How to Strengthen A Weakness

You now know which is your Personality Code, are you wondering how grow yourself? 

When you start to see who you really are, but also some weaknesses that you want to soften this is what I'm talking about. I know I wanted to be more. My profession needed me more well rounded.

I learned how to strengthen the personality traits I wanted to be stronger. Over the years of making small adjustments I feel better and stronger. 

The main idea is just because you are this personality, it isn't an excuse to accept it and use as an excuse. Grow and become the person you really want to become. 

Here is where you start on the journey. Enjoy!

Thank you for listening. Share this episode with a friend that you think would enjoy it.

I would love it if you took the time to leave a rating or review for the show.

Want me to go more in-depth about anything? Let me know.

Send an email with questions to skahrhoff@live.com.

Transcript

Shannon Kahrhoff: 0:02

Hello, welcome back to Decoding Clients for Stylists. I'm Shannon Kahrhoff I took a break last week. It was my birthday week and I needed a little relaxation for a little bit. So I, I am back with a new idea today. I wanna cover how to strengthen your weaknesses. So this is for you personally on how to. Not use your personality type as an excuse on, well, this is who I am and this is how I'm always going to be. It can be that way. There's no one saying you have to improve yourself or work on something that could be a challenge in your life. Me personally, I realized my strengths and my weaknesses through reading these books and understanding. The styles throughout. So while I talk to people, I realize what personality they are, so I know how to relate to them. It makes my life a lot easier behind the chair. But I also realized through talking and understanding and breaking down the personalities, I realize some of the strengths and weaknesses they have. Are mine. So I realized that, okay, so I have a strong personality. I need to figure out how to soften it at times, because my clients don't like me so direct, so is my hair thin? Yes. You got so much balding in your head. This is horrible. There's no way we can, give you this hairstyle because you have the holes on the side of your forehead. No one wants to hear that. The whole idea of. Being a great hairstylist is how to approach the issues that they have in a nice, polite way. But if they are the direct personality, you know, you can go a little bit more intense, but you do not want to go in as insulting. You don't wanna make them go on the defense. You want to be able to make them comfortable and safe in your environment, your space. So I realized pretty quickly after I started learning this, that holy crap, I can be offensive whenever I'm not paying attention because my initial instinct, especially if they're getting on my nerves a little bit, I can be pretty darn direct and insulting at times, and I've probably chased off a client or two in my history because I was not paying attention to the politeness factor. I have other issues that I'm very fully aware of. I'm very aware of my weaknesses, my faults, and I always try to improve on how I can become a better, more well-rounded individual, not just for work, but for every moment of my life. I don't want to be the person that can insult someone or my tendencies of. Seeing a sparkly object on the side and totally losing track of the conversation that I'm part of, that can be a problem. And I worked in a, a booth rent situation. I was surrounded by other people, other conversations we had the radio going on, people were walking in the door, the phone was, the phone was going off constantly. So there were distractions everywhere. So I'm a little bit easier on myself now because I'm in a suite. So my suite helps me block out some of the distractions around me so I can focus a hundred percent. Well, okay, like 80% of my attention on my clients. There's always other things going around, but I've learned through this process how to modify my behavior a little bit, my awareness of different things to. Not always go with instinct. Just like you learn how to work, how you do haircuts, you understand that how you're doing it isn't quite a hundred percent right. It's a little too sharp here. You need to round it so it softly flows, and you have movement in the hair. This is the same thing with your life. You need to have an easier flow. I'm not saying to totally change yourself and deny what your natural instinct is. That totally is wrong. We're not here to, I am not here trying to change you. I'm trying to get you to understand your natural tendencies and how you can become less abrasive or less easygoing, more intentional on different things, depending on your personality type. So in my own process, it was a long time of figuring out different things. But my biggest thing are the peoples, the people that irritate the heck outta me on how they do things. It's usually my cue to myself to analyze why what they're doing is irritating me, because it's usually one of my flaws. And then I realize they don't know what they don't know. It's my job to soften myself because they're not doing it intentionally. This is something I have to grow and change. Now, this isn't for the people that are rude or that are asking for extra services for no These are the people that are unintentionally doing it. There are people that I've had in my chair that I've let go. I don't do it very often, but it's whenever I feel like they are overstepping a boundary, which I have just. Recently in the last few years realized that I don't have to take everyone in my chair. I'm allowed to choose who I service in my chair because for most of my career, you're, you're building, you're accepting everyone in your chair to bring money in, even if they're not your ideal client. In fact, it was just three years ago, I realized there is such