--- title: Shadowmatch Success for All description: Shadowmatch Success for All explores the behavioural science behind the Shadowmatch system and presents a practical framework for improving workplace success, personal development, recruitment, leadership, employee development, relationships and human potential. Drawing on decades of research and practical experience, Pieter de Villiers explains how behavioural habits influence success, happiness and organisational performance. language: en author: Pieter de Villiers published: 2019-01-01 publisher: De Villiers Bester & Associates (DBA) lastModified: 2019-01-01 keywords: - Shadowmatch - behavioural science - behavioral science - workplace success - human behaviour - human behavior - behavioural habits - behavioral habits - habits - workplace psychology - organisational behaviour - organizational behavior - recruitment - talent acquisition - employee development - leadership - leadership development - succession planning - team building - behavioural assessment - behavioral assessment - personality - workplace fit - job fit - career success - career development - performance management - people analytics - purpose - purpose-driven development - happiness - relationships - personal development - self-development - ego strength - failure prevention - success - motivation - psychology - cognitive psychology - social psychology - developmental psychology - behaviourism - neuroscience - workplace culture - employee wellbeing - human potential - decision making - resilience - organisational development --- # Shadowmatch Success for All --- title: Cover --- Shadowmatch Pieter de Villiers Success for all Pretoria 2019 --- title: Publication Information --- ## Published in South Africa by De Villiers Bester & Associates (BDA) First Edition Copyright and Author: Pieter de Villiers, 2019 The rights of the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of South Africa. All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying. Recording, or by any other means, without the prior written permission of author and the publisher of this book. Layout by Minuteman Press Hatfield 158 Gordon Rd, Colbyn, Hatfield Cover Design: Michelle de Villiers michelle@gapcognition.co.za Mobile 072 241 4188 Cartoons by Colin Daniel colindanielcartoonist@gmail.com Publisher DBA, 191 Allcock Street, Colbyn Pretoria, 0083 +27 (0)12 430 2431 --- title: Table of Contents --- ## Shadowmatch ## Success for all! | Introduction and Background on the Development of Shadowmatch | 6 | |--------------------------------------------------------------------------|-----| | Success and failure define us | 8 | | Success and failure: An early development framework of habits | 12 | | A critical series of perceived failures must be prevented at all cost | 13 | | The Turning Point | 14 | | A new question | 17 | | The purpose of life and the Shadowmatch system | 19 | | The Behavioral Foundation of Shadowmatch | 21 | | Patterns of Behavior: Habits | 21 | | A few basics | 21 | | Behavior as contextual | 21 | | How to match the working environment to people most suitable for the job | 23 | | Underlying reasons for failure | 24 | | Habits define the inner strength of a person | 25 | | Importance of relationships and workplace success | 26 | | Success in the Workplace: A Holistic Approach | 28 | | I know | 28 | | I can | 29 | | I fit | 30 | | Shadowmatch: Purpose Driven Development | 30 | | Return on Employment | 31 | | Optimal Placements | 32 | | Employee Development | 33 | | Building Better Teams | 38 | | Personal Well-being | 39 | | Successful Relationships: A Critical Building Block for Happiness | 41 | | Relationship frames and relationship types | 41 | | Relationship Types: Examples and challenges | 43 | | Friendship | 43 | | Business relationships | 45 | | Co-habitation | 46 | | Love relationship | 46 | | Parent-child relationship | 47 | | Marriage | 48 | | Teacher-learner relationship | 49 | | Family relationships | 50 | | A Better Understanding of Habits | 52 | | The basic position | 52 | | We always act | 52 | | Our actions tend to become patterns | 52 | | Neural patterns are 'endless' in their numbers and complexities deeper than expected | 53 | | Change by doing | 55 | | Theoretical Framework of the Shadowmatch System | 57 | | The Unconscious/Subconscious | 57 | | Cognitive Psychology | 58 | | Development Psychology | 59 | | Parapsychology | 59 | | Social Psychology | 60 | | Neuro Psychology | 60 | | Behaviorism | 61 | | Case Studies | 63 | | Recruitment | 63 | | Team Rejection | 65 | | Habits as a Behavioral Switchboard | 69 | | Future Research and Development | 72 | | References and recommended reading | 74 | --- title: Preface --- Clients have used Shadowmatch over many years to help them improve the way they engage with people in the workplace. Shadowmatch is instrumental in assisting people in distress, enhancing relationships between individuals and for many more applications. Mr. Nelson Mandela once said that things seem impossible until it's done. This is true of every challenging endeavor we undertake. A few years ago, thinking about humanity's progress in all aspects of science - things we now regard as normal everyday technology was regarded as impossible. It is fascinating how quickly things become normal, routine, part of everyday life and how the unthinkable is suddenly routine. Actions become habits very easily and we forget how fantastic it actually is. Just think of the many fantastic things in life we got used to as part of the ordinary, routine and everyday life. Even people performing wonderful things sometimes talk about the work they do as a mundane everyday low impact event or action. Let's list a few examples. The day the first television broadcast happened it created headlines and was breaking news. People could send a motion picture from one place to another without any physical connection between the sending and receiving devices. Now, millions of people all over the world can watch a sports event live and very few are aware of how challenging it was to get it right. Cellular phones, aircraft, space travel, organ transplants and many more. This is what we experience with Shadowmatch. People working with it every day can easily become trapped in the mundane, this is just another Shadowmatch result. It is easy to forget how wonderful people are, how intriguing our unique behavioral patterns are, how we apply our habits to find meaning and happiness and how sadly our habits can sometimes make it difficult for us to live a meaningful, happy life. When people see the system for the first time, we often experience that they are blown away. And then the question we get most often: "Who built the system, where does it come from and why was it built? How did it happen that somebody could think of this as a way to help prevent failure, build success and contribute to the happiness of all?" It didn't happen out of thin air. It was a long journey. Certain paradigms that were well established have been challenged and new ideas have been tested. It is important to know that the underlying philosophy behind Shadowmatch is about purpose and meaning in life. The Shadowmatch position is that the ultimate purpose of life is to be happy in a healthy way and that it doesn't have a negative effect on other forms of life. The immediate next point to be made is the conviction that everybody must be in a position to be happy. The notion that happiness is just for the wealthy, healthy and beautiful, is not part of the Shadowmatch approach. The purpose of this, the second book on Shadowmatch, is to tell the story of the development of the system, to deal with questions that could not be answered during the process as well as the questions that could be answered but were never regarded as important. Now, after many years, the Shadowmatch team is aware of the fact that some of the questions that were regarded as less important are actually very important and they must be answered. --- title: Introduction and Background of the Development of Shadowmatch --- The founder of the Shadowmatch system and author of the working capabilities of the system completed his academic studies to become a minister of religion in the reformed Christian tradition. He will now tell the story as a journey of learning and development and in doing so explain the Shadowmatch system as well as the theoretical position that underpins the system: I started working as a young minister with an interest in youth ministry. I was given the opportunity to focus on this ministry in the congregation where I served but I was also involved in the broader youth ministry of the church. Early during my career, I became intrigued about the increase in suicidal behavior among young members of urban congregations. There was also an increase in the number of young people with symptoms of anxiousness and even serious anxiety attacks. I decided to embark on a research project in collaboration with teachers, university student support services and ministers in the church who were involved with youth ministries. The research was frustrating because we couldn't identify a trend based on age, intelligence, language, gender, social affiliations, income groups or success in the school, college or university. The last point is important. Symptoms of anxiety and suicidal behavior were found among top performers, average performers as well as poor performers. The research ended without any meaningful directive and it was stopped. I had access to the data and started reading the short counseling notes from counseling sessions with young people who had suicide tendencies and symptoms of depression. It was during this reading that I became aware of a trend. It was a trend that we didn't process during the data analysis phase because we didn't ask for this information to be captured. The majority of cases shared a perceived single event of failure or a trend of perceived/real failures in their lives. I realized that it is not about the facts. We made the mistake of working with the facts. In other words, we asked questions about their successes in school, college and university, in sports and other activities as well as other performance based activities. If someone would report a profile of success we didn't ask any deeper questions about the relationship between perceived success and real success. I will explain with a case study. I got involved with a family who lost a child as a result of suicide. She was the head girl of her high school, number one tennis player in the school, winner of the senior high school beauty contest and on track to get distinctions in all academic subjects. She committed suicide and left a letter. She asked everybody's forgiveness for the fact that she failed them so badly and she described her inability to deal with her emotions as a failure despite the fact that she has tried so hard not to fail. What was the failure? She failed her practical test for her driver's license. This experience was such a devastating moment that she collapsed and ended her life. I realized that it is not about the facts, it is about a subjective experience and a perceived impact of failure. I restarted the research and a few colleagues and teachers helped. I soon discovered that all our subjects reported a single high impact failure or a series of failures that compromised their perception of themselves and made them feel useless and unacceptable to parents, teachers, lecturers, colleagues, friends, family, employers and social groups. This was the insight I got: If someone allows a failure to absorb them, that person is in serious trouble and a happy, positive and progressive life can easily become a bridge too far. This happens when the perception of who I am and what I am capable of become part of the failure. For me, this was the breakthrough that gave me energy to ask the next question: what can we do to help young people overcome failures? I worked relentlessly on this question for about two years. I could not find one solution to solve the problem. Yes, counseling helped a bit, advice and motivational influences also helped. Storytelling and creating a new or alternative life-story had a bit of value. Neuro-linguistic re-programming was very helpful to bring short term improvements for people in distress. But nothing erased the effect of a seriously high impact experience of failure as it is perceived by the subject. I worked with individuals who successfully dealt with serious failures and I could learn some very strong indicators on how they dealt with it. The problem was that I could not teach these techniques to those who got entangled in their own failures. I then decided to quit and start with a new approach. A new question and a fresh beginning: How do we prevent failure? I decided to work with prevention. The reason for me was my conviction that failure can destroy the inner fiber of an individual - I don't even know what this exactly means - with such intensity that recovery becomes a perceived impossibility. The question of prevention turned out to be much more complex than I thought. Despite these complexities I still decided that a prevention strategy should be better. ## Future research... Who am I, what am I capable of and how strong am I in the face of challenges? The long road with Shadowmatch and many counseling sessions with individuals, groups, families, successful people and people who were destroyed by the challenges made me think long and hard. Currently I'm working on a better understanding of the process that makes some people very strong when it comes to dealing with the challenges of everyday life. I'm puzzled by the fact that some people deal with extreme challenges very successfully while others just collapse. I have worked with people in a group who deal with challenges very successfully and have come across a few individuals who actually became very successful because of failure. Others I worked with collapsed to the point of suicide as a result of the same failure that turned others into successes that are to be admired. To say that it all relates to the way they grew up is very vague. Then to say that it is just the way we are, is in my mind a serious cop-out from the question. Just a few examples. I worked with two young men. Both were fired by their respective employers. The one gave up on life, became dependent on his parents and family, suffered depression and could not get himself back in a job for many years. The other one started his own business and became a wealthy business owner. They were almost the same age, same gender, same suburb and same level of qualifications. I also worked with two women both in their mid-40's. One had two children the other had three. Their marriages became compromised and they went through divorces. The one ended up in a psychiatric hospital, suffered serious depression, was unable to recover and eventually had to live with family taking care of her. The other one started working as an estate agent and within three years she had her own estate agency business, got married again and lived a successful happy life. What makes the difference? My current thinking is that we build an index of personal strength based on the balance between our successes and perceived failures. If our index of perceived failures outnumbers and outweighs our index of successes, we develop a compromised ego strength and we are at risk. The opposite is also true. But I'm still thinking and working on this. Until I reach a point that convinces me otherwise, I will work with this theory-in-the-making ## Success and failure define us If an individual has a history of perceived failures, it becomes part of their habits, it compromises their perception of self-worth, destroys their ability to take a strong position of being capable, it disturbs their balanced approach to challenges they face and eventually these people develop all kinds of behavioral patterns to cover up their inner experience of inferiority. An inflated position of being perfect can however develop when a child is always told that everything he or she does, is perfect. This however is also a symptom of a subjective position of inferiority. (There is a difference between a genuine, proven experience of capable people compared to those without any substance to their feelings of personal strength. The latter is purely because they were told how smart they are without any real success). I will touch on this later but the sooner we learn the facts about losing and winning, the better for a balanced position of relative inner strength. I came to the understanding that we must learn to successfully fail. This is applicable to adults, teenagers and especially children. If parents do not teach their children how to successfully fail, the ego position of the child/early adult becomes either artificially inflated or compromised and they then take a position that is out of balance with the impact of failure on their own well-being. Once this happens, it also impacts the well-being of other people close to them. Our personal well-being is very reliant on the way we process failure. I now need to explain what I mean by "failing successfully". All people, especially children, must learn that failure does not define who we are. If you fail in mathematics, it doesn't mean that you are a failure as a person. They must learn the wonderful opportunities failure presents. We learn how things should not be done. Next on our list of important aspects of successful failure is to divorce from it. We shouldn't take any failure with us, we must leave it behind. We should also teach children and young adults that fear of failure, not trying again and again, makes you weak. Strong people are those who keep on trying until they get it right. Then lastly, failure teaches us the joy of improvement and success. On failing relationships, we need to be more careful. This carries intense emotional content. The best way to help people deal with a failed relationship is to help them understand that a relationship between two people consists of three entities. Person A, person B and the relationship as a bonding agent between A and B. If the bonding agent fails it doesn't define a failure of either A or B. It is like two pieces of wood we glue together. If the glue fails, it has nothing to do with the quality of the wood. The same recipe for the processing of failure must be taught: Leave, learn, laugh and live! I will briefly explain these four behavioral strengths that will enable us to deal with failure: Leave: Once you experience a failure, turn away from it. Live your life in a way that ensures physical and emotional distance from the failure. Don't discuss it too much. Get busy with something positive if you experience that thoughts of the failure keep creeping up on you. Leave the failure behind and don't revisit it in any way! We must do everything possible to get failure out of our psychology and out of our lives. I'm critical of the practice that the individual who suffered failure must tell the story to counselors, family and friends again and again and again. It reinforces the experience of failure without any positive outcome. Learn: Spend some time and list a few positive things you've learned from the failure. Answer the following question: If one of our purposes in life is to learn in order to grow, what did I learn from this failure? What can I pick from this failure that I could take with me as important learning. Laugh: I came to the conclusion that laughter is one of the most powerful ways of dealing with failure. If parents could help their children to honestly and with freedom laugh at failure, they have helped to set them free from the risk of becoming a victim of the failure. We must however