Inability to Concentrate: The Yellow's Juggling Balls

“Look, I Can Juggle All the Balls at the Same Time!”

We need to talk a little about Yellow’s inability to concentrate. He’s always prepared for new experiences. This is the downside to the incredible openness Yellows have for new things, ideas, and impressions. There are so many new things!

And because “new” is synonymous with “good” for a Yellow, it’s best that something new happens all the time. Otherwise, our Yellow friend will lose focus. He can’t be bothered listening to the whole story, the background, and all the details and facts that may actually be relevant. It’s not interesting to him, and he will lose his concentration.

What does he do then? Simple. Something else. He throws up another ball to juggle. The problem with all these balls is that he might be able to keep them in the air for a while, but he can’t get them down into the right box at the right time. Instead, he leaves the room and the juggled balls tumble down right into someone else’s lap. In a meeting, he may very well start playing with his mobile phone or his computer or will start chatting to the person beside him. Softly at first, thinking that no one will notice anything. It’s not true, of course; everyone gets quite irritated. But if no one says anything he’ll just continue. Here Yellows are like little children. They are good at testing the limits. They continue until someone becomes too angry and puts his foot down. And, of course, then the Yellow feels hurt. He just wanted to …

The way Yellows often quickly get bored can have far greater consequences than a little disruptive behavior during meetings. They’re not good at everyday trivial things like administration and follow-ups. As usual, most Yellows would contest what I just wrote. In their own eyes, they are the masters even here. But if we consider the ability to follow up, this could be a serious threat to the effective implementation of a project.

New project—great! Put together a new and dynamic team full of interesting people—check! Get everything going and develop ideas and concepts—are you kidding? Already done that! Working like crazy in the beginning to really get things sped up? Yup. But then? Following up on what is actually happening or not happening in a project is extremely boring. That means looking backwards; that’s dull, and it won’t happen. A Yellow can’t keep his concentration long enough to follow through. He would rather persuade himself that it’s important to have confidence in people and just trust that the project gets done.

A funny example happened once when I coached sales reps at a large commercial TV channel. I sat with a female seller, a clever young woman who made big business deals. We had identified some weaknesses in her behavior profile—after she had struggled to convince me that even bad traits could be quite good—and now started to make a plan for how she would proceed in her personal development.

It began to fall apart on the first point: When would she begin?

She couldn’t start that day because it was already past three in the afternoon. And tomorrow was full of meetings. It had to be next week. But she was away then. Maybe the week after that; she would check her calendar and see.

She had lost the match before she had even begun.