a thing as an ideal client and you have the ability to actually. Picture who you want in your chair because it's your business. You have the right to do anything you want. Now, you're not allowed to be, well, I wouldn't suggest being rude to anyone who comes and sits, sits in your chair and actually just wants to get a look that they want. That to me is the line. But it is okay for you to. Not take a new client that rubs you the wrong way because they are, inconsiderate. They are wanting special treatment. They want in now when you're booked out for six weeks, there are different reasons that you don't have to allow this behavior in your business. Now if you're commissioned, then you might have a little play on what you're allowed to do and not do, because it depends on the business owner that you're working with. But if you're self-employed, if you have your own business, you have the right to say no to someone. They might bring you in great money, but it's the fact of if they are treating you like crap and they expect you to go above and beyond. They don't listen to your advice. They're doing something that's horrible for their hair, but they expect you to be able to fix it because it's your job. To me, that's a little bit, harsh on my own personality type because I don't want to feel like it's my responsibility to accept their bad behavior and my expectation to. It'd be magical that I can fix everything and that in the next six weeks I have to do it all over again.'cause I used crap products. They, they just have horrible home care. So there are instances when I have to say, look, you don't respect my, suggestions. You don't respect me as a professional. I'm gonna have to say I'm sorry. You need to go find someone else that can work directly with you that. Is a better fit. If they make me feel like crap and Ill-equipped and a horrible hairstylist because they are treating me horribly because they don't respect anyone in this profession, that affects me with the rest of my clients because my belief. Level is decreased because someone is just insulting me and that is not how I wanna be treated in my own business. To me, this is an art, and not everyone has to like my art, but it is one of those things that you do not have my permission to insult me and to make me feel like a bug squashed under a shoe. There are times that I have to allow myself to go back. To the fully direct Shannon, and go for it because you can only be nice and polite for so long before everyone walks all over you and you're here trying to backpedal, trying to fix the issue that they created. So am not saying all the time, you have to be well-rounded. You have to use your strengths when you have'em, when you need them. And I am blessed to have a very direct personality, but I also have become a much nicer, softer person through the years because it's, it's nicer being softer and nicer, but I still have to learn that there is a time and place to use that full direct personality. Because I have the work ethic, I have the mindset of how to push through in the struggles to get to the other side and get everything accomplished that I needed. I've learned how to push myself to the level that I need to achieve everything that needs to happen. I think I have a pretty decent amount of all the personalities, but I don't know if it's legit or if I've taught myself how to enjoy every personality type, their strengths, because I've had to learn how to be calm and rest, let my body rest. That is not my full inclination. That's my coping mechanism whenever I've overrun my body to exhaustion. And I had to force myself to learn how to relax and not be responsible for everything. Some things had to be put on the back burner so that I can let myself, my body recover. So that one was my hardest struggle of learning how to, to not do everything that needed to be done on my list. That is a huge struggle because I am a natural. Driven person where I think it's almost my survival mechanism of just keep going. Don't look as left or right. Just keep focusing on the jobs that need to get done. And I'll think about myself later. It, this is, I think one of my survival modes is just keep moving. You don't have to know the struggles. You don't have to do this, but it pushes you through that's my example of how I learned how to balance my different things. I am also a little bit of a rule maker. I like organization and perfectionism in work in my home life. No. So this whole rule maker thing is something I've mastered for work because you don't want to have to. Search around for the tube of color that you need for your client. You wanna be able to look up, reach, grab it, and start mixing. You don't wanna waste 10, 15 minutes looking for all the things that you need to be precise at work. I don't want to be faulty at applying color on clients. I have a measurement system that I use to make sure I get the color the same every appointment, so it's precise. Now at home, my house is pretty much a wreck because I have been a shampoo girl from the time I was 16 years old. So sweeping, folding towels and washing color bowls and dishes are exhausting to me now. So I do it at work because this is my career. This is what I need to do at home. It's torture. I don't want to have to clean my house. I don't want everything in a precise manner'cause I have that at work and that's what needs to happen. I need to be very precise with my scheduling, with my phone calls and my messaging. I need to be precise with placements of everything. No one wants to come into a suite that's nasty, that is a mess all over the place. And, product shelves that are coated with dust now. Through the holidays, yes, my product shelf was coated with hairspray dust, but overall, I try not to have that happen, but this is how I balance my life. Work has to be professional. That's my livelihood. This is my pride right there, is making sure that things are