The Psychologist who Lost Herself in the Therapy Process

This post was written by Jantine Wijtsma, a long time MindSonar professional from the Netherlands. Jantine works mainly in career counseling and we hope that she will continue for many posts to tell us how she is using MindSonar in her daily practice.

I do a lot of career coaching for people who have had to call in sick, because they are in an early stage of burnout. Most of the time they have not actually burned out yet, but the condition does relate to them not knowing why their job doesn’t make them feel healthy any more. They don’t feel good, they lack energy, have vague muscle complaints or headaches, things like that.Continue reading

MindSonar Professionals: Guus Hustinx & Team Building

In this video, trainer and consultant Guus Hustinx from the Netherlands describes how he uses MindSonar for team building. Guus aims to improve cooperation in teams and helps teams solve relationship issues and communication problems. He works mostly in large companies and for government agencies. One important insight he offers, is that MindSonar results often help people put a new frame around their differences. Continue reading

Do you Focus your own Experience or the Non-verbals of Others?

When you want to deepen rapport and understanding with someone, make an effort to notice the direction that their attention goes during conversation. Do they respond with appropriate head nods and cues to your non-verbal communication in an animated way? Or do they seem to only hear the content of what you are saying with very little expression?

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Why MindSonar has Professional Users Only

People have sometimes asked us: “Why don’t you offer the MindSonar questionnaire on the web?” or “Why don’t you make MindSonar available directly to the general public?” We have four good reasons for not wanting to do that and for making MindSonar available to trained professionals only.

Better interpretation
First of all, interpreting MindSonar, although it has quite an extensive written report, still works best when a trained professional is helping. A professional understands much better how combinations of different Thinking Styles and Graves Drives work. They also have a better understanding of and how certain mindset influences how someone feels and behaves in a certain situation.

Better application
A measurement is useful only to the extent that you can actually do something with it. A trained professional can help people translate insight into action, through advice, coaching and training. The same goes for organizations. Understanding how people think is only valuable in so far as people in the organization can use that understanding to change.

MindSonar and the professional enhance each other
We see MindSonar as part of a formula. A coaching or consulting ‘Powered by MindSonar’, it is much more than just the measurement. The other part – usually a quite important part – is the professional using MindSonar. It is the combination of the fine grained measurement of MindSonar with the passion and expertise of the MindSonar professional that make for a great product.

Preventing data contamination
Yet another reason for not opening MindSonar up directly to the general public, is data contamination. If the measurement were open to just anybody, many people taking it would not be very serious about their answers. They might, for instance, just be trying to see if they could fool the system or they might make it their sport to get an extreme score. By opening up MindSonar to just anybody, we would increase the amount of ‘frivolous data’, degrading the quality of our database.