be aware that some failures cannot be brought to the point of laughter. These events should not be labeled as a failure but as a trauma and should be treated differently. Laughing at our own failures is the ultimate position of victory! Live: The big challenge with failure is the risk of being psychologically paralyzed. The individual ceases to progress. In their minds, life has come to an end. They don't have energy, interest or any drive to keep going. This must be prevented at all cost. Careful. Don't talk about a failure or setbacks too much. What you do is repeat the pain and experience and by doing so you are building stronger patterns of the experience and more intense designs of being trapped and strangled in the experience of failure. It could even become a habit of thinking and talking about the painful experience. When this happens, people are easily trapped in the failure and it becomes impossible to leave it behind. It also becomes impossible to live a new life away from it. Living your life away from the failure in a psychological place that is isolated from the failure as well as a physical space away from the physical place of failure, is indeed a matter of running away from it. The traditional notion that it will come back later to haunt you, is not true. I couldn't find any scientific credible research to prove that. Failures haunt us when we keep on living in the failure. When we allow the failure to control us. When we keep our bodies and our thinking busy with new opportunities, new activities and even new circles of friends if necessary, we allow the experience of the failure to fade and eventually die. The important aspect is to live an active positive life. Failure should not paralyze us. We must actively build new content of success and fulfillment. ## Success and failure: An early development framework of habits Although we continuously learn new habits, and we change the way we understand and experience our environment, the basic neural paths in the brain that define the patterns of our behavior are formed from an early age. These patterns can change over time but some of the deeply embedded patterns do not easily change. In some instances, I have experienced the patterns of behavior to be permanent. It sounds negative but it is real: Well developed patterns of behavior (habits) do not change. We can easily learn new ones and try to live according to new patterns but when we are in the same situation with the same contextual challenges that previously triggered a specific behavioral pattern, we tend to fall back into old habits. It is important to understand this phenomenon when we work with people. People must learn that not everything they do is always a success. We are not all winners. Children must also learn how to self-solve problems without the help of anybody. They must learn to struggle. We are not equally good at solving all problems. Some of us must work very hard and for some it is easy. This is normal and the child must be comfortable with this reality. All people must learn to successfully fail. We must be failure-fit! If we are not failure-fit, if we experience failures as disasters, or when failure becomes an unacceptable extension of our own identity, we are in trouble. This is when people develop all kinds of cover-up behaviors. They become insecure, their courage to try new things dwindle and it becomes impossible for them to design new concepts. Their ability to take a strong position of conviction is compromised and eventually they tend to suffer from a chronic inferiority persona. (This we can describe as a continuous feeling of not presenting my identity as good enough). ## A critical series of failures must be prevented at all cost I became obsessed with the issue of failure. I started to understand the impact of failure on the development of healthy, balanced, successful and happy people. I became frustrated because I could not find any method or intervention to prevent failure. Two areas of failure dominated my thinking. Work-related failures and relationship failures. These were the two areas that stood out as the most critical ones in terms of the numbers of failures I worked with as well as the impact it had on individuals. --- title: The Turning Point --- ## A moment that changed my life... In my search for answers I focused on young people who experience difficulties to function properly. I became known in the church as well as the schools and community where I worked for helping young people who couldn't find their way towards a meaningful life. Then something very interesting happened. I started working with a (then) 20-year-old girl who left school as a top performer. She went to university to study engineering. It was a big university, in a big city, known to be very tough and, in her words, a place where students were numbers. She failed all subjects. She became depressed and suicidal with very intense anxiety attacks at night. This was diagnosed by a psychiatrist and she was given antidepressant drugs. Although this treatment helped a lot, as soon as she stopped using it, the symptoms returned. The situation became very serious for the girl, her siblings and the parents. I then started the counseling process and soon realized that her situation was as a result of this failure. I could describe the problem, explain it, help her to understand it, help her parents to understand it, involve the family as a close support system, work on alternative career possibilities, let her talk through her experiences etc. Despite this, I could not help her solve the underlying problem. This was a Compromised Ego (She said: 'I am weak, I've lost my ability to fight, l've lost my energy to stand up against any challenge'). (Please read this again. When I refer to a Compromised Ego Position, come back to this sentence: I'm weak, l've lost my ability to fight, l've lost my energy to stand up against the challenges of life'). She decided to embark on a world tour and despite her parents being very stressed about her well-being, they allowed her to go. She came back stable, but not strong. She still had to use the medication. She decided to apply for the same degree at a different university. This time a small university located in a small town. During the first three months, all her symptoms disappeared. She wrote her first exam and was among the top performers in her class. I stayed close to her and at the end of her third year of success I asked her: 'What made you fail at the first university and what made you succeed at the second?' Her answer shocked me: 'I didn't fail at the first university, they failed. I experienced the first university to be hostile, impersonal, cold and aloof. Where I study now, I experience support, personal interest from lecturers and senior students, people are warm and friendly'. I then realized that success is not a function of the individual, it is a function of how the individual engages with the environment. It has very little to do with the task, it has everything to do with the way the person experiences the environment. People do not plan to fail. They don't intentionally act to be a failure. We must however be aware that some individuals try to paint their failures as successes. This is when they experience such intense pain as a result of their failures that they paint it into their perceived success stories. This is a symptom of a Compromised Ego Position. A sad story: I worked with a young man who became involved with a drug gang. They kept themselves busy with all kinds of criminal activities, drug dealing, stealing, low impact robberies etc. They were very proud of their 'successes' and they were heroes in their own mirrors. Then they were all caught by the police and one of them was the son of parents who lived in the congregation where I worked as the minister. I had long and many sessions with him. He failed in school, failed in sports activities, failed in his relationship with a girlfriend and became the outcast of the successful social groups in high school and the community in general. He then became friends with one of the gang members. They challenged him with drug carrying work and he pulled it off successfully. What he had to do was to carry drugs through a security area at a casino and hand it over to a buyer. On his return to his fellow gangsters, they celebrated his 'success' and that was his first experience of winning and celebrating success. Now he was trapped. He became addicted to the "success" of criminality. Over a period of about two years and many counseling sessions I could eventually get to the bottom of the issue. He was an artist and extremely talented in creative arts, drawing, painting, sculpture etc. But his parents, the high school academic community and the family never allowed him to do it. It was a social system that humiliated art and glorified science and business. At the age of nine, he painted a picture of their house. He spent three weeks painting it without anybody knowing so that he could surprise his parents with his art. When he showed it to his father, the father tore it to pieces and said to him: 'Don't you have anything meaningful to do? Why don't you rather do your mathematics? Art will never bring you anywhere! It is a waste of valuable time'. This single incident was possibly the inflection point when he realized that what he loves, prefers to do and experiences as success is not good enough. He then came to the conclusion that it is not the art, but his life that has been rubbished. It took three years in jail with extreme trauma and pain for him to start recovering at the age of 29. The question was: what will help him to recover? The answer: Art! This was indeed his recovery path. He started drawing in jail. The authorities allowed and supported his talent in creative arts, something his parents failed to do. The truth is that a single high-impact failure has the potential to destroy a life! The conclusion seemed to be simple: I have to determine what environment is preferred by whom. There must be a way to ensure that people work in an environment where they experience positivity given each individual's unique preference. It took me more than a year to realize that this is not possible. I came to the conclusion that the complexities are beyond my intellectual capabilities. I had to try something different. I will try to explain. If we take an individual and his/her preferred working environment, the following headline characteristics of preferences must be determined. Not only its presence and/or absence, but also the relative intensity of the presence. Working with problems or where there are very few problems to be resolved. What kind of problems do we prefer? Working with people and their challenges or with people and their potential? Working with people as colleagues or clients...or learners, young or adult? Technical and practical work or abstract? What kind of technical and how complicated should it be? If abstract: creative or teaching? Or maybe design or implementation? Indoors or outdoors? Maybe with animals? Farming or wildlife or perhaps as a hunter or a veterinarian? In a busy or a quiet place? Noise or silence? Adventure type work and to what level of intensity? Repetitive or dynamic? Or both, how much of each? High risk or low risk? How do we measure an undefined risk intensity so that we measure what we intend to measure? To compound the complexity of this even more: The individuals I worked with in my efforts to get a match between the preferences of a workplace couldn't answer the questions. They didn't know what their preferences were! But there is more: Some of these headline preferences have sub-realities. Let's take two examples: Working with people and their challenges or with people and their potential... People could refer to children, teenagers, adults or elderly people. Challenges could refer to learning and development, medical, emotional, trauma, career counseling or even counseling of a religious/spiritual nature. Or it could be in the motivational space, sports psychology, teaching etc. In a busy or a quiet place? Noise or silence? What is the content of busy? Streets with people, many activities to attend to, busy like on a farm where there are deadlines due to seasonal changes, an office where nothing is said because everybody is busy, under pressure and trying to meet deadlines? Eventually I gave up. The complexities were beyond my capabilities. ## A new question... I adopted a philosophy that worked for me. I decided that, if I can't answer a question, I need to change the question. I must take a different approach to this challenge. Why are some people successful in a work context and other people fail despite the fact that their skills and qualifications are very similar? I realized that my focus was on the wrong people. I only worked with and dedicated my time to those who experienced difficulties to function in a happy, successful and meaningful manner and all of them had a history of failures. I then shifted my focus to get a better understanding of those people who were successful at what they do. I have spent many hours trying to identify what makes successful people different to those with a history of failures. I could not identify one single trait that defines success. Some very intelligent people failed and some were successful. Some people from very poor families failed and some were successful. Some extroverts were successful some of them failed. I even worked with an individual that was highly qualified and extremely skilled but failed. Skills do not protect you from failure. I can carry on with this list. One aspect became clear: Successful people had behavioral patterns that engaged the demands of the environment in a positive, productive and progressive manner. Those who failed had behavioral patterns that prevented them from functioning freely in the environment where the work has to be done. Success and failure are the results of the interaction between the behavioral patterns of the individual and the behavioral demands from the environment. I will explain this with a few case studies from my research phase. The names have been changed. Christopher was a very successful high school student. He had strong leadership qualities, good academic results and he was very motivated for a successful university degree that would put him in a strong leadership position. Christopher had a few prominent behaviors: Very innovative, free thinking, he was a good problem solver but not in the normal way of solving problems. He was low on discipline and routine. He actively resisted routine. His discipline and adherence to rules in a regulated environment were weak. Christopher failed at university. He changed the direction of his academic studies, and failed again. He became friends with someone working in the advertising industry and visited this person at work. He decided that he wanted to work where this friend works. He went to the agency and told them that he is willing to work without a salary to show them his passion for advertising. Christopher became the best advertising script writer and he won many accolades in this industry. His innovation, free thinking and different approach to problems were the behaviors necessary for his advertising career, but it was the reason for his failure at university. Jo-Anne was a young primary school teacher. She hated her job. Her energy levels were low, her relationships became troubled and she decided to resign. She knew she wanted to work with people in a helping capacity. She was offered a job in customer service. This was face-to-face, helping walk-in clients to resolve account queries in retail. She lasted for three months, resigned and started to show behavior of repetitive failure. During discussions, I realized that she still wants to work with people in a helping capacity but not as a teacher and not in customer service. I then decided to do a series of analytical counseling to better understand her frustrations. During this time, she was appointed as a coordinator at an events management company. She had to plan and organize events for companies and manage their needs during the event. She was very positive about her new job. She worked with people and every event was different. This enthusiasm lasted for about four months. Her frustration levels reached a point where she decided to resign. I discovered a single point of failure: Jo-Anne had very low problem solving behavioral patterns. She had a pattern of either handing problems to other people or she would ignore it. Sometimes she would postpone resolving it or just give up on it and if at all possible work around the problem. All the above jobs were related to handling problems, solving them, explaining them and by doing so, finding a solution with the client. She was unable to do it. I recommended her to try find a job where she works with people but not with problems. If at all possible, she should work where problems are minimal. Jo-Anne started the search for a new job. She found a vacancy at a game lodge where she had to show people the lodge, show them the animal recovery area, explain to visitors how to best manage their time to see the game at the river, where to go for bird-watching etc. Jo-Anne was very successful, she worked there for twelve years and eventually resigned because her husband decided to go farming on the family estate. One absent behavior, that of working with problems - of which Jo-Anne was unaware of - pushed her to the brink of chronic failure because she didn't know what caused the repetitive failures and frustrations I have now learned that the success of an individual is largely determined by the way the individual engages with the task in a specific environment under specific conditions. To determine what behaviors are necessary for success in which working environments, is only possible if we could determine what are the behavioral patterns shared by those who have been doing the job successfully over a period of time at a specific place under specific conditions. One of the best ways to explain this is to study the success of sales people. The idea that a successful sales person can successfully sell anything to anybody under any condition is not true. Anybody who thinks that selling expensive cars to high-income clients and selling clothes to low-income clients are the same and success is driven by similar behaviors makes a serious mistake. Now that Shadowmatch is a working tool we have numerous case studies to prove the fact that success in one company as (for instance) a sales person (or engineer, teacher, administrator, programmer, technician, lawyer etc.) is no guarantee for success at the next company. The principles and practices for success in the workplace will be discussed in full detail later. I have now reached a critical point in my efforts to better understand success and failure. My aim is to prevent a pattern of failures resulting in an individual being so compromised that a meaningful life and happiness become impossible. I came to the conclusion that a pattern of failures is so destructive that we must work towards prevention. Once somebody has reached a certain breakpoint, it becomes almost impossible to recover and a very dim future awaits the person trapped in this pattern. Not only for the individual that is trapped. Families, friends and colleagues also experience the negative energy of living and working with the frustrated failure-trapped person. I have now set myself a very clear goal: to prevent the build-up of failure in the two areas where people – according to my research and experience – are most vulnerable to fall into a pattern of high-impact failures: Their careers and their relationships. These