Make the best choices with your unique empreinte!

The book “Make the right choices”[1] points to a journey that will help us attain greater awareness when making our choices. This is the key to learning HOW to choose in order to lead a more meaningful and fulfilling life.

Thanks to my book I happened to meet someone, apparently quite by chance, but in truth because there was a feeling of kinship that needed to be probed. Juan Aragon had just bought my book, when I met him in my Paris office. While leafing through, and talking about the book, we discovered that our writings on choice were complementary. In fact, Juan has created a tool, Empreinte (Imprint in English), which helps to reveal HOW we choose.

This innovative approach is centered on a dynamic representation of our thinking patterns. Empreinte, a personalized cognitive and evolving map, enables us to better understand how our way of interpreting the world leads to our choices and our behavior. This in turn opens a new self-assessment path underlining and revitalizing the qualities of each person and each group.

The approach

Empreinte is an approach that starts with a self-assessment inventory. Through several positive questions to be answered on line, it examines our areas of interest, preferences, what is usually known as “our tastes and our colors”. Thanks to an algorithm, the software draws a multi-colored mental map. The colors represent the numerous facets of our actions in the world. For instance, red represents our interest in a certain goal, orange stands for the need to act to attain that goal, and so on. The originality of Empreinte consists in “staging” the way people become aware of their inner workings and in forcing them to think with the language of colors. Following is an example of Empreinte, gathered from a survey.

Typically, a certified consultant pre-interprets the picture and hands it back to the client while submitting his hypotheses to him. At this point these hypotheses will be approved by the client, who is the ultimate authority in this matter. The final interpretation of the picture is therefore all the more meaningful and thought provoking, because it is the result of a joint creation which has been accepted and incorporated by the concerned party, the client.

A cognitive theater on six color levels to “enlighten us with a smile”

Empreinte stages each person’s “tastes and colors” on six in-depth levels to grasp dynamic coherence and lead it towards the corresponding choice:

• Level I – Target: acting meaningfully, understanding what makes us happy and act accordingly, acting with lucidity when faced with a choice.
• Level II – Resources: identifying our values and living according to them, freeing our positive and driving emotions.
• Level III – Implementation: finding our life mission; strategic thinking.
• Level IV – Adjustment: “Aligning structural choices with daily choices”: deciding to act or not to act thanks to an increased awareness of what is good for us.
• Level V – Evolution: opening our conscience in order to change, shedding habitual patterns, heading for new horizons, making active choices.
• Level VI- Transformation: transcending our aspirations for an improved self-realization and self-fulfillment with, and thanks to, others.

The Empreinte image on such serious, sensitive and complex subjects, appears as a kind of brightly colored Harlequin character whose purpose is de-dramatizing the relationship between self and others by putting a playful spotlight on the numerous tricks played by emotions and beliefs, which surreptitiously influence our judgments. We therefore get a clearer vision and can step back to make better choices thanks to an improved awareness.

A bit of history

The Empreinte approach was born 25 years ago in the field of aeronautics. Today this constantly updated approach is used to accompany people and organizations that wish to optimize their human potential. It is an original as well as demanding approach that deliberately differentiates itself from traditional tools which focus on categories and standards, finally providing simplified profiles. Each Empreinte is unique and allows a deeper knowledge of each person’s make-up, by identifying unexpected resources and previously unremarked qualities that surface from the vortex of our past experience.

It was conceived by Juan Aragon as a result of research on optimization of synergy among people. This was part of a vital project for the development of a large enterprise. To reach this objective, with its socio-dynamic, pedagogical and strategic goals, he linked, pioneer-like, company operational experimentation with the latest works on neuroscience, particularly those by Jean-Pierre Changeux, and the contribution of cognitive science.

Empreinte’s added value

By experimenting Empreinte on myself, I have ascertained that it offers attractive, innovative and effective resources to single persons or groups, enabling them to position themselves in the realm of personal and professional choices. Confronted with the difficulty that each person faces when trying to represent a self-image and to talk about it with ease, conviction and especially pertinence, Empreinte offers the active pleasure of stepping back vis-à-vis our self, thanks to a simple, creative and basically friendly solution: the language of a color-based frame of reference specific for each model. This enables the person to paint him/herself by applying small colored touches just like an impressionist painter who instills life and volume to what he sees without quite defining it. The purpose of the entire approach consists in strengthening our perspicacity. This in turn will help us make the best choices in our context by putting within the reach of our heart and our mind a colored image representing our past experience, thus revealing the breadth of our possibilities, simply, realistically, positively and with some humor.

For more information go to http://siteepigenese.mapyourdream.com/en/ and contact me.

Article written with Juan Aragon