placed where they need to be, where it's, it's pleasing for someone to come in and sit down and rest. For those true rule maker people, it probably discussed them with my dust and hair sitting on things, but I don't have the time to dust every day. Maybe I should, I don't know. But this is something that I've learned. The more I analyze everything on why I do certain things, and I still sit down and analyze where is my weak point, where is my strength, where am I overcompensating here to? Focus on this. So it's, it's my little system that I have to do to create the habits. Systems are a huge thing for me also, and I think that's the rule maker person, that if I don't create a habit on things, it's all irrational in my head. There's no rhyme or reason to how I do things and how often I, I clean and, order products and how I cut hair and how I apply color. There's consistency or I falter. I have a customer that, cracked me up one day because I just, I cut his hair and I did clippers. So I'm going around and I have my system. Well, apparently I faltered on my system or I was distracted with a story or something and I'm cutting and I go down and put the clippers down, turn around, grab my scissors, and go into the blending. And I forgot one quadrant. One quadrant of his hair, the right side of his hair from ears forward. I forgot to use the clippers on why I broke my system because. It is a habit that I have created, but somewhere along this line, I faltered on my system and I caught it. You're not gonna miss not shaving, a quadrant of the hair off, but it was, it cracked me up and he still misses with me today. It's hilarious because I've never done that before in all of these years that I've cut his hair. It's just a recent development that I have forgot and. It has not been just one time. It has been two or three times in the last two years that I forgot to shave this one side of his head. So he's, he watches me now to make sure I don't put those clippers down until I have all four sides shaved. But this is why I've learned that I have to, well round myself by creating a system with everything because my. Direct personality can totally skip the process of how I do things just going into task mode. I have this to do this, to do this, to do this, to do, but by having the rule maker in me strengthened, I have a system on how I do everything. And when I let myself slack and don't live up to my. Systems. That's when things break down and it doesn't happen. That's when things get overrun. I am out of balance at work on how things are done, so then I have to work even harder to restart the system and like with cleaning with the holidays. And then I got sick shortly after that. My suite was dirty. I had hair blown in the corners of things that. I don't know if my customers noticed, but it drove me crazy and there was hairspray dust on everything. I use hair fibers on the client and the hair fiber dust is all over the place. It's all the way up on top of my color cabinet, and every so often I have to get up there and dust or else there's layers of this hair fiber and hairspray coated on things. It's easy to dust away, but it's still disgusting knowing that there's layers of ick in there. Systems is how I've learned how to maintain some of the balance in my life, and I still have to tweak my, my systems here and there. But this is something I had to learn how to do because it's not my natural instinct. I was all over the place. My whole life, because it was thoughtless, I just automatically did whatever I felt was the next thing I had to accomplish and go for it. And most things along the sides were dropped It was not a good way to do it. I was very good at getting things done that were important to me. But not the things that were not important to me, which is usually cleaning an organization that is not my strength, but okay. Organization in my own personal life. I need to realize how to bring that home to my home and my life and create habits on everything. If you wanna start with figuring out how to, well round yourself. Hopefully by now you have an understanding of what personality type is most like. You. I talked to someone and they said, this one seems very much like me'cause I do this and this. Okay, so that's great. So now you have a basis of what your strengths and weaknesses are and how you like to see things and how you like to do things. This is the thing that you need to understand now. You know your strengths. So what are your weaknesses in this personality that you need to improve a little bit, that you would love, you personally, would love to increase the positive in that you wanna decrease the weakness, and only you can decide this for yourself. Don't let anyone tell you what your weaknesses are and what needs to improve. This is a personal growth process yourself. This is something a hundred percent you that you need to figure out what would make your life easier if you just improved a little bit. Now, a direct personality, you can focus on what you need to improve, and you're right there. You can figure it out and go. Everyone else you need to take a little time, figure a few things out because everyone else is a little bit more hesitant. You don't just jump into it. The okay, the fun loving might want to jump into it, but fun loving doesn't also like to realize their weaknesses'cause it's not fun. That means it's something that has to be worked on. Unless you see the, the tripping point, the part of your habits that makes you stop, it stops the cycle, the flow of your life because all of a sudden there's something that affects other people and yourself around you and not for the good. So that's something with a fun loving, you need to figure out what you don't like. There's different things and cues that you get from reactions from other people. And if you're looking at your clients and your family members trying to figure out their personalities to