two areas now absorbed my time and research. I fully understand that other areas of our personal lives can seriously compromise our happiness, but these two were the ones I have decided to focus on. ## The purpose of life and Shadowmatch Before I explain how the Shadowmatch system works, I need to explain my philosophy and motivation to spend all my available time and energy to develop the system. I am convinced that the purpose of our lives is to be happy. I'm a hedonist. I do not buy into any other philosophy than the conviction that the ultimate purpose in life is to enjoy, laugh, admire the wonderful world we live in and to find meaning and fulfillment in the joy of freedom, success and laughter. To experience an abundance of energy to fully live and enjoy life as an individual and as a community. This became my goal: to build a system that will help people find more of the above. In our search for happiness, the work we do every day and the relationships we have with those around us are critical factors to either build our fulfillment or destroy it. Because of my personal criticism of definitions, I tend not to define concepts. I do however understand that definitions play an important role in an academic environment and I do from time to time define specific concepts I work with. But I don't like it. With that in mind, I see happiness as a unique combination of the following: A healthy life, full of energy and love, filled with laughter and positive progress. It is the experience of fulfillment, positive contributions to the lives of others, a strong sense of self value and a community of respect and dignity. We need to add a few critical abilities to our list of building blocks for a happy life. These are the inner strength to deal with failures in a positive way, the absence of harm to anything or anybody as well as a position of personal value so strong that possible insults and humiliation from those living outside the philosophical circle of happiness, will not influence us. Happiness is free of fear, free of envy and freedom from wanting more than what you have earned. The dark side of happiness is very easy to understand. Nobody can build happiness based on the blood and tears of other people. Nobody can build happiness by taking from others. Nobody can build happiness in their personal or collective position as a community with hate, revenge or destruction. The dark side of happiness is hell! You build it yourself. Anybody who lives in the illusion that happiness, success and prosperity can be at the expense of others will discover the hell of false happiness. Anybody who has the faintest idea that his/her happiness can be at the emotional or physical expense of others will discover the severe punishment life brings to those who sow pain in any direct or indirect way into the lives of other people. --- title: The Behavioral Foundation of Shadowmatch --- ## Patterns of behavior: Habits It is general knowledge that our behavior is determined by the neuron structures in the brain. This viewpoint has been accepted by neuro-scientists. Our current knowledge makes it impossible to differ from this point of view. The second accepted position is that all our behaviors tend to form patterns. If there is no pattern in the brain to do something, it has to either learn a pattern or it has to use other related patterns to try and do the job or to engage the challenge. Because of this, we can easily predict behavior if we could determine how well the neural paths in the brain have been established. All variants that influence our behavior are processed by the brain and the actual result of everything manifests in what we do. I have decided that the most reliable theoretical system to work with is that of the behaviorists and the part that works best for me is academically known as Second Wave Behaviorism. In recent years behaviorism got unexpected support from the neuro-scientists. They research the working of the brain as an electro-chemical biological computer (my terminology) that commands behavior. This research brings a new understanding of how we understand behavior. ## A few basics We learn how we do everything. Despite the theory about genetics, talented people and young people with extraordinary skills like music and sport, the majority of our behavior, is learned behavior. The brain works predominantly with patterns of behavior based on neural paths. In simple terms, there is a group of neurons (active brain cells) working together to instruct our bodies to do certain things like talking, walking, singing, driving a car, laughing etc. ## Behavior as contextual Our senses (visual, audio, taste, skin, smell) send information to the brain. This information is processed and the brain reacts to it by instructing the body to act. Although it is clear that some behavioral patterns are somewhat disconnected from the context, the vast majority of our behaviors are contextual. We engage with the environment and we react according to the environment. Behavior is therefore mostly contextual. Keep in mind that if someone behaves in a way that doesn't consider the contextual reality and it doesn't create logical, constructive and meaningful engagement with the environment, those who do engage with the environment in a meaningful, constructive and logical way, will reject the ones who don't. We could argue that behavior that doesn't consider the environmental realities are abnormal. In my experience, abnormal behavior is a pattern of behavior that is actively rejected by the majority of society where the 'abnormal' individual grew up and lived his life. A second aspect of abnormal behavior is when a person behaves in a way that is disconnected from the environment. An extreme example would be if someone tries to play golf on a tennis court. Or if someone would go swimming in one of the offices at work. When the behavior of an individual doesn't take full consideration of the environment, such behavior must be seen as problematic. There are less intense examples still tolerated by society. People who drive their cars on a public road whilst under the influence of alcohol is one such example. Or parents who shout, scream and physically punish their children in public (or anywhere in my mind). These are contextual insensitive behaviors that should be frowned upon. It is important for our future discussion on Shadowmatch to fully understand the fact that our behavior is contextual. If for example someone has strong behavioral patterns of living and working as part of a team, working together to get things done with strong support from those doing the job collaboratively, and that individual now has to work without such support and collaborative energy, he/she can become compromised and success will not be optimal. Let's look at just a few linear examples like this and then a few more complex ones. Imagine a job of collecting outstanding payments from clients who are frustrated with the work that they feel has not been done properly and they refuse to pay. Every client is frustrated and on the verge of being aggressive. The majority of interactions with these clients are conflict handling intense. Employee named 'Mr. Kind' grew up in a family where no conflict ever became a challenge. He never had to deal with conflict and during his school career he worked in such a way that he never became part of an intense conflict situation. He has very weak patterns of experience in conflict handling. His job is now saturated with conflict. It is not difficult to understand that he will easily become stressed and his success could be compromised. Why? Because his deeply embedded habits are not conducive for the job. The following is more than just an example. It is actually a case study. This (let's name her as Charmaine) person worked in the finance department of a big company. She was not successful, unhappy and very frustrated with her job. One of her key performance areas was to find and fix differences between amounts paid by clients that are not the same as the amounts invoiced. Some of the differences are as a result of a problem is with the computer system. Clients hired expensive machinery from the business and the cost structure was complex and not without challenges. Charmaine had to continuously work with these discrepancies, find a solution and then get everything to balance. She had a resistance towards working with problems, especially problems related to numbers. She had no resilience to keep working on a problem if the solution is complex and challenging. Her habits were not suitable for the job. Charmaine became so stressed that she resigned without an alternative job and despite the fact that she was a single parent who faced the risk of being unemployed with no income. Now a more complex example. This individual is very resilient and has strong behavioral patterns of working with problems, solving them and finding innovative ways to get around problems or to solve them in a way that is new and fresh. He enjoyed writing new business processes. He enjoyed the design of processes where multiple functions have to come together, integrate and follow specific precision connectors to meet an automated production process and timeframes in a factory. Then he was offered a job in a business with very strict protocols and well-embedded processes that have been working for many years. These processes were not optimal but they worked. He was not allowed to redesign any of the processes. Eventually he was told by his seniors that he should stick to his job and not think about the things outside of his span of control. This frustrated him to the point where he was unable to do his job properly. His habits were not allowed to function. He resigned ## How to match the working environment to people most suitable for the job Let's go back to the question about the match between the working conditions and the person who will be a good fit to work in a specific environment under specific conditions. If we had twenty people applying for a job, how do we know who will fit into that job best, based on the behavior demands from the job and the working environment? I could not find a way to map the environment. I could also not successfully determine what preferences an individual has for an anticipated positive experience of a future working environment. What I knew was that some people are successful doing a specific job under specific working conditions and some people failed despite the fact that these two groups were equally well equipped for success based on knowledge and experience required for the job. So how do we match the behavior framework of the individual to the behaviors necessary to fit the job and the working environment? I decided to try and map the habits of people by asking general lifestyle questions and then I used a complicated algorithm to identify patterns in the answers provided by individuals. My thinking was and still is that the behavioral patterns of successful people doing a specific job under specific working conditions will incorporate the behavioral demands of the environment. Such a behavioral map will present both the habits of the individual as well as the behaviors required for sustainable success in a specific job under specific conditions. If I could compare the behavioral demands necessary for the working environment to the behavioral patterns of an individual who has ambition for that job under those specific working conditions, I could attempt to predict the anticipated success of the individual in that job. This was a frustrating, long and exhausting process. There were some specific challenges I had to work around. It was very difficult to find reliable performance data from employers. Finding people to participate in the study was equally frustrating. Eventually I decided to work with test groups and I was fortunate to get access to eight test groups of 50 people per group who shared similar working conditions in each group. I developed a method to gather performance data with a short peer review questionnaire and I got a lot of help from some of my very well qualified friends to do data correlation studies. In some instances, the data was a bit frustrating because the correlation between success and the results from my test groups who completed my worksheet, were not good. But I soon realized that there is a pattern. In jobs where people work just to survive, low-income jobs where minimal qualifications are necessary and people with very basic skills could learn the job in a week or less, the correlation between success and the worksheet results were not good. As the necessary skills and knowledge faculties increase in order to qualify for the job, the correlation between success in the job and results from the worksheet increased. Eventually I was satisfied that, for the majority of jobs, the results from the completed Shadowmatch worksheets and the actual performance of people in the job could in a reliable way be used to anticipate the success of new employees doing the same job under the same conditions. By using the relative shared intensity of habits of successful people in a job as a benchmark, I could help predict the success of new recruits doing the same job. But I could do something else: I could identify the reasons why some people were unable to perform optimally in a job by comparing their habits to the combined habits of the successful employees in the same job. ## Underlying reasons for failure Many of the challenges we face are related to the same single underlying predicament that forces an individual to become stressed, aggressive, frustrated, unable to perform optimally, sometimes even depressed, anxious, traumatized etc. When the person experiences his inner strength to be less than the challenge (obstacle), the person becomes insecure, fearful, stressed and sometimes just so deflated that he/she does not have the ability to face the problem, work with it and engage with it successfully. Once somebody experiences a pattern of failures or even one major failure, that individual could suffer various symptoms as a manifestation of a single problem. This single underlying problem in the majority of instances is a compromised ego position. In simple terms: The individual experiences his/her inner strength to handle the challenge they face, as inferior. 'The challenge is more than I'. If the individual experiences a series of failures and he/she internalizes these failures, the risk of a series of symptoms can develop. Failures are internalized when someone turns a failure into a self-identity reality. For example: If Jo fails an exam and he refers to this failure as the result of poor preparation or not attending critical lectures, the failure is still external. But if Jo fails the exam and then decides that he is not able to succeed, or he is not good enough for this, or he is not intelligent enough to be successful there is a risk that he internalizes the failure and turns it into an identity of the self: 'I'm a failure'. This is a challenge! It must be prevented at all cost and a responsible community must help individuals not to internalize their failures. Employers, teachers, parents, community leaders, lecturers and influential friends can play a critical role helping fellow community members to steer away from failure internalization. ## Habits define the inner strength of a person This may sound very strange. We have all seen and worked with many people, some of us sat with hundreds of troubled people in an effort to help them. Many readers of this book have a good understanding of the behavioral sciences. We have all watched people collapse. But many of us have seen people deal with immense problems and hardships in a surprisingly efficient and winning manner. Winston Churchill once said: 'If you are going through hell, keep going' I had many experiences of people who could go through hell and keep their position of strength intact. Sometimes we are surprised by the competent, strong and resilient way these individuals handle serious troubles in their lives. It is because of these realities that I came to the conclusion that our habits play a critical role in our experience of strength and a personal position of power. Let's say somebody has strong active habits of problem solving, innovation, resilience, taking ownership of things to be done and a high level of being conceptually active and successful towards working with complex problems. These habits are embedded in the brain as a cluster of strong enabling abilities. The result is a self-sense of inner strength, an ability to deal with challenges life may throw at the individual. Keep in mind, habits form predominantly by repetition. If someone successfully repeats these behaviors, a feeling of power takes shape in the mind of this individual. This we could call a strong sense of winning, success and personal strength. Back to the working environment. If the environment and the job someone has to do demands behavioral patterns more active than the habits of the individual, the individual runs the risk of always feeling weaker than the demands. If the habits of the individual are more active than what is necessary for the job, the individual becomes frustrated, a feeling of boredom and low levels of engagement could develop and the success of this individual becomes compromised sooner than the former example where the habits of the person are less active than what is necessary for the job. What must happen, is to find the best match between the habits of an individual and the habits necessary for success as presented by the habits of successful employees in the job. In a more theoretical frame of thinking, the behavioral patterns of the individual must be of equal intensity and repetition to the behavioral patterns necessary for the job. This we can only create in a reliable manner if we have a behavioral profile of successful people in the job. ## Importance of relationships and workplace success Let's understand the basics of successful relationships. People get along with each other because they approve of each other's behaviors. If people live in whatever type of relationship and the index of non-approved behaviors outnumber the index of approved behaviors, the relationship becomes compromised and at a point, the relationship becomes unbearable. Relationships that work positively have a major impact on the success of people. The opposite is as true. The question we have to answer is: What makes us approve each other's behavior and what makes us not approve it? It is all about diversity and similarities. When people do things in the same way, with near similar intensities, they tend to approve each other's actions. When people are different in the way they do things and the intensities with which they do it, they become uncomfortable with each other, eventually they disapprove the actions of each other and the relationship becomes troubled. A good example is when two people visit a coffee shop as friends. The one is soft kind and careful when dealing with mistakes other people make, the other is hard, abrasive and confrontational when someone makes a mistake. The difficult one gets served a cappuccino with cream instead of foam as ordered. He immediately starts to shout and scream at the waiter, demands to see the manager, makes a big noise and then tell everybody in the coffee shop how unacceptable it is. The softer person completely disapproves of this behavior but keeps quiet. Do you think their friendship will last? This happens in families, at work, in business and between loved ones. It is a red light that could compromise the happiness and success of people. I would like to explain the specific importance of successful relationships in