as well, would I say that I'm self aware, I'd say that I'm open to continue to learn to be self aware. And that's what you're dealing with. and and and And insights, once again, opens the window, opens a corridor, you can work with a Johari window with insights. It's beautiful for that, you know, that hidden area,
00:16:10
Speaker
that shame and blame and ah spooky imposter syndromes all there, the blind spot, all that's mentioned in in in the reports, which is just their bang for them so to work with. Whereas if you're trying to do that without insights or without another psychometric test, you're going to be there for months, years. And my clients don't have that. They want solution focused approaches and something like insight, fast forwards that. So yeah, it's intertwined in the trust triangle.
00:16:41
Speaker
Love it. So it it really sounds like you're taking the concept of awareness and discovery and relationship building and really applying it through your own methodology, which is which is just fantastic to hear, Matt. I mean, I guess life is full of surprises and here you are on your journey now, wherever you are. Has being involved with them and learning and development and the trust triangle and your your partnership with Insights, has it led you to some opportunities and environments that perhaps you didn't expect would emerge in your life?
00:17:11
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I think that my love of coaching was reignited when I took insights and took it on and and trained to do it because I'd been an MBTI practitioner for about 10 years.
00:17:28
Speaker
um And I had my coaching practice for a while when I took on insights. So that reignited it for me. And the interesting thing that I've discovered is I'll have a one to one coaching relationship with a CEO. One of the things I do in my coaching packages, they do insights. And then the CEO will be like, Oh my gosh, this is good.
00:17:54
Speaker
And then the I'm finding out that I'm doing an offsite with their leadership team on insights. And then it kind of opens a pathway that I didn't expect it to open. When I do my management course, I expect every manager to do an insights discovery profile. And I also add the management chapter onto that. In fact, I had the management chapter onto everything because I love it. I think it's a great chapter.
00:18:23
Speaker
And, um you know, people will come, will make an inquiry three or four years down the road, five, six years down the road, go, do you still have my insights, bro? I'm going to get my hands on that. I need it now. I didn't quite need it then. It's today. i Yeah. And I store all of them for them. And it we starts a conversation again. you know Fantastic.
00:18:47
Speaker
so So yes, it's a great conversation starter. Yeah, I definitely have my own experience of the of the profile. And I've been hanging around here for a few years was and sometimes I lift up the first profile I ever had, which is way back actually in April 1997. And I read the bits and I think, gosh, I never read that because it wasn't relevant at that point. my But it's true now, you know, sometimes the bits that you thought You know, earlier on you talked about how some of your clients go, this paragraph's not so for me. So you just hop over it for now. Those are the ones six months, 12 months later, you know. So it is a gift to keep together. A really good point. I never thought about that, Marcus. I'll share that with my clients. You know, just hold on to that and see what happens. Read back in a year's time and see whether it's relevant or not. That's a good point. You never quite know. You never quite know. It's always about the moment, isn't it?
00:19:36
Speaker
and Well, you know it's been wonderful to talk with you today, Matt. and I guess one final ask from me. We have ah you know thousands of practitioners and and partners around the world and our employee bases all over the globe. and If you had one wish for this community that you are part of,
00:19:54
Speaker
What would that wish be and why? I think the wish would be to thoroughly embrace insights and all the tools and techniques that you have. you know I go onto your website at least once a week and I'm pulling all sorts of different stuff off.
00:20:14
Speaker
which is great. So I would say embrace it all. My favorite quote at the moment is that the magic that you're looking for is in the work that you're avoiding.
Embracing the Insights Community and Resources
00:20:25
Speaker
And, you know, if if you're using kind of 50% of what's available on insights, that's the results that you're going to get. So, you know, and embrace it all. It's great stuff.
00:20:39
Speaker
and also embrace the community because as you say there's thousands of us around but and i have I haven't met a dodgy one yet if I'm honest. In my training I'm still friends with many of those that I trained with and um when i when I find another practice practitioner or a fan of of insights. It's like meeting a friend that I haven't, a stranger that I haven't become a friend yet with. it's It's fantastic. So yeah, embrace it all. That's what I'd suggest. I love it.
Podcast Wrap-up and Global Impact
00:21:10
Speaker
I mean, my experience of our practitioners is they are passionate.
00:21:14
Speaker
human beings and individuals around the world who are just doing what they want to do in the world, and it just so happens that insights and discovery in particular is something that helps helps us do what it is that we do. Matt Davies, it has been a pleasure to hear from you and and your story about the Trust Triangle and how you are part of this community. and Any final comments? No, it's just it's just ace to meet you Marcus. I mean like you know you're a bit of a legend in the insights community and maybe we should swap seats one day on this podcast and I interview you because you've got so many stories to tell too. Now that would be nice and with all your TV and radio experience I i imagine you'd do a slightly better job than I but um I think many of us are legends but thank you for the compliment but I'll have to cut you off there if you're going to be complimenting me so
00:22:02
Speaker
Thank you Matt Davies and we shall hear from someone else soon. Bye for now.
00:22:10
Speaker
Well that was a truly fantastic story we shared together today. I love the fact that our community of practitioners make such a huge difference across the globe. That's all for today folks. Thank you for listening to our Voices with Insights podcast. Look out for the next story in our series.