Manila, 2 October 2019 — What if changing your communication would be as simple as choosing what color to drink?

Colors of Hair

Long ago, my parents told me that drinking coffee would make my hair turn green. In Wassenaar, the town where I grew up, green hair would surely have made me an oddity and the object of ridicule.

Nowadays, however, if you color your hair a vibrant color, people would be more accepting, and no one would think that you had been drinking something unhealthy.

Rather, it could be seen as a statement of you embracing your uniqueness. You might draw looks of curiosity, and some interested people might even start a conversation.

Now, imagine what would happen if you color more than your hair? What if drinking a color could absorb its essential qualities in your mind and heart, and come out in the way you act and speak with people you meet?

Colors of You

Would the reactions of the people around you be different if you had chosen to drink a glass of green, red, blue, orange, or another color?

Today, HR workers and aspiring leaders around the world will use colors to refer to aspects of your personality and your leadership style.

In the Community of Leaders that I work with, we use the choice of what color to drink as a metaphor for the skills to connect with people in a way that strikes a chord in them and makes them feel understood.

Colors of Worldview

We are exploring a spectrum of seven colors that represent the range of worldviews that our colleagues in the workplace will use to make sense of their world and to cope with the complexity of their life conditions.

Work In All Colors, the method we use, lets us play with the colors to recognize what they stand for, and then choose which one will work best with each of the diverse audiences and situations we encounter at work.

Once we get to that level of practice, the metaphor of choosing a color to drink and use in our communication is apt and well within our reach to apply. We can, in fact, choose between the colors several times a day. For each of our conversations, we are able to choose the right color that is likely to give the best result.

Change of Color

Seen with the help of the metaphor, choosing your color to drink will make you a much better communicator—someone who knows how to connect well with the people in your workplace, and who is known for finding solutions, building relationships, and achieving results.

This week, we shared experiences in our community how we can change the color of conversations in our workplace to achieve better results. What we discovered is how possible it is to do that. It's a choice we have.

If you want to learn the communication skills that leaders need to connect with the people around them at work, then you’re welcome to consider joining us in Grow3Leaders!

When you join the community, you commit to influencing a change in your workplace (business, organization, or project) together with three colleagues you invite to join you. We call this the Grow3Leaders challenge.

You will form a small team that we call a Collab, because you will work together (Col as in collaborate) and experiment (Lab as in laboratory) with modern ways of influencing positive change in support of a bigger purpose, like sustainability.

Colors to Connect

When you join, what you will have in common with the other members of the community is a commitment to influence change in your workplace, and to share your on-the-job experiences, challenges, and inspirations as you make the change happen.

If that touches a chord with you, then visit Grow3Leaders to request your invitation to join us, free of charge, and not free of commitment.

Our community’s theme for October is how leaders can connect with their audience, and that’s what choosing to drink the right color is all about.