the workplace with a short case study. I worked with someone who is qualified as a clinical psychologist called Mandy (for the purpose of this example). She has a good understanding of relationships and how to keep it free from becoming toxic. She decided to join a group of psychologists working in a practice as specialists in Human Resource Management Support and Organizational Design. They consulted to some big companies and they worked as a team in support of each other to ensure the collective success of their business. They were about twenty psychologists in the business and shared an open space office with meeting rooms for smaller group-work sessions and interviews. The relationship between Mandy and one colleague became problematic. It deteriorated to the point where only one of them could be in the office at any given point in time. If the one is in the office for the day, the other works from home for that day. It had such a bad impact on the group that the directors asked both to rather leave the business. The reason for this was as a result of the impact this negative relationship had on the success of the remaining group. The two individuals in the troubled relationship suffered all kinds of illnesses, absenteeism and even difficulties in doing the most basic things at work. The people we work with are the largest contributors to our experience of the working environment. This is why the Shadowmatch way of comparing the habits of the individual to the habits of successful employees in a job makes so much sense. Remember, the combined profile of the successful people in a job provides us with a workplace behavioral map as well as a behavioral map of successful people who will define the workplace relationships. If we match new recruits to this benchmark, we match them to the behaviors necessary for the job, the behaviors most conducive for the working environment as well as to the people who they have to work with. By doing this, we kill three birds with one stone. First is to determine whether the person will be able to live up to the behavioral demands of the workplace. Secondly, to determine whether the habits of the individual fit the general behavioral demands of the working environment and thirdly, to determine whether the person will be a good colleague working with the successful employees currently in the job. These three factors could form as much as 90% of the success foundation in the job. --- title: Success in the Workplace: A Holistic Approach --- In order to understand success in the workplace, we need to take a broader perspective than behavioral habits only. A simplified approach with a good understanding of the practicalities of success works best for me. This is how I try to understand this intriguing question. ## I know! Success in any job requires a certain level of knowledge. This is always the case when people must do a job. Even the most basic job has a knowledge content. Obviously, advanced jobs depend more on knowledge than jobs with lower levels of complexities. Knowledge is always abstract, theoretical and information based. People with knowledge about a job can answer questions in relation to the job. They understand the working mechanisms of the job and they might even be able to write papers about the way the job should be done. Does this mean that they can actually do the job? No! Let me explain. If someone writes all the theoretical exams to become a pilot, and maybe he/she has an engineering degree with aeronautical design as one main subject, does it warrant the person to be able to fly an airplane? No! For some jobs, the knowledge faculties necessary for success are extensive and critical. Pilots, medical doctors and nursing, engineers, architects, lecturers and other science-related jobs are examples of careers that are very dependent on theoretical knowledge. In none of these jobs is it true that sufficient knowledge makes you a competent practitioner of the work to be done. But, it is important to know that the knowledge necessary is a critical prerequisite for the job. It is the ticket to the match! The process to determine adequate knowledge for a job is relatively easy. Official qualifications and experience based learning can be tested and there are many ways to do this. It is important to understand a few basics with regards to the knowledge that is necessary for a job. Official qualifications are very valuable because a reputable institution like a university certifies that a person has successfully shown adequate knowledge of specific subjects to qualified levels of learning. The benefit of official qualifications is related to the fact that academic education teaches a student in a holistic way. Let me explain. If someone studies engineering, the very basic building blocks of structure, strength, mathematics, principles of design and many more are covered. The student builds a complete and broad understanding of engineering knowledge with a good understanding not only about how things work, but also why things work in a specific way. Official qualifications will always ensure in-depth knowledge. There is however a slight downside to this. Academic/theoretical learning tends to lack practical application of knowledge. In my recent work with universities and colleges I have experienced more emphasis on applied learning with compulsory practical work even in real world situations. This is to be commended. The other way of learning is experience based. The challenge with experience based learning is related to completeness. Did the individual learn all aspects of the subject or only those necessary for the specific focus area of experience? In most instances, experience based learning tends to teach the individual only the theory necessary to get on with a specific job. The benefit of experience based learning is related to the fact that it is practical, on the job and mostly well integrated with the skills necessary for success. In essence, if somebody doesn't know, success in the job is compromised. ## I can! This is always about a physical ability. The mechanics of execution! The ability to physically do the job in an efficient, fluent and successful manner. We refer to this as a skill. The pilot example works best. I have experience of flying with pilots with very limited theoretical knowledge but extreme aircraft handling skills. Handling of an aircraft with a feel for crosswinds and power limitations, height and ground speed is a skill. Yes, there is a lot of knowledge and experience based information involved to successfully land an aircraft in challenging weather conditions. Fact remains, handling the aircraft successfully is a physical skill. The Shadowmatch team developed a separate system that works along the same lines as Shadowmatch to determine what skills are necessary for success in a job. This system (Skillsgrid) uses the skills profile of successful people in a job to determine what skills are necessary to properly do the job. It matches the applicable skills of an individual to the skills necessary for the job and indicates the level to which an individual is adequately skilled to do the job. The experience is that successful employees doing the job over a period of time are the only reliable source to provide an accurate skills profile for a job. In some jobs, the absence of skills can be a disaster in the making. ## I fit! This is the most challenging part of workplace success. Does the individual experience the workplace as a positive, motivating and fulfilling environment? Does he/she fit the relationship network in a positive way? If this is not true, the success and productivity of the employee will be seriously compromised despite the fact that the person might be well qualified, with all the necessary knowledge and skills for the job. We all know about people with extreme knowledge and skills for a job not being able to successfully thrive in doing what they are qualified for. The reason is a disconnect or negative assimilation between the behavioral preferences, habits and ways of doing things and the working environment. Success in the workplace is about bringing harmony to the environment, job demands and the people. Somebody who doesn't fit is compromised and he/she is a performance liability for the team. --- title: Shadowmatch: Purpose Driven Development --- Shadowmatch has been built to help people in their search for meaningful relationships and success in the workplace and in their relationships away from the working environment. Unfortunately, this must be a collaborative and collective effort. People cannot take full ownership of their success and happiness. We live in an ever-shrinking personal space reality. Cities are overcrowded, companies increasingly push people into tight working spaces and most people live in a world where they are always in close proximity to others. Living spaces are sometimes divided by a curtain to separate families from each other. Keep in mind that mankind has difficulties in dealing with diversity and relationship challenges. This reality is at the core of many emotional problems people experience. Work has become a scarcity and too many companies employ people as production machines with minimal respect for their dignity, their need for personal fulfillment and happiness. Shadowmatch wants to help employers and employees to build a better index of success, fulfillment and happiness. This will always result in better business, higher productivity and improved customer service. The one thing a business cannot afford is a hostile relationship with its employees. Poor performance by a workforce is the most expensive cost of business. The workforce of a business is the business. The people are as important as clients. If you don't have customers, you don't have a business. If you don't have dedicated people building the business, the business is dead. Recruitment, optimal placement of people and employee development are the most critical functions for a sustainable and successful business. This is not possible if the workplace is experienced by employees as negative and hostile. It is not possible if employees have to work beyond reasonable hours, expectations can't be met and they do not have time to live a healthy and balanced life. Fact is, happy people are successful, success breeds success, respected employees respect the business and its clients. When employees experience an employer as abusive and exploiting, they turn into subtle destructive entities - in some instances not even subtle but explicit. A successful business must get four things right with regards to its people: Recruit optimally, retain the positive loyal energy of employees, develop employees to become their optimal best and display a practical tangible interest in the well-being of the people. This is the purpose of Shadowmatch. It enables a business to do this under the functional themes as described in the rest of this chapter. Keep in mind that Shadowmatch is a fully automated system and all functions are system-intelligent and real-time enabled. ## Return on Employment Cost of employment needs to be explained on a high level. This publication is not about the cost of running a business. It is however important to understand a few basic calculations. If a qualified, fully trained, skilled and successful employee resigns, that resignation costs the business three times the annual salary of the employee who resigned. This is a broad framework of the calculation: 1. Cost to write a job specification. 2. Cost to write the job advertisement. 3. Cost of advertising the vacancy. 4. Cost of screening applications. 5. Cost to conduct interviews (if internal employees do this, calculate the cost of their time against their salaries, as the minimum). 6. Cost of psychometric assessments, background checks and qualification verification. 7. The annual cost to company of the remuneration for this position (all benefits included in financial terms). 8. Floor space allocated for this job in monetary terms. 9. All technology provided to the individual to do the job. These include equipment such as computers, furniture, communication services (telephony, internet, virtual meeting equipment, etc.) Also include the proportional water and electricity cost here). 10. Proportional training facilities costs for the training that will be necessary. 11. Proportional allocation of full cost to company of training staff necessary to get the new employee fully trained and competent. 12. 10% of the cost to company of every employee with which the new recruit will engage every day (this is to take into account the cost that will be caused by employee dependency, as a minimum. For Information System Developers, it could be as high as 25%). 13. Cost of travel and parking space for the new employee. 14. If applicable, the cost of clothing (uniform). 15. Stationery. 16. Food, or where applicable, the proportional cost of subsidized food. 17. Proportional cost to company of the full management contingency above this new employee in terms of seniority. 18. The proportional cost for shared services such as security, human resources, cleaning services and employee entertainment and functions. 19. All bonuses paid to the employee in whatever form it might be. 20. All compulsory costs incurred for employing people such as workplace safety insurance, employee danger exposure insurance, etc. ## Optimal Placements The Shadowmatch system works with job and environment specific behavioral benchmarks made up of the behavioral habits of successful people doing the job. These benchmarks can be used to match the habits of job applicants to a job benchmark to determine whether the individual is a good fit for the job. It also provides a fully integrated interviewing system should the business decide to interview a candidate for the job. Fit for the job can be extended to also determine whether the individual has the skills necessary for the job. This can be done using the Skillsgrid system which is now an integrated part of the Shadowmatch system. In companies with multiple jobs/departments/business functions or branches, benchmarks should be created for each of the different jobs in the business. This enables the business to match the behavioral habits of an applicant to multiple jobs in order to find the optimal fit for the applicant in the business. This redefines our recruitment mindset. Instead of recruiting people for a job, we can now recruit people for the business. If the individual is of the caliber suitable for the business, finding the optimal place for the individual in the business is exactly what Shadowmatch can instantaneously do. A good example of how this function can be used is when a company has multiple branches where similar job types are replicated in each branch. Take sales people as an example. Different branches will ideally have different benchmarks made up of successful sales people in each specific branch. If a sales person now applies for a sales job, Shadowmatch will provide the recruitment team with a full analysis of which sales team in which branch will be most suitable for optimal success of the applicant. But optimal placing of employees is not only applicable to new recruits. If somebody in the business doesn't perform optimally, the Shadowmatch system can be used to determine why the success of the individual is compromised and it can be used to 'multimatch' the habits of the individual to all the benchmarks in the business with the aim to find a possible better fit for the employee somewhere else in the business. In addition to the above, the system is also fully enabled to manage optimal succession planning in a company. Once all jobs on all levels of the business have benchmarks, Shadowmatch can be used to create functional benchmarks. For example, a leadership benchmark. This provides a benchmark of how the successful leaders in a company behave. This benchmark can then be used to search for potential future leaders for the business by matching all employees to this leadership benchmark. Benchmarks can be created for different senior leadership and team leader positions in the business. The habits of junior employees can then be compared to that of the senior people to determine two important aspects for succession: Which senior position will be most in line with the current habits of potential future seniors and what succession development will be necessary. This unique capability provided by Shadowmatch, determines the precise development requirement necessary for each individual. (More on this when Employee Development is discussed.) The traditional people development practices of a blanket approach is questionable. Everybody must for example attend management training. The challenge is that person 'A' might need self-confidence development to be a good manager while person 'B' may need conflict handling development to become a good manager. This is where Shadowmatch is different. It recommends person specific, job specific and context specific development for each individual. ## Employee Development In business, the saying: 'Learn and lead or lag' is very apt. Stagnation has destroyed many successful companies. The word stagnation however, is not applicable to a company, it is applicable to people. People stagnate, not buildings or businesses. People in a business tend to build a collective comfort zone. If a business doesn't build a culture of continuous learning and development for employees, their knowledge of developments in the broader world of business lags. They keep on doing business as always and eventually they fall behind compared to innovative, future-ready companies and eventually the sustainability of the lagging company is compromised. Interestingly, very few business leaders see employee development as critical to the future success of their businesses. Some understand the principle but they do nothing to address it. Others tend to think it is the responsibility of each employee to do self-development. The number of business leaders who actively and in a scientific way invest in the development of their employees is minimal. This is a challenge, not only for the business itself but also for the business community. If the majority of companies suppress the development of their people, the broad business community will always recruit poorly developed employees. The argument not to develop employees because once they are trained and developed they tend to resign, reflects a problematic mindset of fear, poor employment practices, possible exploitation and limited insight into the reality of positive collective growth instead of selfish selective and exclusive growth. Shadowmatch enables a business to drive specific development programs for all employees by making Personal Development Programs available on 20 of the habits identified and quantified by the system. The Shadowmatch development initiative is based on four development principles found to be important for individual and collective success in a business. The first is related to Experience Based Learning. It is common knowledge that we learn much quicker from 'muscle to memory' than the other way around. We learn to walk by walking, swim by swimming, read by reading and so on. It seems like learning by doing is much more efficient than learning by knowing without doing. A few examples will clarify my conviction. If a person understands the mechanics of a golf ball, the engineering principles of all the golfing equipment and all the rules of the game, does it imply the person to be a good golfer? If we teach someone all the principles of conflict handling, does it make that person a good conflict handler? The Shadowmatch position is that learning is much more efficient if it is done by