predicting human behavior | the Wakefield Doctrine

clarks -the Wakefield Doctrine- ‘hey, I’m good enough for my friends…so the heck with what you think’

September 16, 2015 By clarkscottroger

Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

(As so often happens, here at the Doctrine, a phrase popped into my head that seemed to be a whole Post…provided I could put into words the feeling that were [embedded] in said phrase. When I wrote today’s Post subtitle, I immediately had two thoughts, a) Readers are going to misunderstand and respond by saying, ‘aww, don’t feel bad, we all think you’re doing great’ and 2) I really need to get back to this kind of post, one that is written to the clarks who are encountering the Wakefield Doctrine for the very first time. And, of course, c) my own re-appreciation of how much things have changed since I first started writing this blog… not the content and nature of the Doctrine, rather the nature of the readership and, even more germane, the changes the Wakefield Doctrine has wrought in my own self. So, what say I give it try?)

When I was young(er), I retained an unshakeable faith in two things: a) my friends and b) my capacity to endure and survive. Now I am no longer younger. More to the point, (of this post), I am now possessed of an understanding of my predominant worldview (clark/Outsider) and that enables me to see a lot more of the ‘why’ of my behavior and beliefs, actions and responses to the people and the world around me. This is an improvement. This knowledge, this insight into the way that ‘I relate myself to the world around me’, does not, in and of itself, change anything. It does, however, make any desired change much more attainable and sustainable. That is the good of the knowing of the Wakefield Doctrine.

The title today? (And the introduction above, that suggests that perhaps writing a Post to appeal specifically to the brand new clarklike Reader, might be more difficult than I think?) All of what underlies, and thereby giving rise to the sentiment manifested in the subtitle remains true in me, in all clarks. I still have the …. er…. not so positive self-concept that is the initial premise shaping the worldview of the Outsider, and I still, very much value the friends that I have. Most of us, (including rogers and scotts), will recognize, in the second half of the sub-title an implication, a… ‘yes but’, a ‘hedge’, if you will, on the claim to being valued by others. There is something to the way the statement sounds that is a hallmark of the clarklike personality type. It’s necessary to a clark, this ‘hedging’ of a claim of self-worth or value (to others), a pre-defensive defensive, if you will.

You want a physical example of what I’m trying to convey? (It’s also a primary characteristic of clarks.) Watch a clark smile. Most of time, especially when ‘in public’ or not in a totally secure environment, which is pretty much everywhere except bed or the bathroom, clarks will smile by compressing the lips, putting a slight upwards motion to the corners of the mouth, while watching the other person very carefully. Hedging their bets. Being careful. Keeping the escape route viable. You know, as an Outsider, we’re all about interacting, all while keeping an eye on the door. Find me a classroom, I don’t care if it’s First Grade or Grad School, if the individual student is allowed the choice of seats, you will find a preponderance of clarks in the back row. Near the door. And while one might think that this choice is simply to avoid being noticed, one would be almost correct. It is, in fact, to provide the option to escape, to not be forced into the focus of attention.

That’s part of what the clark personality is like. Tomorrow we may look at scotts, ( ‘I think, therefore I scream‘) or perhaps rogers (‘there is no ‘i’ in herd, there’s only me and everyone like me’)

Since I’m doing kind of a old-style Post, I thought I’d include a music video, well, just because.*

*excuse me!! excuse me!! because, well, holy shit!! (lol) you want to know the real, totally-honest-to-god reason why I find writing Doctrine Posts so ….so incredible? Ok, so I’m finishing up the final edit and I decide… sure, lets keep the music vid, because I love the song. The last thing I needed to do was to find the ‘cover photo’, you know, the Post’s thumbnail that shows only on the landing page. Well I think, ‘lets look for an image associated with Grieg and ‘the Hall of the Mountain King’, (today’s vid)…at the top of the results page is a link to the wikipedia, so naturally I go to read it ( I’m a clark, remember?) anyway, here’s what jumped out of the screen at me, it made me laugh:

The piece is played as the title character Peer Gynt, in a dream-like fantasy, enters “Dovregubben (the troll Mountain King)’s hall”. The scene’s introduction continues: “There is a great crowd of troll courtiers, gnomes and goblins. Dovregubben sits on his throne, with crown and sceptre, surrounded by his children and relatives. Peer Gynt stands before him. There is a tremendous uproar in the hall.” The lines sung are the first lines in the scene.