understand how to relate a little bit better, you're also gonna figure out exactly how. Your actions are affecting other people, their facial expressions, their behaviors, sometimes their words. So you need to really just think about if you tweaked one thing, what would that improve in your life? This is another way to look at it. You look at someone that you want to emulate to follow, you, understand that they're achieving great things, and they have, as a stylist, they have the clientele that you want. They have the relationships and the price points that you want for your business in the future. What is that person doing differently than what you do? Listen to their words. Listen to their tone. Now, sometimes they have a total different personality than you. That's okay. We all have our own gifts and talents, but it doesn't mean that you can't work towards figuring out what one little tweak in your personality or in your behaviors can increase this. So you're thinking of different stair steps to improve. So if that person is a better listener than you, they know how to take the time and the efforts just to have a special relationship with our clients. You can watch them if you have downtime and say, okay, how do they do this? What is their energy like? What is their, what are the words? Or do they ask more questions than talking? Those are the little things you can figure out and you can look at your own behavior, how you have an interaction with your clients, with your coworkers, and see where's the difference there. What can you tweak to get a little bit closer to that person? Whatever that trait is that you're trying to, that, that you respect. That's a perfect way to say it. You respect their behavior in this because the results they get is something you want. If you're in an office and your manager has a way of communicating or patting you on the back and saying, great job. I really love how you finish this project, and I love how you wrote it all out. I love how you presented it. Great job. If it's just a matter of affirming someone, then you have to figure out, do I affirm people? I want to have my people around me feel this great about themselves as I did whenever my manager, my boss, told me something. This is the art that people need to really understand. People need pats on the backs. People need to understand what they're doing, right? So you're not constantly just criticizing people because positive gets way better results than the negative. Just pick one thing and go from there. Which of the personalities do you wish that you had more of? I know that's how I started with mine because I was like, but I want this personality. I wanna be the fun-loving person who can. Have a good laugh all the time. Who takes things lightly? Who doesn't get, so upset about the smallest thing. I want things to roll off my back and just have fun, and I've had to learn that. That's not my natural instinct unless I'm totally comfortable around people. Figure out, do you want more steady in your life? Do you want more direct in your life? Do you want more rule maker? Do you need boundaries and rules, or are you wanting to be more fun loving because you can adjust anything in your life to get a little bit closer to where you wanna be. It's all a learning process. You do not have to accept where you are right now as your whole boundary in life. This is not what this is for. I want you to understand yourself. So you can relate to other people, but grow and change. That's what this life is all about, is understanding how to become a better person, how to be a little bit more organized so that you can achieve more things. Because if you take that time to organize things, you don't have to scurry around all over the place trying to play catch up and to find everything. In my leadership development class, I learned how to set goals a little bit better. I have a good foundation from the development business that I took years ago, but how to actually do it in a professional sense was huge for me because I understood the general part. If you can learn how to grow a part of yourself that needs to soften your weakness, go for it. Make yourself a better person. If you have to read self-help books, go for it. If you need to listen to other podcasts, go for it because there's so many different Habit creating podcasts out there, you just have to find someone that resonates with you and doesn't force you into a direction that does not feel comfortable because there are so many out there, but they're all directed to different personalities. You have to understand the personalities of the person teaching it to understand that they might just be teaching their experience, not just. What speaks to you. So some things are gonna be too unattainable if it's too opposite of where you are personally. My whole goal in this podcast is to get you to understand that once you figure out your personality and understand your strengths, your weaknesses, what weakness do you think would be the most beneficial to strengthen a little bit more? Is there something in there that you feel you understand that if I could get that a little bit better, my relationships are gonna be better, or my organizational skills will be better, or my mindset will be so much better? One step at a time. Peeps, if you figure out exactly how you are and where you want to go. Anything is possible because you're making a life plan to make your life more comfortable, to make the people around you a little bit more comfortable. But don't be scared to go back to your number one powerhouse strength and still be able to use it. You were given this gift for a reason, and sometimes you have to pull out the big guns just to protect yourself and to understand one thing or the other. I hope this makes sense. I hope it helped you. If you have any questions, reach out, talk to me. I'd love to hear from you. Have a great week. I'll see you later.