means of doing. This is why the Shadowmatch Personal Development Programs are all experience based learning. It forces the individual to do things, repeat, give feedback, change, do it again and again. A single example will explain. If an individual decides to do Problem Solving as a Personal Development Program, one of the learning phases will ask the learner to find three unsolved problems in his/her working environment. Describe the problems, discuss it with colleagues and find a solution to each. The next step will be to present the problems to colleagues and management with possible solutions and an implementation plan. By doing this, the second learning principle embedded in the Shadowmatch Personal Development Programs is adhered to. This is the principle of Context Specific Learning. The aim is for everybody to benefit directly from the development energy spent by the individual. The business must benefit and the employee must benefit. Every Personal Development Program focuses on the direct working environment of the individual. The example above demonstrates this as well. The tasks are always related to the direct and immediate working environment of the individual. A different example will explain in more detail. If an employee decides to do Conflict Handling as a Personal Development Program, one of the tasks will be to find a conflict situation somewhere in his/her immediate working environment. This might be conflict between two employees, conflict during a meeting or it might be between a customer service agent and a client. The program will then guide the employee to follow a specific process that will eventually resolve the conflict in an amicable manner. By doing this, the employee learns new behavioral patterns and the employer has a direct benefit as a return on the investment made to develop this person. Imagine how many work-related problems are solved if a company with 100 employees has 40 of them on Problem Solving as a Personal Development Program. The third on our list of employee development principles is about a Business Culture of Learning and Development. Every business has a culture. This is the shared behavioral patterns in the business, the index of preferred behaviors and approved collective behaviors. This culture is created and shaped by the ten percent most influential individuals in the business. It is shaped by their behavior, not by their talking points, PowerPoint slides, marketing slogans or even new employee onboarding processes and induction training. I repeat: It is shaped by the behavior of the ten percent most influential people in the business. Not necessarily the most senior people, but the most influential. If this ten percent most influential people do not take an active interest in the development of employees, whatever they say about the importance of learning and development is of no value. Back to the Shadowmatch Development Programs. These programs are experience based learning, working context specific and aimed at building a company culture of learning and development. This happens when the company allows their more experienced employees to be mentors. A mentor has to ensure that the mentee completes the development program. They (the mentors) must also take a positive interest in the development of his/her mentee and ensure continuous progress through all the stages of the programs. By doing this, experienced people in the business influence the less experienced employees to keep growing, keep learning and by doing so, keep building the business. The value of this cannot be monetized. It exceeds the monetary value it has for the business because it also contributes to society at large. It builds the lives of people, their relationships, success and the sustainability of the business. The fourth important principle to uphold is that of Individualization. For those interested in a bit of philosophy, this is one of the postmodern aspects of Shadowmatch. Without too much detail, one of the characteristics of postmodernism is that of individualization. It is a conviction (paradigm) that the needs and perspectives of the individual supersede that of the group as far as the happiness and well-being of the individual is concerned. The way the individual lives his/her life must be respected as unique and it shouldn't influence the way the collective lives their lives in a specific community. This is exactly what the Shadowmatch Personal Development Programs do for each individual. The programs are individually unique in four aspects. Mentorship, individualized behavior in a specific working environment, individualized learning content, individually unique development needs and interventions. Let's elaborate on these important aspects. The individual has the right and must be empowered to choose his/her own mentor. It must be a trusted person, who will honestly prioritize the interest of the mentee and who will be able to give reliable guidance when needed. If a mentor is forced onto a mentee, the relationship can easily be compromised if they do not successfully build a relationship of trust. The second aspect is about the unique way every individual acts in a specific working environment. This is because our behavior is driven by behavioral patterns in reaction to the demands of the environment. The complexities related to this reality is endless. Despite these complexities, we must admire the fact that individuals can react differently to the demands of their environment because they have different embedded behavioral patterns. With this in mind, the Personal Development Programs must allow the individual to apply existing habits in support of the habit under development. The individual must focus on those aspects that stimulate their energy to act, (most active habits) because that will reflect the unique preference the individual has to engage with more emphasis on certain aspects and less emphasis on other aspects of their development path. This needs an example. Let's imagine John is doing a Personal Development Program on Innovation. At a point during this Personal Development Program, John must identify - in his working environment - a challenge that could not be resolved by means of traditional methods. The challenge he found is related to the way employees take their religious days for worship in a working environment where different people with different religious days have to keep the business running 365 days a year. His energy was attracted to this challenge because of two other habits where John has very strong embedded behavioral patterns. These are Altruism and People Positive. Andrea works with John in the same working environment. She reaches the same phase in the same Personal Development Program (Innovation) where John decided to work on the challenge of religious days of worship. She doesn't want to work on the problem John decided to work on, she decides to work on a different problem. She worked on the challenge the business has to keep stock in an unpredictable disease management support pharmacy. This attracted her attention because she has strong conceptual fitness, she is very active when it comes to working with objects and tasks and she has a dominant individual work preference. The Shadowmatch Personal Development Programs allow for this individualized approach to the same learning outcome. This brings us directly into the next aspect of individualized development. Every person must be able to custom create his/her learning content based on personal preferences. This is again directly related to postmodern learning and development. Different development programs for different people doing the same job, in the same environment under the same conditions. This might sound crazy but it is critical to understand and to implement. A different example has been discussed previously under the heading Optimal Placing of Employees. This aspect will be discussed once we understand the practical application of individually determined development content. The following example will explain. Company "X" has a pool of (about one hundred) customer service representatives helping clients to get their loyalty rewards activated if they have a specific pattern of support to the business over a period of time. The majority of their clients are not used to advanced functions on computers and smart phones. The process was somewhat cumbersome and many clients could not get it right. Among the pool of service agents were individuals who were so successful that their names were distributed by clients to fellow clients to ensure good service. The result was a small pool of service agents who were in very high demand and the majority didn't get service request phone calls. Clients were willing to wait in a telephonic queue for 30 minutes to talk to the requested 'competent' service agent instead of talking to an agent who might not be able to help. The agents who were high in demand were used to create a performance benchmark and all the other agents' habits were matched to the performance benchmark. The system identified the following habits as critical for success: Altruism, People Positive, Propensity-to-Hand-off, Conflict Handling and Frustration Handling. It was decided that every service agent must do a Personal Development Program to help them improve their engagement with clients. Out of about 86 service agents who were not in high demand (in fact they were struggling), 36 were recommended to do Propensity-to-Hand-off, 12 were recommended to do Altruism, nine did Conflict Handling, 15 Frustration Handling and the rest were given the opportunity to be moved to other departments in the business because their habits, were so far removed from the benchmark habits, that it would not be feasible in terms of timelines to reshape their habits to the point where they would be able to do the job with comfort and success. In short, their habits were too strong and active and the behavioral demands from this job were just too far removed from what their habits allowed them to do successfully. The principle is that people struggle with a job for different behavioral reasons. A one-size-fits-all development approach is just not feasible, it's not intelligent and it doesn't work. The learning programs must be individualized and specific. ## Building Better Teams In many jobs, despite the postmodern trend to individualize, the working environment has a strong team content. Colleagues working together as a team is common practice in the workplace. Sales teams, project teams, customer service teams, medical rescue, firefighting, finance management teams, sports teams, students studying together as a team, airline in-flight crew teams, etc. These are all examples of a working environment where people need to work in collaboration with others to get the job done. In the broadest sense we distinguish two team types. The first is a team where all team members have the same task, they do mostly the same thing and they work towards a common goal. Some sales teams serve as a good example. Every individual member of the team must sell cars. The cars are all the same. The clients are from the same social structure and income. The sales team drives one goal: Sell cars! The second team type is that of interdependence among team members and diversity of tasks allocated to members of the team. A sea rescue team is a good example. The team may consist of a skipper, radio operator, divers, position coordinators, technical support for the rescue vessel, support for the divers, medical staff, trauma counsellors, food and rehydration supply specialists, etc. In this team the tasks are diverse, team members depend on each other, they have to act without asking questions and they must coordinate their actions with precise timing. The first team (sales) will be called a single tasked team, the second will be referred to as a multi-tasked team. The dynamics are very different but certain realities are similar. Both teams work towards a shared goal, team members need each other, the success of the entire team can be seriously compromised by one member not working in sync with the rest of the team, team members may frustrate each other. Fellow team members play a critical role in the way colleagues experience the working environment. This is where Shadowmatch provides any team with a team building and development function that could be used to largely improve the success of every member of any team as well the collective success of the team. The Shadowmatch Team Building and Development Function has two capabilities. It provides team members with a collective team behavior chart as well as a graph for each team member compared to the collective behavioral index of the team. It can also compare the team behaviors of any number of team members to each other. This graph has been designed to make it easy to read. The user can, without any training, determine in which behavioral areas are risks for conflict to develop, in which areas it will be easy for team members to agree and in which areas team members will tend to reject the behavior of one or two team members. The graph informs the team members about the way tasks can be allocated to specific team members based on their habits. The second function is to identify sub-group formation in the team based on specific behavioral preferences among smaller groups in the team. It shows seven roles individuals will play in the team, the value each of these groups could add to the success of the team as well as the risks some of these groups might hold for the collective success of the team. ## Personal Well-being Every individual with a completed worksheet on the Shadowmatch database has a Personal Portal. The individual can, from his/her portal, read the Shadowmatch Full Feedback Report, the Short Report and request Relationship Reports with anybody. There are eight different Relationship Reports available on the system. Marriage, love, friendship, work, family, co-habitation, parent-child and teacher-learner Relationship Reports. The system compares the habits of the two individuals in the relationship with each other and generates a report that explains the core drivers of that specific relationship type followed by comparative descriptions of the pros and cons of behavioral habits that are predominantly similar, habits with differences and habits that are different to such a point that it could compromise the success of the relationship. These reports are based on the Shadowmatch relationship model developed by the founder and creator of the Shadowmatch system, who is also the author of this publication. The following chapter is a high-level outline of this model. --- title: Successful Relationships: A critical building block for happiness --- ## Relationship frames and relationship types The Shadowmatch research team has been working to design a structure that will explain relationships in a clear, easy to understand behavior-based structure. The reason for this is to find a way of comparing the habits of two individuals to each other. The aim is to help those in the relationship to understand the way they will interact with each other. By doing this, it is possible to provide the Shadowmatch users with a report that could help them better understand their relationship and also improve the quality of the way they engage with each other. Eventually a combination of relationship frames and relationship types were defined, described and used as the structure for the development of the Shadowmatch Relationship Reports. Relationships are complex. It is impossible to capture all the complexities of a relationship. In an effort to better understand these complexities, the Shadowmatch research team developed relationship frames and relationship types. This has been done to distinguish between key components that make specific relationship types succeed and in a broader sense, a framework that provides the basic relationship frames. Four relationship frames are distinguished: friendships, love, business relationships and security relationships. Each of these frames depends on some critical drivers to establish a successful relationship. The following critical drivers must be present in the behavior and experience of both parties to the relationship in order to make it a success. With all relationships, the one most critical aspect is the fact that relationships are successful when both parties approve of each other's behavior. This is firstly applicable in a broad sense of behaviors outside of the relationship. But these drivers are more critical when it concerns the behavior of the two parties in the relationship. Relationships become compromised when the parties (both or one party only) do not approve of each other's behavior. This applies to all relationships and this is the very basic premise the research team worked with. In addition to this broad principle, different relationships have different critical drivers. Critical relationship drivers are behaviors that make the specific relationship succeed, keep it alive and create a platform for the different relationships to be based on. Friendship relationships have three critical drivers: Common interest, sharing of activities and physical distance. Business relationships are established and successfully managed when there is an exchange of value and if both parties have a subjective feeling that they are in a way on the winning side of the value exchange action. Security relationships serve our physical and psychological needs to experience a secure living space for one or both parties in the relationship. The critical drivers for the success of this relationship are a need from one party (or sometimes both) to secure his/her living space, while the other party provides what is necessary for the experience of security and the willingness of both parties to manage the relationship in a way that works for both. Love relationships exist in a relationship where the well-being and interest of the beloved is of higher priority to the lover than his/her own well-being and interest. Love relationships are unconditional and one directional. Friendship and business relationships are bi-directional relationships. Love and security relationships are one-directional relationships. Friendship and love relationships are about sharing with each other and caring for each other. (Love relationships are, in principle one-directional). Therefore, caring is provided by one party in the relationship to the other - unconditionally and the value is predominantly emotional. Security relationships and business relationships are about gaining tangible value from the relationship but the underlying motive is as emotional as the former two relationship types. People form relationships to fulfill specific needs. Friendships fulfill our social needs, business relationships fulfill our material needs as a tangible reference of our emotional needs. Security relationships provide people with safety and security while love relationships are for the fulfilment of our spiritual needs. Love transcends our cognitive reasoning, logic and social status as well as all borders of gender, race, age, etc. Within these four relationships frames, the following relationship types function: Friendships, family, work-related relationships, teacher-learner relationships, parent-child, marriage, staying together (also called co-habitation) and love. In its purest form, the different relationships types relate to the relationship frames as follows. Friendship as a relationship type is just related to the relationship frame of friendships with the possibility of love components in the relationship. In the relationship frame of business the following relationship types are predominantly