Dynamic Communication 2 - Application and Case Presentation

“IT WORKED!” was the subject line of the email I received. I had completed a presentation on case presentation using DISC to a southern Michigan dental society. The doctor who sent the e-mail had attended the presentation and just successfully completed a crown procedure on his brother-in-law that was diagnosed two years earlier. What changed his patient’s mind? A change in communication style – to the patient’s style.

Man has studied human behavior since the ancient Greeks. Hippocrates attempted to identify behavior styles to determine the outcomes of various wars between city/states. It wasn’t until Carl Jung’s Psychological Types was published in 1921 that we began to classify behaviors into four types. It was William Moulton Marston, the inventor of the lie detector, who perfected Jung’s behavior styles in 1928 in his publication Emotions of Normal People and ultimately classified the four behavior traits – Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Compliance (DISC).

What my Michigan dentist explained in the body of the email was textbook behavior profiling. He has a behavior style that is common among dentists – a high level of the Compliance behavior style. Prior to my class he believed that everyone could be convinced to move forward with treatment if he just provided the data. During the class we completed an exercise in “people reading” and the dentist used his brother-in-law in the exercise. The dentist determined that his brother-in-law had a high Dominance behavior style. He decided to change his presentation at his BIL’s next visit, using the words, body language, tone of voice and pace of speech that high D’s respond to favorably. Not only did his BIL agree to treatment, but to do treatment on the same day!

It feels like magic, but it's centuries of science.