DISC

"I thought my sister was broken"

Growing up at the dinner table, my mother would say, "Kids, how was your day today?" And I'd go — oh my gosh, Mom, okay, so what happened today… just firing it off. Before I could even finish, she'd cut in: "Just eat your food, Steven." Then she'd turn to my sister: "Courtney, how was your day?" And Courtney would say, "Fine." "Well, did you have that test today, honey?" "Yeah." "How did it go?" "Good."

And I'm sitting there like — give me the mic back, I have more to tell you.

I thought my sister was broken. I didn't know what was wrong with her. Why doesn't she talk? It took me years to figure out she wasn't broken — she was just passive, and I was active. Two different settings on the same machine. And once I saw it at the dinner table, I started seeing it everywhere.

That's what this page is. The dinner table, expanded into a framework that tells you how to talk to every customer you'll ever meet.

Industry terms this page covers

DISC is an old HR assessment tool. I got it handed to me at two different corporate jobs before I ever sold anything — took the test, got a printout, said "thanks, HR" and went back to work. It didn't mean anything to me.

Then I got into sales, and I looked at it again, and I went — wait a second. This is the user manual for people. This is the answer key.

Why it matters: people like people who are like them

People buy from people they like. Easy shot. Base hit.

But the second part is what sellers miss: they tend to like people who are like them. Which means if I want to work with more people, I can't just be me harder. I have to become more like the people I'm trying to work with. I need to adjust my style.

The goal is to make you multilingual in personality. Quadrilingual, actually. Four languages. And here's the thing — you already do this at home. You talk to your spouse different than a family elder. You talk to your seven-year-old different than your boss. We all use DISC in our real lives and then walk into work and expect everyone to adjust to us. That's the blind spot.

The two axes — the whole framework on one napkin

I teach DISC two ways. There's the textbook way with four letters and a wheel, and there's my way — two questions, one cross. Mine is faster and harder to forget.

When I meet someone, I ask myself two things:

Axis 1 — Active or Passive?

"Hey, Steve! How are you doing? Where are you from?" — active. They start the conversation. They push it forward. Extroverted, assertive, sometimes aggressive.

Versus the quiet one, who nods, makes eye contact, waits for you to ask. That's passive. Not broken. Not shy necessarily. Just running on a different setting.

Axis 2 — Task or Relationship?

You're at a restaurant. It's been fifteen minutes, nobody's come to take your order.

Task-oriented stands up: "Does anybody work here? We've been sitting here for an hour." They don't care about feelings right now. They care about getting food.

Relationship-oriented waves politely: "Excuse me, hey, when you get a second? We just sat down — could we maybe get some menus?" They want to make sure we're cool before anyone gets in trouble.

The four styles — at a glance

Put the two axes together and you get four quadrants. Four styles. Four languages. Each one gets its own page — click through to learn how to spot them, what they value, and how to sell to them.

One industry truth to know up front

In the ready-mix and aggregates world, your buyer is almost always a D. That single fact shapes how the whole market behaves — and why "we can't sell on service, we can't sell on price" is true so often. Read the full breakdown: Why your buyers skew D.

Reading it in the wild isn't the end — doing it is

Spotting the style is the easy half. The hard half is actually adjusting your style to match theirs without it feeling fake. That's its own skill — common traps, the voicemail diagnostic, the "accommodate vs. adjust" difference, how to practice it. Full how-to: Style-matching.

Homework — the DISC scan

Pick your top five customers. For each one, answer two questions:

1. Active or passive? How do they open a conversation? Who pushes it forward?
2. Task or relationship? Do they jump to business, or do they check in on you first?

That gives you a letter. D, I, S, or C. Don't overthink it — first instinct is usually right.

Then the harder question: What letter are you? And for each of those five customers — is there a mismatch? If you're an S and your biggest account is a hard-charging D, I can tell you right now where that relationship is leaking.

Next call with each one, try matching their style before you pitch anything. Details on how in Style-matching.

Where to go next

• D-style customers — the hardest to sell to, the most common in our industry
• I-style customers — fun to deal with, easy to mistake for friendship
• S-style customers — the loyalists, but slow to switch
• C-style customers — the spreadsheet lovers, the why-people
• Style-matching — how to actually adjust without faking it
• Why your buyers skew D — the industry pattern that changes everything
• Information Pull vs. Push — once you know the style, you know which questions work

Source: drawn from 479 moments across the live-coaching corpus — the second-highest-volume teaching concept in the body of work. Dinner-table and restaurant analogies used verbatim across dozens of student sessions. Voice preserved.