functional: Work-related relationships, teacher/learner and staying together (cohabitation). In the frame of love relationships, the following relationship types are present: Parent/child, and pure love relationships between two people. The relationship type of marriage functions with components of all four the relationship frames. It carries components of love, friendship, business and security. The reason for this is to be found in the complexities of marriage relationships and the practicalities of living together over a longer period of time with a vested interest in all activities of both as well as the decisions taken by the couple collectively and individually. Once there is an understanding of the relationship types and the relationship frames as the underlying mechanisms and principles driving and guiding the different relationships between people, it is much easier to understand and recover a relationship once it becomes compromised. ## Relationship Frames ## Relationship Types: Examples and challenges It is important to note that relationships become compromised when a single relationship becomes a mixed bag of (for example) love, friendship and business. In practical terms, don't sell something to your friend or treat a business partner as a close friend. Relationships must stay clean to succeed. One example with implications and relationship risks will be discussed on every relationship type. ## Friendship A relationship of friends has three basic components for success. Those parties in the relationship must share some common interest. Let's say they are both golfers. If there is no common interest, the friendship will be short-lived with no content to carry the connection between the parties. The second component is that of physically shared activities. The parties to the friendship must play golf together. The third component is that of physical distance. The parties must be in relative close proximity to each other. With the development of communication technology, friends are able to connect via Skype or Google Hang-outs or WhatsApp and many other communication enablers but the physical time together has not yet been replaced in the psychology of friendships. It might happen over time. In all relationships, the relationship becomes compromised when there are behavioral patterns that one or both parties do not approve of. For example, two individuals are keen golfers, stay in close proximity of the golf club where both of them are members and they often play together but one of the parties has a pattern of losing his/her temper after a bad shot, throwing his golf clubs around, shouting, screaming and swearing and then starts to become aggressive towards fellow players. The friend of this individual does not approve this behavior. This pattern persists because behavior like this easily becomes a habit. This friendship will not survive. But there are other challenges to a friendship relationship. If one of the above friends move to live in a town far away and they can no longer play golf together, the friendship will also eventually die. A big problem with relationships is embedded in our inclination to mix and merge more than one relationship type into a single relationship experience. For example, in the friendship of the two golfers, the one decides to sell his car and his friend is interested. The car has a few problems but the seller and the buyer decide on a price and the transaction is concluded. If anything in the process of selling the car goes wrong, the business transaction will be a serious threat to the friendship. Simple advice: Don't sell to friends! ## Business relationships The basic components to this relationship is firstly, an exchange of value. The seller (employee) will give the buyer (employer) his/her time, energy and labor and in exchange gets paid a salary. The seller (teacher) will teach and train the student (buyer) and in doing so provide the value of education and a possible qualification to the buyer. The buyer will pay the seller a tuition fee. Then one final very simple example. The seller wants to sell his collector's watch. The buyer is interested and buys the watch. Now the second component. Both parties must feel that they have won. They must have an emotional experience that the transaction has provided them with value more than what they have lost during the exchange process. The seller of the watch must feel that he/she got a good price and the buyer must feel that the watch is worth more than (or at least equal) what was paid. The moment one party experiences that the amount paid was more than the value received, the relationship is in trouble. Keep in mind that a business relationship has less to do with facts and more with emotion. Why would somebody buy a watch (with basic functionalities like time and date only) that is more expensive than some smaller cars? Because in a way the buyer convinced him/herself that the value that is gained by owning the watch, is more than what was paid for it. Some products have less emotional content than others but in the consumer market, the emotional content is always present and in some instances, it is a fully emotional relationship between buyer and seller. Think of the way people buy shoes, cars, clothes, food, houses, etc. A business relationship is challenged when there is a feeling of loss at one end of the relationship. Again, the danger of relationship mix is a threat. If you have a business relationship with a supplier, be careful not to become friends with that person. It complicates the relationship and mixed expectations can destroy it. ## Co-habitation This happens when students for instance end up staying together with or without a choice of a preferred habitation partner. This happens often with younger people but it can also happen to slightly older and sometimes even old people. Think of retirement homes where elderly people have to share a living space. This falls in the business relationship frame. All the business relationship principles are applicable. The question is about the value content of exchange. The very basics of exchange are behavioral patterns that are approved by both parties. If this doesn't happen, conflict can destroy the relationship. ## Love relationship The key components of a love relationship are when the well-being, happiness and fulfilment of the beloved takes higher priority than the self-interest of the lover. Second to this, it is an unconditional relationship. Thirdly, love relationships are single directional. This means that the love of the lover for the beloved does not depend on any positive returns. The complexities of these statements and their implications are infinite. Some people would argue that all our relationships should carry a component of love in it. This raises more questions than I am able to answer. It depends on the ethics and spiritual position of every individual. In some of the relationship types, if this component is missing, the relationship comes to a train-smash type ending. The two relationship types most sensitive to the basis of love is that of a parent-child relationship and marriage. A relationship that carries love in its purest form as a strong relationship frame is easy to maintain if the love of the lover is honest and sincere. If not, upholding it is impossible. ## Parent-child relationship This should in its purest form be a love relationship. All the key components of this relationship must be fully in line with the frame of love. I will demonstrate the principles of a parent-child relationship by using a parable of which I am not the author. I will try my best to share it with you in modern terminology. A wealthy father has two sons. The father owns a successful business that the two sons will one day inherit and both of them are employed in the business. The one son decided that he wants to do his own thing. He tells the father that he wants to pre-inherit his shares in the business, sell it and go on his own. The father approved of his idea and the son left the business and the city. As it so often happens, this son lost everything. He ended up being a hard laborer, working among gangsters and thieves to earn enough for bad food only. Then he remembered that the most junior people working for his dad is in a much better situation than his current situation. He decided to go back to his dad, not as a son but as one of the most junior employees. He went back knowing that he should be treated like a criminal. His father didn't ask him one question. He didn't ask him where he was, what he did or how he decided to return. He knew that his son squandered everything. Despite all the destructive ventures of the son, he reinstated him in his full status in the family and in the business. This father understood what love is. Unconditional, one directional and sometimes with a very heavy price tag. But the other brother was not impressed. Why? Because the brother defined his relationship with his father and his squandering brother as a business relationship. The original version of this profound parable is in the New Testament, Luke chapter 15. A parent-child relationship is a love relationship. Too many parents try to turn it into a friendship or even worse, a business relationship. As a friendship relationship they tend to teach the children that they must play together as friends, share activities and interests, spend time in a sharing of activity type games where both play by the rules. When this doesn't work, they tend to turn it into a business relationship of give and take. 'If you do this, I will do that. If you don't do this, I won't do that'. The question I often get from parents is how to teach children the principles of business without teaching them the principles of value to be exchanged and losses to be felt when one party to the relationship does not deliver. The answer is very simple: You teach the child the principles of business in the same way you would teach the child to play tennis or the piano. You don't teach the child business by running the relationship with the child as a micro business. The most important of all is to teach a child to successfully fail. This can only be done when the relationship is fully anchored as a love relationship. ## Marriage This is the most complex of all our relationships. The realities of a married couple force the relationship that normally starts as a love relationship, into other frames such as friendship, business and security. It is inevitable. If a married couple signs the legal documents to be registered in the offices of the state as a marriage, the relationship immediately takes the shape of a security relationship whereby each party to this marriage has specific rights and protection. If the couple plays tennis together, that becomes a friendship based activity. If they live in a house, certain tasks are allocated to either the husband or the wife. For instance, the husband will fix the leaking roof and the wife will shorten the curtains in the dining room. This can become a pattern. Then the task allocation becomes a business-type agreement. This is all good and well as long as the dominating frame of the relationship is that of love. Keep in mind that the love component must override all the other realities. The moment we need agreements to govern our behavior in the marriage relationship, or we have to escape from each other's aggression, or we humiliate each other, or we negotiate tasks and money, the relationship is in deep trouble. If the recovery of a marriage relationship is a negotiated agreement of conditional behaviors, that marriage is in deep trouble. The relationship then works with "if statements" and as a fulfilling relationship, that marriage will always be compromised. It then contains statements such as: 'If you stop smoking, I will stop drinking'. 'If you stop working late, I will stop spending weekend time with friends'. 'If you stop making a mess of the kitchen when you prepare food, I will stop throwing rubbish down the drain that blocks it'. Recovery of a troubled marriage relationship must be based on the recovery of a relationship dominated by love. If the couple can't behave towards each other with love, caring for each other and making the interest of the beloved a higher priority than self-interest, that marriage must, as a second price, be moved to a friendship relationship. If that doesn't work, the relationship does no longer qualify as a marriage. It will then turn into a business type relationship of two people in a convenient cohabitation lifestyle. Sometimes it might not even be convenient. ## Teacher-learner relationship This is somewhat complex. If we think along the traditional directives, we would immediately think of an adult (the teacher) and a child as the learner. This is true but there are many other teacher-learner relationships to be considered. What if the teacher is much younger than the learner? Think of young people lecturing Principles of Information Systems as a subject to senior business leaders who signed up for training on advanced business management. Or, a young agricultural engineer teaching older and much more experienced farmers how to treat virus-infected sheep. Fact is, in all of the above, the relationship is a business relationship and all the principles applicable to a business relationship should direct the teacher-learner relationship. ## Family relationships It is important to keep in mind that most relationships are established as an initial invitation and acceptance of the invitation. We can for instance, define advertising as an invitation to a business relationship. A golf game could be an invitation to share common interest and a possible friendship. Marriage starts as an invitation to a love relationship with a later invitation to a marriage. Family is not by invitation. Family is a reality like gender, skin color, color of your eyes, hair texture and color, etc. The positive of such relationships is that we learn how to make relationships work when it is a given reality and getting out of the relationship is not an option. Two family relationship types should be classified as love relationships. Parent-child relationships and the relationships between siblings must be seen as love relationships. Other family relationships should be classified as extended family relationships and they work best as friendship relationships. The family well-being is regarded as common interest. When a family relationship becomes compromised, it can only recover if the parties to the relationship understand the relationship type and work towards behavioral patterns of approval that make the selected relationship type succeed. --- title: A Better Understanding of Habits --- ## The basic position In this chapter, a very simplified argument will be presented to explain the principles at the foundation of the Shadowmatch system. Every paragraph will introduce a statement of principle followed by a description of the principle. We always act. This is the starting point. If we are alive, we cannot stop acting. The sentence: 'I'm doing nothing' is a contradiction in terms. It contradicts itself. It says: 'I'm doing..." This is a statement of action. Then it ends with '...nothing.' If somebody sleeps, he/she is doing something. If someone would walk to the beach, throw a beach towel on the beach, lie down to relax and rest, stare at the waves without any intention other than to rest, that person is actively doing something. He/she is lying down, staring at the sea, resting his mind and body. These are some extreme examples. It is difficult to disagree with this statement: We always act. Our actions tend to become patterns. All our actions are the result of instructions the body executes based on the messages it receives from the brain. This is basic neuro-science. The communication between the body and the brain is bi-directional. The body - through its senses and nerve system - sends information to the brain, the brain processes the information and instructs the body to act. The neuro process is memory driven and it works with patterns. All our behavior is based on existing neural paths and these neural paths follow patterns of working with information to instruct the body to act based on existing neuro patterns. What we do when we get out of bed every morning is a pattern, how we get to work and the road we take is a pattern, how we deal with frustration is a pattern, how we talk to people is a pattern, how we sit, walk, stand, play, react to an unknown threat are all patterns. What about the individual who doesn't follow any pattern? There are two answers to this question. If the individual deliberately does things differently every time, then that is the pattern. Second part of the answer: If the person reacts differently to similar situations every time, such behavior could be defined as a pattern of random, unpredictable behavior that could become erratic behavior to the point where it might be regarded as abnormal. (Just a side comment. I prefer to define abnormal behavior as behavior that repeats in such a way that the majority of the community where the 'abnormal' person grew up and lives, rejects him/her as a person. The more predictable and acceptable the behavior of an individual is for his resident community, the more his/her behavioral approval and acceptance rate is. But we should take this further. The more predictable an individual behaves with high levels of approval of behavior from the resident community, the more stable this individual will be regarded to be). This is why stable acceptable habits build a profile of reliability and predictability. There is however another twist in this statement. What is the situation if the individual has no pattern in the brain for an activity. Let's say we introduce a young adult to a bicycle. This person has never seen a bicycle. The brain of the individual has no pattern on how to ride it. Then the brain needs to learn a pattern by learning to ride it. Neural patterns are 'endless' in their numbers and complexities. The patterns that determine our behavior are for all practical reasons endless in its complexities and patterns. This makes behavior very complex and impossible to understand. This is why we need to work with broad, easy to understand behavior groups such as problem solving, conflict handling, innovation, altruism, etc. It is, in my mind, impossible to track, untangle, understand, plot, describe or explain the complexities of our decision-making processes and behaviors. The question about why somebody did something or why he/she didn't do it is in most instances not possible to answer. In a linear situation, it is possible to get behind the thinking of a person. For example, if someone oversleeps on a Monday morning and then runs late for work, we can sometimes explain it by referring to the Sunday evening when he/she watched a television program till late, then fell asleep without setting an alarm. That's relatively easy. But to explain more complex behaviors like a gay/lesbian lifestyle, or why one child has artistic skills and his brother has no artistic skills but mathematical skills instead, is impossible. Or to understand why some people would become so stressed when talking to an audience, that they stutter and lose track of their wording, or even why someone would not be able to control the way he/she spends money when stressed etc. Trying to explain these behaviors in terms of mental processes are pure guessing without any scientific base. The reason is because of the complexities of how the mind/brain functions. What we can do is to study behavior, determine what the patterns are and then try to work with the behavioral patterns. If we could help people change their habits, we can help