Grieg himself wrote “For the Hall of the Mountain King I have written something that so reeks of cowpats, ultra-Norwegianism, and ‘to-thyself-be-enough-ness’ that I can’t bear to hear it, though I hope that the irony will make itself felt.” The theme of “to thyself be… enough” – avoiding the commitment implicit in the phrase “To thine own self be true” and just doing enough – is central to Peer Gynt’s satire, and the phrase is discussed by Peer and the mountain king in the scene which follows the piece.( italics added) (wikipedia.com)

…no!! really!! lol man! do I love this Wakefield Doctrine!

Filed Under: Featured, Psychology, the Wakefield Doctrine Tagged With: personality types, predicting human behavior, psychology of personality, relationships, self-improvement, the Wakefield Doctrine

-the Wakefield Doctrine- Wednesday and such

September 2, 2015 By clarkscottroger

Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

Just a quick, jot-down-a-list of things to pick up at the Cumberland Farms and/or other semi-important things to do on a busy day Post today.

Speaking of Lists! Did you know that the concept of ‘a List’ are three very different things to a clark, to a scott and to a roger? Well, they are! (Want to thank Cynthia and zoe for their Comments re: Cynthia’s reference to Dale Carnegie and is famous self-help book, ‘How to Win friends and Influence People’.) The point being, that something as simple at that book will manifest differently for a person, depending on their predominant worldview. (‘manifest’ is the term we use in this context), because we want to be sure that we remember that we’re not talking about:

‘how a person interprets the book’, or
‘what a person gets out of reading the book’ and we’re so not saying,
‘whether are not the person understands what Dale is trying to say’.

Nope! To say that this Book ‘manifests…’, is to say that it’s an actual ‘different thing’ and, …especially and! (the concepts it presents) are different things, depending on the reader’s personality type.

Speaking of fun and challenging, zoe has this week’s Six Sentence Story prompt up already! So, if you’re like me, you’ll want to go over there and see what the word is so that you can start the struggle early! (I’m just kidding. not. There are some astoundingly skilled and talented people who join in each week and they produce stories that’ll have you saying, ‘how the hell do they do that?’ and they make it look easy. For example, take Dyanne (please! barum bump!) she has the gift of the Six Sentence Stories and they are quite good, as are all the others…. Why don’cha stop by and send in a Story!

Speaking of gravity matters! (ha ha) We have an Open Enrollment Day running today only at the ‘Gravity Challenge‘! You should join us. It’s fun and satisfying. …ok, a little odd, but in a good way, and the people! Once again, it’s the people who participate that makes a blog or a bloghop or even a group weight lose thingie, the cool thing that it can be. So, if it makes you feel better to talk to a participant, before you join look up Christine or Lisa or Val or Joy or Kristi and then come join us!

Filed Under: Featured, Psychology, the Wakefield Doctrine Tagged With: Personal, personality types, predicting human behavior, self-improvement, the Wakefield Doctrine

Six…that’s right! all it is, is Six Sentences comprising a Story -the Wakefield Doctrine-

August 27, 2015 By clarkscottroger

Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

Tough one. At least it’s striking me so, here at 12:30 am Thursday the 27th, as I sit at my computer, typing, near-automatically with similar ambition, (to the automatic writers of old), hoping against hope that the very motion of the pen (or keyboard), will be mother (or father) to art. Maybe they were on to something.

‘The Project that was projected was to project as much of the project to as many of the people comprising the Project.

To Project, speaking from a faux psychoanalytic perspective, is, in part, to attribute (project) onto to people, places and things in ones’ world, the attributes and characteristic that one attributes to oneself but would really rather not accept.’
Luckily this is only this week’s Six Sentence Challenge and all I have to do is finish and submit and then go one with life, which has enough difficulties in it without having to contend with zoe’s latest deviously simply word prompt.

Man! this is a tough one…

Awake, thank god that night is over!

Tossed and turned all night, chased by worry and hobbled by loss of confidence, surely, (so spoke the voices of the night), there is no way to get through this next set of challenges.

Coffee to stimulate the mind, producing the illusion (maybe even the allusion) of being capable of efficient and effective action.

