On September 18, 2008 I walked into the Sheraton Hotel in Bakersfield, California. I was ready for my all day E-Colors training, though I would not say I was prepared for what was in store for that day. I had taken the PDI (personality diversity indicator) survey, read my description and talked with some of the HES (health, environmental & safety) personnel about how it was going to be used in our Drilling & Completions area. I still remained a bit apprehensive, however, feeling it could be construed as a bit stereotypical, I remained open minded, despite my apprehension, as Equilibria Coach Gabriel Acosta-Mikulasek led me through my first E-Colors experience.
As we started to get into the E-Colors and differentiating between all of the four colors, we did the self-awareness exercise of strengths and potential limiters and then rolled it into the team awareness. We were asked to write on a large sheet of blank (lined) paper our top three strengths and top three potential limiters. I, of course, being high top color Green, elected myself to be the scribe for the Green/Red team.
Image courtesy of Berg London
After meticulously alternating Green and Red letters to title our sheet “GREEN/RED” I began to write down what we had come up with, re-discussing our choices aloud as I went. When I got to the last potential limiter, “Judgmental”, and began writing it as I said it aloud one of the members of my group stopped me after I wrote the “J” saying, “Maybe we shouldn’t use that one, I don’t like the way it sounds.” My quick reply was along the lines of, “I don’t really care what we put, but it better start with a ‘J’ because I am NOT re-writing this whole thing on a new sheet of paper.” We all agreed that it was fine and to continue with the word we had originally planned.
I thought nothing of my statement, it was not out of the norm for me, and it was acceptable to my group that rewriting the entire list for one word was unnecessary, and a simple line scratching out the “J” was unacceptable to my level of standards for neatness and organization.
As we hung up our beautifully transcribed sheet next to all the other groups’, the differences in everyone’s personalities and tendencies reflected not only in the various words chosen in each category, but the degrees of neatness of the words written. This was my first light bulb that maybe these E-Colors were actually a pretty good description. The second light bulb came when Gabriel got to my paper and noted how nice, neat and organized it was and speculated that if I had messed up I probably would have started all over again. From that point on I decided that I would give E-Colors a shot and figure out ways to effectively use E-Colors in the field as a DSM (drill site manager) for my company. I have since joined Equilibria as a coach in the US.
Article By: Amy Hughes (Green/Red)
If you haven’t established your E-Colors yet please visit www.equilibria.com and complete your PDI– it’s free!
We welcome your comments. Just leave a reply below and we’ll get back to you.
© 2013, Amy Hughes. All rights reserved.