them change their lives. Deeper than expected. Habits are stubborn. Once a behavior has been deeply engraved in the neural paths of the brain, they should be regarded as permanent. If someone wants to stop such deeply engraved behavior, it becomes a process. To unlearn these behaviors can in most instances be impossible. Once you have learned how to ride a bicycle, you can't unlearn it unless there is damage to the brain. Driving a car, swimming and running are similar examples. But this is also applicable to smoking, alcoholism, being short tempered with children, problem focused behavior, innovation, talking down to your spouse in front of other people, etc. The idea that people can change these behaviors through counseling, reading a book, turning a new page is possible but extremely rare and difficult. The problem is related to the operating mechanics of the brain. If a habit is very deeply rooted and ingrained in the neural paths, that behavior becomes rote or habitual. The individual is no longer in control of that behavior as a conscious process, the habit is in control of the individual as a rote process also referred to as automatic behavior. This is when it becomes very difficult to change. The reason lies in the fact that the processes to change it has been hijacked by the automatic rote chain of behavioral patterns. It is for this reason that we must be aware of the fact that habits do not change easily. I make this statement because I'm very uncomfortable with my own honest conviction that deeply embedded habits never disappear. Let me repeat, if a habit is embedded in the neural paths to the point where execution is automatic and rote, it never gets erased. The mother of a very close friend of mine had the habit of playing the piano every day for at least one hour without any sheet music. She had a list of songs that she played every day for 50 years. At the age of 70 she got dementia and Alzheimer's disease. It was so bad that she could not remember her children. She lost one of her children and the brother of the deceased child went to tell the ill mother about the death of her child. She acknowledged the message and indicated a good understanding of the content. Ten minutes later during this visit, she asked three times how the daughter was doing because she hasn't seen her for a while. Despite this complete loss of memory, she played all the songs on the piano without any mistake, every day for one hour. The fact that the brain has this incredible ability to keep neural paths alive is the most valuable ability we have. We must be thankful and use it in a positive way. Imagine the opposite. We have to learn to ride a bicycle every morning when we want to cycle to university or to work. On our way, we fall several times because we do not have memory of how to ride properly. Or we have to learn how to drive a motor vehicle every time we use it. But there is more to this ability of the brain. Once a behavioral pattern is well established, the brain can do it in automatic mode, make no mistakes and the individual can do several other things simultaneously. Driving a car and talking to your passenger. Riding a bicycle while talking on your cellular telephone. Make food for the family and listen to a radio broadcast and look after a toddler in your care. The downside of this is when negative behavior becomes deeply ingrained in the brain and we want to change it. This then becomes serious and challenging. The attempt to change this is a process, not a discussion. Change by doing: "If you want to change your life, change your habits". This Shadowmatch saying carries the content of our approach when helping people learn habits to support their work-related success as well as individuals who would like to improve their lifestyle. It also serves as the most basic principle in helping people who became trapped in a spiral of negative behaviors and destructive energy in their lives. It is however imperative to understand and appreciate the fact that it must be a holistic effort from the individual. The following are some critical moments for any individual towards a better life, improved performance at work, better academic results as a student, better relationships, healthier lifestyle, etc. In the book 'Shadowmatch The Full Story' a list of interventions and processes that change habits is provided. In this publication, only one of the habit changing programs will be discussed in more detail. Mentorship programs are by far the most powerful process to change our habits. These programs must incorporate the following characteristics in order to be optimal. Firstly, the person to be developed must understand the framework of habits. We must know how habits shape our lives and how our personal framework of habits influences the way we react to our environment. The individual has to understand how we live our lives under strong influence (sometimes even under control) of our habits. Some individuals react extremely positively once they have this insight and they tend to initiate certain changes in their behavior. The problem is that these initiatives are mostly short lived. It must be supported by the second critical part of the process: Action. The person who wants to change his/her habits must start doing things. Even if it is in a mechanical way. Let's say the individual needs to learn more active behavioral patterns of discipline. An example of an action would be to go to a gymnasium every morning for a full workout. Not because he/she wants to do it, not because they feel like doing it, not because it will be fun or because it is refreshing to exercise in the early morning hours. These motivators may be true but the fact is, this is the activity of discipline that teaches the brain a specific pattern or habit. The individual must just do it. Don't think, act! The neural patterns will form even if it is done mechanically. The third part of a mentorship program is to help the individual understand how to prevent repetition of unwanted habits. Habits need a trigger to activate. The majority of negative habits are related to specific environment triggers to activate the rote (automatic) reaction. The developing person must identify these triggers and prevent their presence in his/her space if at all possible. Unlearning a habit is fully reliant on prevention of those cues that trigger the habit. This needs an example. Let's imagine a person who has a dangerous habit of road rage when driving his car in traffic. He cannot control his anger when fellow road users do not drive the way he wants them to use the road. This person must for a very long period of time not drive in traffic. This will help the strong active habit to fade. But it must be very clear, this doesn't happen overnight. It takes time. It is also important to note that, although habits are very difficult to unlearn, we can help the brain be less active in a certain area of behavior. Lastly, the individual must have someone to walk this development path with him/her. We can call this person whatever we want: Coach, mentor, helper, counselor, friend, manager, brother or whatever is most suitable. Fact is, the developing individual must have somebody who takes up an active, honest, positive and progressive support role in the process. The most important aspect to remember about the process of changing our habits is, as outlined above, the fact that it takes time, continuous effort, actions in line with the habits we want to strengthen every day and repetition. If we want a habit to fade and become less active, we must prevent pulling the trigger that initiates the habit. In the language of Mr. Ivan Pavlov: 'Don't ring the bell.' Pavlov used dogs and a bell as a trigger to create a habit of eating. The bell became the trigger that causes mouthwatering as the dogs expected food. Pavlov concluded: "To prevent mouthwatering, don't ring the bell". --- title: Theoretical Framework of the Shadowmatch System --- It is general knowledge that there are multiple psychological theories and methods among academics and psychologists and that different scholars prefer different models. Students are trained to understand the different models and theories and they then select a theory that works best for them, or they combine theories and work with unique methods and theories in combination. In some instances, I explicitly asked a few psychologists and professional counselors what method or theory they use. The majority confirmed that they only work with methods and techniques. The theories are part of their broad knowledge that serves to help them interpret and integrate the information they gather as a result of their methods and techniques. Some decide to work with a specific methodology and some prefer specific methods for specific purposes. It is impossible to list all the different psychological theories and models, methods, branches and combination of the above. Instead, it is easier to work with the broader focus areas where the different theories can be found. I have developed the following summary structure that works for me. This summary is not meant to be complete. The aim is to create a simplified structure and to be familiar with some basics of a very complex academic maze: The Unconscious/subconscious: Many psychological theories and methods are based on the conviction of the existence and working of the unconscious mind. Sigmund Freud, Pierre Janet and Carl Jung are amongst the most prominent originators of this school of thought. Since Freud first used this term (1893), scholars and practicing psychologists came forward with many different angles and specific emphasis. The majority based their single point of departure on the unconscious mind. The best description of the unconscious is probably found in the Oxford Dictionary: "The part of your mind that notices and remembers information when you are not actively trying to do so, and influences your behavior even though you do not realize it". Some of the theories and practices predominantly based on the unconscious are: hypnosis, dream analysis, psychoanalysis, shared unconsciousness theory and collective unconsciousness. The Rorschach Test as a way to access the unconscious mind of a client is a good example of one method based on this school of thought. There is a lot of debate currently on the reliability and the objective scientific premise of this test. Cognitive Psychology: This is psychology that works predominantly with conscious thinking. What we are aware of, thinking content we control and sometimes even experiences that are difficult to control. The Shadowmatch research team distinguishes two focal points in the broad cognitive approach. Cognitive Rational Psychology focusses on rational/ logic and intellectual content. This fits into the broad definition of cognitive psychology as the scientific study of the mind and mental functioning, including learning, memory, attention, perception, reasoning, language, conceptual development and decision making. The modern study of cognition rests on the premise that the brain can be understood as a complex computing system (psych.rutgers.edu/co). Then there is also the focus on Emotional Cognitive Content. Most recent studies have indicated that emotions are conscious cognitive content (Joseph E. Le Doux and Richard Brown: 2017). All the theories related to emotional experience of people and all the psychological interventions related to the emotions people experience can mostly be regarded as conscious, cognitive work. Development Psychology: These are theories that focus on the development of people, their childhood, teenage development, adult development, etc. The basic premise is that of learning. In short, we are what we have learned to be during all the phases of our development. Parapsychology: Parapsychology has for many years been regarded as either a sin or something that could result in people being labelled as abnormal/disturbed. It is a field of study concerned with the investigation of paranormal and psychic phenomena which include telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, near-death experiences, reincarnation, apparitional experiences and other paranormal claims. There is an increased interest in these different aspects of research and the way people know things. One question we should try to answer is where the line between normal and abnormal psychic phenomena is to be drawn? Let's say some scientist could successfully research and prove reincarnation, do we then reclassify this as normal? How did we prove the existence of the subconscious mind? How do we engage people who report apparitional experiences? These are the questions that keep the Parapsychology working towards some kind of a meaningful answer. Social Psychology: This is exactly what the word says, the way we engage with others, how we influence each other and how the individual reacts to the influence of other people. Some would argue that social psychology should be part of cognitive psychology. Some would argue it to be part of unconscious psychology and some could even argue this to be part of parapsychology. The preference is to rather treat it as an independent psychological school of thought. Neuro Psychology: This is predominantly a medical science. It is based on the working of the brain and related nerve systems. In simple terms, neuropsychology is a medical science working towards a better understanding of behavior based on the medical, chemical and electromagnetic workings of the brain and the related nervous system. There are early indications that this research will soon dominate the way we understand behavior. This research makes progress at a pace that could in the near future dominate the general science of psychology. Behaviorism: This is probably the most powerful (subjective opinion of the Head of Research at Shadowmatch) psychological model. Unfortunately, this model has been severely criticized by academics over many years. It was blamed unfairly for being a reductionist approach (reducing people to mechanical objects). It has been criticized for what it doesn't say. Fact is, their methods of research are the most scientific methods. Behaviorists work with what cannot be challenged and because it is based on behavior, it is very difficult to argue their findings. When Ivan Pavlov did his very well known research of ringing a bell and then feeding the dogs, he documented something so powerful that the full meaning of this is yet to be understood. Let me explain. All behavior becomes a pattern. All behavior is stimulus based - there is an internal or external trigger to activate everything we do. When behavior repeats with purpose and success, it becomes rote behavior - automated behavior with no or minimal planning or conscious thinking. When this happens, we are conditioned and our reactions to events related to our rote behavioral patterns are automatic. With Shadowmatch we are very specific. The Shadowmatch system is a behavioristic system, it works with behavioral habits that are learned and it accommodates the neuroscience position that all behavior is based on neuron activities that follow neural paths. Shadowmatch is based on the assumption that we don't know how people think and how their cognitive processes work. What we do know is what people do. We don't know why they do things. What we do know is that there must be a neural path in the brain that controls the behavior. Our knowledge of these neural paths is based on what has been researched and documented by the neuroscientists. In the most linear way, Shadowmatch works with behavioral patterns and we refer to these patterns as habits. Where do these patterns come from? We learn them. Can we explain how they work? No. Can we change them? Well...yes, sometimes, but not always. Why not? We don't know. What is the best way of learning new neural patterns? Repetitive new behavior. Can we ever determine why specific patterns have been embedded in the brain? No. Do we ever pretend that we know how people think? No. What about Shadowmatch and the more cognitive, social, emotional and subconscious based psychological models? Shadowmatch doesn't work with these. Shadowmatch is a behavioristic-model-based system. The Shadowmatch team has no assumptions about other theories, schools of thought, methods or hypotheses. It has been stated above but it is of such importance that we need to continuously remind our users and readers: Habits can be passive. We never do nothing. It may be important to illustrate again with an example: If a person is confronted with conflict and the behavioral pattern is to keep quiet, observe and refuse to actively participate in the discussion or conflict, such an individual has the habit of passive reaction to conflict. Between active and passive positions of our habits, we behave with behavior-intensities relative to the context. --- title: Case Studies --- ## Recruitment ## Did Shadowmatch improve our recruitment success? ## Background This series of events is very well documented by one of our big clients in the financial services industry. The company has an extremely competent internal Shadowmatch custodian. She knows the system very well. Her job is to apply Shadowmatch to the recruitment process, facilitate team building sessions, help with mentorship training and implement personal development programs. Where necessary she must also have one-on-one sessions with employees who requested personal feedback and personal development discussions. ## Context She was called by one of the executives and they discussed renewing their Shadowmatch contract. Her executive manager said that if there is no solid proof of the fact that Shadowmatch works, he cannot spend the money on using the system. Shadowmatch was primarily used in the sales division where they do outbound telesales. They call clients, present the services and products of the business to the client and try to sign them up to use and pay for their service offering. The business has very good performance data on the success of these people. Following is the email report to her boss. Please keep in mind that this is email language, internal to the company and actually not for public consumption. ## Results ## Here is how I did it: 1. I pulled all the sales data for everyone (past 3 months). 2. I ranked all the agents on number of sales per month (September to November). 3. I calculated the average sales per agent for the last 3 months. 4. I benchmarked the agents making more than 60 sales on average per month (first benchmark). 5. I created a second benchmark "average performing agents". Agents making more than 40 sales consistently per month (but not more than 60) (second benchmark.) 6. I gave each agent 2 scores (matched against both benchmarks). 7. If the agent matches 2 benchmarks, I marked them as "Recommended". 8. If the agent only matched 1 benchmark, I marked them as "Control group". 9. If the agent did not match any of the benchmarks I marked them as "NOT recommended". 10. I gave each person status: Top performer, performer (40 Sales +), UNDERperformer (agents who do not make more than 40 sales on average per month), new (if the agent does not have any sales data) or resigned. I worked with a group of 103 Agents. I created 3 Groups: Recommended, control group and not recommended. KEY: SM: no. of agents in each group T.P: Top performing agents (more than 60 sales average last 3 months) Per: Performing agents (more than 40 sales averaged last 3 months) U.P: underperforming agents (less than 40 Sales avg) Resigned: Agents who resigned within 3 months New: Agents who do not have any sales data. | | SM | T.P | Per | U.P | Resigned New | | |-----------------|------|-------|-------|-------|----------------|----| | Recommended | 23 | 16 | 4 | 0 | 2 | 1 | | Control group | 43 | 17 | 9 | 2 | 4 | 11 | | NOT recommended | 37 | 7 | 9 | 3 | 11 | 7 | | Total | 103 | 40 | 22 | 5 | 17 | 18 | Remember, the control group consists of agents who only matched 1 benchmark, Recommended agents matched both. ## Conclusion: Not one of the agents underperforming was a match to both benchmarks on Shadowmatch. 