The caffeine, (a delightfully psycho-active part of a complete breakfast, ‘the Best to me each morning’), surely the Lord Chamberlain of morning, has me convinced that my worries of the past night were simply that… worries, not real at all; the reality of this morning in front of the computer with a cup of coffee on the desk is what is real and all of the tossing and turning of the night were merely projections and everyone knows, they are but shadow shows, the illusion of action and character and can’t be the actual world, otherwise I might find myself caught in them, like last night’s seemingly endless struggle, and that would be….

…Tough one.

At least it’s striking me so, here at 12:30 am Thursday the 27th, as I sit at my computer, typing, near-automatically with similar ambition (to the automatic writers of old), hoping against hope that motion of the pen (or keyboard) will be mother (or father) to art. Maybe they were on to something…

Filed Under: Featured, Psychology, the Wakefield Doctrine Tagged With: predicting human behavior, psychology of personality, relationships, the Wakefield Doctrine

Leadership, Passion and clarks -the Wakefield Doctrine- (of parentheses and conversation, it’s Friday Monday and the pressure is finally off (for the rogers and scotts, that is!)

August 24, 2015 By clarkscottroger

Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

Once again, we have Friends of the Doctrine to thank for an interesting Post topic. Our friend Cynthia wrote, in a Comment, the other day,

“And…and…clarks. I need to do some learnin’ about bringing out the “leadership” quality in a clark. You know: making those 60-second decisions, not backing down, managing a lot of people. That sort of thing. Not a very clark-thing to do at all. :P“

“:P” indeed!

(I was just thinking, ‘My reply to Cynthia, the other day was pretty comprehensive and, well, lets just say, ‘the post is almost complete with a couple of copy/paste(s)’, go ahead! who’s gonna object?’)

I’ll compromise and put the Reply, (my response to our friend’s Comment), somewhere else. Actually this will be quite useful in allowing me to experiment with an idea for using un-categorized Posts as secret hiding places. So, if you would like to read my response to Cynthia’s excellent Post-topic-to-be, click here.

To the topic on hand! One that I started writing about this August 19th and am only just now publishing it, which is not, as it turns out a bad thing. The reason is that in the intervening time, discussion ensued, specifically, what might we suggest to Cynthia as (possible) paths to explore as she continues on with the remarkable tale of profession and personal development?

(New Readers? note here. the Wakefield Doctrine, besides being a lot of fun is also a tool for understanding the people in our lives, which includes ourselves… as people in our lives. Now the thing about the Doctrine is that we do not claim to have ‘the Answer’, hell, we don’t even insist that our way (of looking at the world) is ‘the Better Way’. All we say is that the Wakefield Doctrine provides an additional perspective on life and the world and dealing with that pain-in-the-ass guy at the deli counter at the Stop ‘n Shop (and) the girl that we would really like to believe we have a shot with and (even) the new boss who seems to be going out of his way to be a first class dick, our emphasis here being, of course, on ‘additional’. We sincerely believe that the more we understand the people in our lives, the better our lives can be. So, the next time you find yourself saying, “I really thought I knew them better than that! How could they be so mean?” stop. remember the three worldviews, see if you can infer how that person is ‘relating themselves to the world around them’, (as an Outsider (clark) or a Predator (scott) or a Herd Member (roger). and then…. then do your best to see the world as they are experiencing it. If you do that, you will know them better. Maybe just a little better, maybe a lot better, but you will have a better understanding/appreciation of them.)

My! that certainly was a jumbo parenthetical aside! Back to our ‘discussion’. how do clarks become more effective leaders and managers? You’ll recognize, in these two, the worldview of scotts and rogers, respectively. It is fundamental to the Wakefield Doctrine that, while we all have only one predominant worldview (our personal reality), we retain the potential and capacity of ‘the other two’. We refer to these as our secondary and tertiary aspects.* At first blush, the ‘answer’ to Cynthia’s query might be thought to be ‘well, develop your secondary and tertiary aspects!’ And, in fact, that is the answer. However, the question remains, ‘how the heck does one do that?’

Hey! here’s what I’ve got: enthusiasm.

Yep! there it is. the answer.** Enthusiasm… or, as we presciently wrote in our Post Title…passion. That is the keystone, the touchstone, the abracadabra of accessing her secondary and tertiary aspects. Now, I alluded to discussion over the course of the weekend that contributed to a better understanding of this mechanism (in clarks). Remind me later in the week to tell you about it. Mention: spinner and hydraulics for cars and I’ll totally get what you mean.

Got to go to work.

