Core Belief Profile 5

The Analyst Elephant

Role Description

The Analyst is the wise person who is highly observant and reflective. They use their observing and thinking as a way of ensuring an emotional separation from others and relationships. They tend to have a lifelong attachment to knowledge and value understanding highly.

Analysts have a special attraction to the secret and unexplained. They are described as maintaining an emotional distance from others, protecting their privacy, not getting involved, doing without and getting by on a minimum.

Analysts withdraw into intellectualism because they use this to protect themselves from intrusive demands and from being drained of their resources. Thus they become private and self-sufficient. The underlying assumption is that personal and physical resources are in short supply.

Analysts try to preserve their resources by becoming private and self-sufficient, while limiting their desires and accumulating a great deal of personal knowledge. They seek security by withdrawing from people or situations that are perceived as threatening.

Focus of attention:

• The intellectual domain.

• Facts.

• Analysis and compartmentalised thinking.

• Intrusions or demands on them.

Focus of energy:

• Observing from a detached stance.

• Learning all there is to know about a subject.

• Thinking and analysing in advance.

• Dampening and reducing feelings.

• Self-containment, withdrawing, conserving.

• Maintaining sufficient privacy, boundaries and limits.

Focus of Avoidance

• Strong feelings, especially fear.

• Intrusive or demanding people or circumstances.

• Feelings of inadequacy and emptiness.

Preferred communication style

• Prefers to maintain an observer role; doesn’t want much direct attention or participation, especially at the beginning.

• Attention moves to principles, concepts and systems. Researched content is favoured over anecdotal or hearsay content.

• Likes to hear other people’s experiences without a demand for personal contact.

• Needs time to absorb and review new material.

• May be listening well without showing much personal reaction (great Poker face)

Dos and Don'ts for this Core Belief Profile

Do

• Include as much supporting data as you can as the Analyst will delight in the details.

• Provide insider information. They want that special piece of knowledge that will provide them with extra insight.

• Do appreciate that the Analyst finds meetings very difficult. Provide them with as much information before the meeting as you can; what is to be discussed, who will be there, what needs to be decided and what will be required of them (the most crucial point).

• Do allow, if possible, the Analyst to make decisions following the meeting, not during the meeting.

• Do appreciate that a Analyst absolutely requires privacy.

• Do understand that they have delayed reactions and so their feelings can surface when they are alone. They can feel great tenderness as they reflect on the other.

• Do realise that you may end up living in a compartmentalised aspect of the Analyst’s world, separated from the rest of their world.

• Do allow them to make decisions after thinking about it, rather than on the spot.

• Be direct, precise and concise and, most importantly, do not pry.

Don't

• Don’t try to fill every space in the conversation.

• Don’t try to get a reaction from them. This will not occur.

• Don’t stray from the normal or agreed upon topics since the Analyst may come to experience even normal questioning, as cross examinations.

Suggestions for Professional Development

• In work you must collaborate to succeed. Try to find production-oriented people so that you can bring your ideas to life.

• Look for feedback on your communication style. While it may feel that you are offering helpful ideas or facts, others may perceive you as being a condescending and arrogant know-it-all.

• Express your opinion! Other people are not mind readers.

• Don’t always play it safe and hide.

• Get out of the habit of thinking about what you are going to say while another person is talking. Instead, listen to what they are saying.

• Assess your plans to see if you have considered the human factor at all.

• Recognise that there is a difference between secrecy and privacy.

• While it is appropriate to keep a great deal of yourself private, there is no need to keep everything secret.

• Try to monitor the message that others are taking from your silences.

• Learn to spend a little.

• Be intentionally impulsive.

• Whenever you are generous with what you have, you nourish yourself.

Danger

• Avarice (greed for wealth or material gain).

• Detachment.