65% of the agents who resigned over the last 3 months were not recommended by Shadowmatch. 83% of the top performing agents were recommended by Shadowmatch. ## Interpretation This is fantastic information. It shows, in a simplified way, the correlation between Shadowmatch-based system recommendations for a job and actual performance in the job. If we analyze the work done by this Shadowmatch custodian a bit more, we see that 91% of those she marked as recommended were actually successful in the job. Almost 50% of the employees not recommended by the system, didn't succeed in the job. Most important in the case study is that not one person who was marked as "recommended" ended up being an underperforming employee. If we do a bit of advanced calculations to get a final single Shadowmatch employee success factor, it will be 81%. In short, if a business uses Shadowmatch consistently and correctly, and against reliable performance data and benchmarks, it can trust the system to provide the business with 81% of new recruits to be in the top performing and good performing group of employees. Another important indicator derived from this data is the fact that Shadowmatch is extremely good in accurately recommending candidates for success but not equally stringent when it comes to identification of possible failure. This is exactly how the system has been designed. The "not recommended" index tends to give a border-case applicant the benefit of the doubt. But when it comes to recommended applicants, the system has been designed to apply very stringent rules to make sure that those who are recommended have a very high propensity to be successful and as seen in this case study, as close as possible to a zero-failure rate among recommended individuals. The aim is to prevent failure. If we prevent failure we prevent other difficulties in the lives of those people we employ. This is why the system has been designed to filter very carefully in search of successful people for the job. A final comment on this case study. The Shadowmatch team does get complaints from time to time that recruitment officers battle to find people with a strong recommended Shadowmatch indicator. They then want to either change the benchmark or employ people who are not a good match. This is very unfortunate. It actually implies that a recruiter is willing to sacrifice the success, happiness and fulfilment of an individual just to get a vacancy filled. This is not a good approach. ## Case Study: Team rejection A sad story This case study shows the importance of a fit with the people we work with, the colleagues we engage with and those we collaborate with as part of a team. ## Background The six people in this group are highly qualified individuals. They all hold postgraduate degrees from recognized universities. These qualifications were in Theology, Psychology and Business Management. Between the six individuals they held 21 university degrees. They were all highly intelligent, somewhat successful, dedicated to their ministries and highly respected by the community where they worked together as ministers of religion in a Christian congregation. Four male and two females were in the team. They then appointed a seventh person to the team and suddenly everything changed. Team members made each other look bad in front of the congregation. Meetings became uncomfortable and individuals pulled into different directions. Eventually the relationships were so distorted that they were not able to have meetings. ## The process A member of the congregation decided that the situation was out of control and something needed to be done. He approached me to talk to them and facilitate a process that would take the team to a better place. I told the team that we won't start the process with a discussion but with the Shadowmatch worksheet. They had to complete the worksheet and our first discussion would be when all the data is available. They didn't like my approach but I decided to be stubborn. The reason for their reluctance was due to their approach to relationship problems that they worked with relationship challenges as part of their counseling ministries. Keep in mind that these individuals are skilled counselors working with all kinds of relationship problems in the congregation. The big difference is that their shared approach is to talk about things in the relationship that frustrate the parties and then by talking and understanding, voicing frustrations and listening to each other, things should improve. I do not buy into this approach and I fully understand that I am the minority. This is my approach. I trust the Shadowmatch system to provide me with reliable information about the behavioral patterns of people. I work with a simple principle that a relationship is successful when the parties to the relationship approve each other's behavior. When they don't, the relationship becomes compromised. Can we fix the problem by talking? No. We fix the relationship by changing our behavior. This is my approach: If I have a profile of the behavioral patterns of the team members, and I explain the differences to the team, we can agree to change the way we behave towards each other and we can change the expectations we have of each other. If we then stick to our agreement and we change our behavior, things will be much better. The question I always have to face is: What if the change in behavior is not a change of heart? This means that if someone changes his/her behavior but they do not change their thinking or feelings towards each other, it may not work. My answer: We change our thinking by changing our behavior. In most instances, we do not have a problem with what someone thinks but with what they do and say and how they do and say it. My honest answer is normally something along the lines of: "I work with what people do and say, not with what they think and what their intentions are. My reason is simple, I don't know what they think but I know what they do". Eventually I got all their Shadowmatch results. I put them in a team and the system generated this picture: The above is the consolidated graph of the team members without the newly appointed team member. The habits of the group are all very similar and on none of these points on the graph are there differences to a proportion that could be defined as a risk to the harmony of the team. The following graph shows the profile of the newly appointed member compared to the team. The newly appointed member of the team will be called William. Now that we know this, it becomes very clear: The difference between the team and William is such that there will be a high risk for conflict. During discussions with the team the challenge became very clear. The original team wanted to change the way they work. William preferred not to change. On Active Exploration of the unknown as well as on the aspect of change, the original team had more active behavioral habits than William. In addition to this challenge, the changes the original team planned, were to include members of the congregation in a collaborative approach to guide and direct the work in the congregation. William is passive on people preferences and collaborative/cohesive team work. William preferred to rather not work in a collaborative people oriented working environment. This made him actively resist the changes. His resistance destroyed the collaborative energy in the team. I facilitated a process to help the team come to an agreement that the initiative to include members of the congregation in their leadership work must be done without William. They should help William to focus on areas in the ministry that they agreed shouldn't change and to allow him to work alone on projects that was suitable for such a solo approach. My advice worked for about a year. William then resigned and blamed my intervention as the reason for his resignation. The remaining team members agreed that it was not a long-term solution. They understood the fact that they shouldn't have appointed William. They were very positive towards the Shadowmatch team analysis intervention because if it wasn't for that, the entire team could have ended-up so disjointed that it risked destroying the work they do. One of the original team members called a meeting with me. He told me that they knew there were differences between the original team members and the behavioral patterns of William, but they thought that diversity would help them change the way they do things. He acknowledged that their ignorance could have destroyed their work. My reaction to the idea that diversity should help a team to grow is very simple: This sounds like a good argument on paper, but relationships are not paper. Relationship are complicated behavioral realities. If people do not approve each other's behavior, and the index of disapproval exceeds the index of approval of behavior, the relationship is compromised and in trouble. My take from this process is to be very informed about the complexities of working with colleagues and to make sure that team members are well informed about possible behavioral risk. ## Habits as a Behavioral Switchboard A fantastic story of change This case study started with a random meeting between myself and Chris. Chris is an electronic engineer with extreme skills in the field of electronic engineering, design and programming of advanced control systems. Chris also had an active hobby of flying and building light aircraft. I met Chris as a result of my interest in buying a light aircraft. Chris knew the plane and I was referred to him for objective information. I met him and we had a long discussion about the aircraft. This discussion ended with the traditional question: 'So, what do you do for a living?' My answer to his question: I have built a system to help prevent failure because when people develop a history of failures, they run the risk of becoming slaves to failures instead of living positive progressive happy lives'. When saying goodbye, I could see that Chris was interested in the work I'm doing. A few days later he phoned me. He had a very direct approach. This was more or less the conversation: 'I'm not sure if this is what you do but I think I need some counseling. Will you be willing to help me?' 'Yes of course. I will send you a Shadowmatch code to access the system, complete the worksheet and I will call you for coffee.' 'Is that it?' 'Yes, that's it'. I sent him a Shadowmatch code. He did the worksheet and I got the results. These are his headline habits: ## The challenge... Chris was busy building another light aircraft. He does a perfect job and every aspect is attended to in the finest of detail. He does a lot of innovative additional add-ons to improve every aspect of the aircraft in terms of safety and performance. He also decided to build the aircraft to be certified for glider towing capabilities. This stretched him even further. Whilst building this aircraft, he had to write software for a product he designed. The programming was to enhance the functionalities of a device he invented a few years ago and some software updates were now necessary. The software development was urgent and commercially critical. The aircraft was not urgent. But this caused a problem. Chris continued spending his time on the aircraft and the urgent software project was neglected. He could not afford this to carry on, but he couldn't get himself dedicated to complete the software project. Before Chris and I discussed his Shadowmatch results, I asked a few questions. I asked him to describe his experience to me when he has to work on the software. He indicated that it was mundane, extremely frustrating and the underlying conflict with his client who has been waiting for the software update, frustrated him. I asked him explicitly if there are any complexities in the software that would challenge him. His answer: 'Not really.' I then tested the Shadowmatch results with him and asked if he could hand off the software development to somebody with the skills to do it. The answer was an emphatic 'No!' My next question was the most obvious one: 'Are you the only person who can do this?' I had a look at his graph on the construct of Propensity to Own and Propensity-to-Handoff (far left on the graph above) and I anticipated his answer to confirm the fact that in his mind, he was the only person on earth capable of doing it. I was right. My next question was related to the habit of routine. It is his third most passive habit. In other words, he doesn't have strong active habits of mundane repetition. My question wanted to discover how Chris works with routine. He anticipated my question and said to me that it was the single most devastating and frustrating aspect of this software writing exercise. But the aircraft gave him energy and fulfilment. The reason for the positive experience he had when he was working on the aircraft, is embedded in the fact that building the aircraft stimulated his five most active habits: Propensity to Own (he had full control and ownership of every aspect of the project), To Simplify (he had to continuously find the easiest, safest and most effective way of making everything work), Problem Solving (every aspect of building the aircraft was a problem solving venture), Responsiveness (Chris could immediately do what was necessary and he had immediate results), Innovation (this has been the most thrilling part of the building project. He had to design innovative solutions to get what he wants from the aircraft). What was the solution? I told Chris to visualize his five strongest habits as having enabling on/off switches in his mind. He must decide to write the software and switch on different habits. This, in accordance to his strongest habits, was what he must do: Confirm full ownership of the process. Simplify the working content. See it as a problem that must be solved in the most efficient manner. Find an innovative way to do it quickly and accurately. Chris fully understood what I said. He refocused, activated his strong habits and soon the software was delivered. Strong habits are like friends. --- title: Future Research and Development --- For obvious reasons, the Shadowmatch team is not transparent on its future plans. There is however some work we do that could be shared without risk of being copied. Our research has indicated that we gather enough reliable data with the Shadowmatch worksheet to derive a profile of the specific social inclusion or rejection. It is however important to understand that we work with this as it manifests in behavior. Traditionally and within the current constructs of psychology, this work touches on the concept of emotional intelligence. Our research findings are critical of this construct for the simple reason that emotional intelligence must be presented as a context specific attribute. It is not clever to work with it as a blanket ability. In other words, somebody is or is not emotionally intelligent. Period. We must define it as an ability that functions successfully in a specific defined social environment. One example will explain the Shadowmatch position. If somebody is emotionally very intelligent at work, between people talking one language, where all colleagues are engineers, they are all Christians, male and between the age of thirty and fifty. Does it mean that this person will be equally intelligent when lecturing at a college where the students are multi-cultural, from different religious groups, different sexual orientations and between the ages eighteen and twenty four? The Shadowmatch team wants to use a different label. We don't want to use emotional intelligence, we want to work with the idea of social inclusion and define it as a contextual reality. Although this will be a demanding algorithm to create, we are convinced that we are very close to a final breakthrough. This will be an artificial intelligent algorithm with progressive learning because society is not static. We are also in the process of finalizing a behavioral career report. The report will be for three different audiences and it will help the individual to better understand how their habits will - in a broad career directive - fit different career types better. In this regard, it is again important to note that our approach is different. We do not work with IQ or with aptitude or even personality indicators. We work with behavioral habits. Our research has indicated some fascinating results. In some careers, the habits we anticipated to be important as active habits tested exactly the opposite. The belief that some personality types are successful in specific careers have limited scientific proof (if any). The notion that specific habits define success in the workplace is as thin. The Shadowmatch team has an enormous benefit. We have data. The data proves something much more complex and much more intriguing. Our aim is to create a very specific but also an extremely reliable career preference report. We are ecstatic about the possibilities this might hold for individuals who are not sure of their optimal career possibilities. The report will also include some developmental recommendations should the individual prefer to pursue a career not optimal for their current patterns of behavior. On the personal wellness part of our work, we have exciting initiatives. The aim is to provide individuals with Relationship Development Programs. This will be based on their Shadowmatch results and it will be our first step towards providing a personal development program that will benefit the happiness and relationship fulfillment of individuals living in any of the relationship types we work with. These are just three of about ten research projects we are working on. All of these are aimed at one outcome: Success for all. For every individual, every relationship, every employee, business, team and those who experience their optimal success to be compromised for whatever reason: We want to make things better! --- title: References and recommended reading --- Cargile, A. C. (2011). Being mindful of the habitus of culture. China Media Research, 7(3), 11-20 Crossley, N. (20130. Habit and habitus. Body & Society 19(2&3), 136-161. Danner, U.n., Aarts, H., & De Vries, N. L. (20017) Habit formation and multiple means to goal attainment: Repeated retrieval of target means causes inhibited access to competitors. 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Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88(6), 918-933 | https://docsmith.co/2015/03/what-is-third-wave-behaviorism/ | | https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ880554.pdf | | http://crossref-it.info/articles/554/postmodernism-and-individualism | | https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/subconscious | | http://neurosciencenews.com/cognitive-emotions-psychology-6117/ | | http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/02/14/1619316114.full#sec-16 | | https://www.thealternativedaily.com/creating-neural-path-brain/ | | https://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/pressrelease/how_the_brain_makes_and_breaks_a_habit | | http://news.mit.edu/2005/habit | This publication provides the reader with a better understanding of the events that led to the development of Shadowmatch. The reader will also be introduced to a few philosophical paradigms behind the system as well as to the theoretical foundation of Shadowmatch.