Last week I told you about my one-line emails.
How the people working with me could tell I was under pressure before I could. How a short reply left a team member wondering what she’d done wrong. And how it took a behavioural profile, back in 2015, for me to see the pattern clearly.
I promised I’d tell you more about that profile. So here it is.
The question we usually ask
When health professionals are under pressure, many of us reach for the same question.
What’s wrong with me?
Am I burnt out?
Am I not coping?
Do I need to step back, or step away altogether?
Sometimes those are exactly the right questions. Real burnout is real, and it deserves proper care.
But often, we skip a step. We go straight to a label, before we’ve understood what’s actually happening.
I want to offer a different question.
How do I tend to show up when I’m under pressure, and what can I do about it?
That’s a question you can work with.
What Extended DISC is
The tool I use is called Extended DISC. It’s a behavioural profile built around four broad styles:
- D: direct, decisive, results-focused
- I: sociable, optimistic, influencing
- S: steady, patient, supportive
- C: careful, precise, analytical
Most of us are a blend. None of the styles is better or worse than another. The profile doesn’t rank people or sort them into good and bad categories. Each style has strengths, and each has things to watch for.
So far, that might sound like many other tools you’ve come across.
What made me choose this one is what it does next.
Two profiles, not one
Extended DISC gives you two pictures.
The first is your natural style: the way of behaving that takes the least energy and feels most comfortable to you. It stays fairly stable across adult life.
The second is how you believe you need to adjust to meet the demands of where you are right now.
The gap between those two is where the useful information sits.
When I looked at my own profile in 2015, my natural style was strongly results-focused, with a sociable, influencing side. But in the second profile, I’d pushed the results-focused side as far as it would go and turned the social side down. The report put it plainly: I felt I had to be businesslike “at the expense of being social and open.”
That was costing me energy. It was also costing the people around me, and I hadn’t noticed.
When you’re adjusting a long way from your natural style, you’re spending energy just to keep up. That isn’t a failure. That’s a signal.
Not all DISC is the same
If you’ve done a DISC before, there’s a fair chance it was a short online quiz with a one-page result.
Here’s something most people don’t know. DISC isn’t one test. The original model was never patented, so dozens of organisations have built their own versions, with very different levels of rigour.
And the research on DISC generally is honest about its limits. DISC tools tend to be reliable, meaning you’ll get a similar result if you take one again. But they haven’t been shown to predict job performance, and they shouldn’t be used that way.
That’s one reason I chose Extended DISC. It publishes its validation data. It reports internal consistency of around 0.8 across all four styles, from a sample of more than 200,000 people, and its results hold up when people retake it months later. These are the company’s own figures, so read them as that. But they’re published, which isn’t true of many quick DISC quizzes.
The bigger difference, for me, is what it measures. A one-page DISC usually tells you how you’re showing up right now. Extended DISC separates who you naturally are from how you believe you need to adjust. That gap is where most of the useful information sits.
Energy, not ability
This is the part I most want health professionals to hear.
The profile isn’t a can-and-can’t-do list. If something sits outside your natural style, it doesn’t mean you’re bad at it. Many people excel in areas that don’t come naturally to them.
It simply means that area costs you more energy and concentration.
For a profession that’s chronically full, that’s a far more useful way to look at ourselves.
Not “I’m failing at this.”
Not “Something’s wrong with me.”
Just: this costs me more, so I need to plan for it.
Why I trust it
There are three reasons I keep coming back to this tool.
It gives real, practical insight. Not a label to wear. Information you can use on Monday morning.
It checks its own work. It looks at how consistently someone has answered, and flags when a result needs more caution, or a fresh attempt, before anyone builds decisions on it.
It doesn’t pathologise. It describes behaviour, not disorder. That matters to me as a clinician, and it matters even more when someone arrives already exhausted and quietly wondering what’s wrong with them.
What it isn’t
It isn’t therapy, and it isn’t a diagnosis.
It isn’t a tool for deciding whether someone gets a job, and it shouldn’t be the only thing anyone uses to make decisions about a person.
It’s a starting point for a better conversation, with yourself first and then with the people you work alongside.
If you’d like to see your own
I’m keeping up to five places a month for Extended DISC sessions.
Here’s what’s included:
- You complete the questionnaire online.
- You receive your full Extended DISC report.
- We meet for an hour to work through it together, focused on how your pattern is showing up in your work right now.
- Within 48 hours, you receive a one-page written summary with your practical next steps.
The investment is $600.
Book your Extended DISC session here.
Next week I’ll walk you through exactly what happens in that hour, and who it’s for and who it isn’t.
A question worth sitting with
Where are you adjusting the most right now, and what is it costing you?
Lets work this out together – Jo