An established method to come to an understanding about others is to first understand yourself. The definition of social competence is the ability to understand and foresee your own behaviors impact on the behavior of others. If this is true, the solution is all about self-insight. But to be honest – who has the time and makes the effort for profound psychological studies to get to know oneself? Going to therapy is in addition insanely expensive, and a fairly unreliable method.

Now there is a readable solution here in the book ”Surrounded by Idiots” . The author Thomas Erikson describes one of the worlds most used methods to sort out the differences in human communication. It is a method coming from the famous DISA profiles, that use a color scheme of red, yellow, green and blue as a base to describe different behaviour and personalities. It is written with lots of humor and gives the reader a steady guidance which makes the book very practical. The focus is on usability and the methods described works every time you meet another person.

People are of course not an exact science, but with the help of this knowledge lots of painful misunderstandings will be avoided. The method is described on a popular science based level, but describes specific communication styles followed by hands-on advice on how best to respond to each of them.