* e.g. I am a clark with a strong secondary scottian and weak tertiary rogerian aspect(s) as a result I am a creative Outsider, but have at times found myself driven to act aggressively on the world at large, this blog being the best example of that effect.

** this is the answer specific to Cynthia’s Comment-question. It is applicable to clarks. If we were dealing with a roger or a scott, even with the same question, the answer would be different. Why? well because they have different set of rules, the worldview, the personal reality of (a) scott or (a) roger is different. It only makes sense, doesn’t it?

Filed Under: Featured, Psychology, the Wakefield Doctrine Tagged With: personality types, predicting human behavior, psychology of personality, relationships, self-development, self-improvement, Understanding Human Behavior

TToT -the Wakefield Doctrine- ‘it’s easier to finish a Post than it is to start one’

August 21, 2015 By clarkscottroger

Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

This is the-bloghop-that-Lizzi-built, and it is, as befits all communal activity in the virtual world, many things to many people. There are few Rules, (but many Secret Rules), the people who participate vary from the new-to-blogging to extraordinarily talented blog writers, however, the bottom line here the charge to us to make the effort to identify parts of our life/our world/our reality that elicits a feeling of gratitude and to share what that means, (to you), here at this virtual gathering, every weekend.

1) I’ll start by thanking Denise for today’s Post subtitle. Not certain what prompted it, but, in the course of conversation, we agreed that, when it comes to writing blog posts, its’ easier…’

2) funerals. This is not an attempt to be macabre or worse, contrived, but I have to go to a funeral service (a work connected person, close but not family close) tomorrow and I am grateful because most of the time I go to one, I leave with a refreshed sense of the importance of appreciating the here and now. It’s not a ‘glad I’m not them’ thing, rather, it (the experience of going to a funeral service), is a very real and effective reminder that no matter how caught up I get in my dreams and ambitions, fears and hopes, the fact of the matter is that there is only today. (Sure, there’s probably going to be tomorrow… but that’s exactly how I get myself in trouble, living in the future, as most clarks do.*) And, I also experience funerals as an opportunity to self-understand myself more… not being an overly-emotional person, (which is not to say that I lack emotion), I find it a challenge to convey what I would convey to the people that I care about at (a) funeral.

3) Lets hear it for work! (The employment type, not the dig in the yard, physically demanding, mentally refreshing activity, which will be Item #5)… I enjoy what I do and sometimes I catch myself avoiding making mistakes and that’s really an excellent feeling. (I did mention that I’m a clark, right?)

4) I will cite as Grat Item #4, the opportunity to use the word macabre in a sentence where that is the legitimately best word

5) digging holes in the ground. (the photo below) is my home made drainage …thing. (turns out that the new driveway was not quite properly pitched, at least the section of it that Phyllis uses to park her Mini. Which is a problem in the winter. The snow melts and pools inside the enclosure that we have for the car and the car sits in water until it gets cold enough and then the car is locked in the ice for a couple of months. So, the solution is to create a lower point. The problem is, most of the area around this section of the driveway is higher. (damn! this is taking a long time to write! Hell, I devoting nearly as much time describing my drainage project as I did trying to relate my feelings and attitudes toward funerals… that can’t be right! lol)

6) Phyllis’s Treehouse is coming along fine… for this year, the only things left are some sort of curtains (probably some of those bamboo roll-up things) and a little landscaping and that’s about all for this season.

7) Una, of course.

8) the fearless and intrepid Graviteers over at the 2 Mile Run ‘Gravity Challenge’ (that would be Kristi, Christine, Val, Lisa and Joy) ya oughta come by and join us! It’s fun and gravity-defying!

9) z and her Six Sentence Stories…. A weekly mid-term/class project/term paperette and impromptu presentation all rolled into one! (no! normal bloggers! don’t listen to me on this. this is only how I view the challenge of writing a six sentence story, most of the others have the skill (and talent) to not only create great stories, but also make it look easy! My own interest is very simply, if I hangout with people with superior skills in the word-wrangling biz, then mine will surely improve as well!

10) SR 1.3 …and,of course, the entire Book of Secret Rules (aka the Secret Book of Rules) for being nothing less than license to do almost anything in these pages (with the clearly appreciated caveat that this is still about being grateful)

* and rogers live in the past and scotts, now they, they’re the one’s that live in the present, ‘cept they don’t have the interest to over-appreciate what it is they do…