"Never let anyone call you slow." An Interview with Sandra Seagal and David Horne (from Leverage Points Issue 71)

Based on 26 years of research and practice, Human Dynamics is a body of work that offers understanding into fundamental differences in the way people learn, communicate and develop. It identifies the interaction in people of three universal principles: mental (intellectual), emotional (relational), and physical (practical). It enables individuals to discover how these hardwired principles combine and interplay in specific ways to form distinct personality dynamics, or ways of being. They can be identified, even in infancy. Learn more…

Sandra Seagal, Ph.D., and David Horne, M.A., are president and partner respectively of Human Dynamics International and co-directors of the Human Dynamics Institute, a nonprofit organization for scientific and educational research. They have been engaged in the research and development of the field of Human Dynamics since Sandra’s breakthrough investigation into personality dynamics in 1979. With extensive backgrounds in education and psychotherapy, they have brought a new understanding of human systems to thousands of people through their book — Human Dynamics: A New Framework for Understanding People and Realizing the Potential in Our Organizations (published by Pegasus Communications) — and through transformational training programs in hundreds of organizations in over 25 cultures worldwide.

In the following interview with Leverage Points editor Vicky Schubert, they reflect on over two decades of learning about Human Dynamics in people and share their thoughts on where they go from here.

LP: Tell us about how you started your research on Human Dynamics.

SS: It began with what I’ve characterized as an “inspired experience.” In 1979, I was working as a psychotherapist with a nine-year-old girl who was having difficulty in school. In the middle of the interview I suddenly discerned three distinct frequencies in the child’s voice—which I didn't understand at the time, but later learned to associate with the three principles: mental, emotional, and physical. That was what launched my inquiry into this whole body of knowledge we now call Human Dynamics.

We started working with two or three different schools in Los Angeles, and they loved the work. This attracted some publicity. The Los Angeles Times did an article in 1981. Then a business magazine interviewed me in 1983, after which I got a call from a vice president at Ford Motor Company. He said, “Why don’t you come out and do my management team?” And I remember distinctly saying, “Your what? Oh, no, I can’t do that, because I’m not from the business world; I’m a psychologist and educator.” And he said, “Well, I’m the business person, and these people are driving me crazy. If you can do anything with the people, I’ll take care of the business.”

So, I went out, scared to death, with my own prejudices about business. These broke after five minutes with this man and his team. I stayed there three years. The experience opened up the business world to us and helped us to manage ourselves financially.

LP: So, over time, the work moved into the business realm, which happened to be a handy way to fund your research and provide a large practice field with a large number of people.

SS: Exactly. And it’s allowed us to bring the work into other cultures as well. We first went to Sweden at the invitation of a school principal. Teachers had to handle non-Swedish children who had come from war-torn countries, who had lost parents, who were speaking other languages—and they were climbing the walls. We gave the principal and teachers some tools to work with. It was about helping the children, with interpreters, to speak about their feelings, to help them adjust emotionally from the experience, to relax. The whole class changed.

SS: We’ve done Human Dynamics work in education in Singapore, Israel, the Netherlands, the United States, and Sweden. Right now, Sweden is where you’ll find best practices in education with Human Dynamics. The Singapore community of educators has sent six or seven learning groups to Sweden to look at schools there. So, we’ve established some precedents, and now our job is to bring it more broadly into the United States.

LP: Talk a little bit about how Human Dynamics can make a difference in kids’ lives.

DH: It’s invaluable information for parents to have about their children. We know that these different human systems are hardwired from the beginning of life and can be identified in infancy. And certainly as the child gets older and as more of their external behavior and processes of learning become apparent, it becomes increasingly easy to identify the dynamic and understand the child.

It’s also invaluable information for teachers to have, because these different ways of being, with their different ways of learning and developing, are present in every classroom. Armed with this knowledge, parents and teachers can help children understand their own processes and how to take care of themselves.

SS: I can tell you a story about how we give children a language for these hardwired internal processes. We were in a classroom with boy, about 9- or 10-years-old, who was a “D” student. I asked him how he was doing, and he said he was a “slow learner.” I said, “Who told you that?” He said, “My teacher.” And I said, “Well, I’m going to tell you something. First, I want you to look at me and tell me if you think I would lie to a child.” And he looked at me and said, “No.” And I said, “What you call being a slow learner is one of your greatest gifts.” He was really astounded. I went on to tell him, “You take in more information than any other human system in the whole world. There are many, many children like you, and even adults. Now, can you tell me back what I just told you?” And he said, “I take in more information and that takes me more time.”

This child—it’s a classic story of moving out of failure—is now an “A” student. We talked to the parents, we talked to the teacher, we talked to him. And two weeks later, he was in a completely different place.

We invited him to tell his story to 300 parents at a session in Canada. He took the microphone and told about how his life changed and how he finally knew he was really smart. And then he talked about how his family had moved and he had to go to another school. In the new school, the teacher said, “Hurry up, John. You’re working too slowly.” And he said in the microphone, “Dr. Seagal told me never to let anyone call you slow. But you have to be very careful, because you’re a child and this is your teacher. You have to find the right time and the right place to tell them about how you learn. So, I decided to ask my parents to go with me to tell the principal what I knew about myself, and then maybe the principal would tell the teacher.” Which is exactly what happened.

Then he paused and said, “Now, I’m 10-years-old, and there are many kids just like myself who are struggling. You have to get this work to the boards of education. It’s moving too slowly.” There wasn’t a dry eye in the audience.

LP: Do you find resistance from teachers or administrators who don’t feel they have the time to accommodate children’s different learning styles?

DH: Yes. But with training it can absolutely be done. It’s actually easier, because you’re accommodating the “difficult” children. We’ve done a fair amount of teacher training in this country. But if the teachers come from a variety of schools and then they go back to their individual classrooms, we get feedback from the individual that it’s helped them a great deal, but it doesn’t change anything. If, on the other hand, you get a whole school or a portion of the school where you’ve got the principal behind it and so on, then you can really create change. In Sweden now, 20,000 teachers have been trained. So it’s had a real impact on the educational culture there.

In our teacher training program, the first half is all about “who are you?” If you understand your own dynamic, it becomes real. When you go back to your classroom, a lot of judgment will fall away; you’re much more open to the children. And then the second part of the program is the focus on the children, understanding the different learning processes associated with the different dynamics and different developmental processes.

LP: What do you see as the research horizon for this work?

DH: In the first five years, the focus was on basic research into these different human systems. Sandra worked with groups and, with their help and through her own intuition, developed the basic body of understanding. Since then, in doing training with people—in business, healthcare, education—the research has continued.

However, there are two more levels of research yet to come. One is more formal research into evaluating results. For example, capturing the feedback of those 20,000 teachers in Sweden. Some of that work has actually been started with a couple of the universities in Sweden.

In addition, we have come to see that the different dynamics are not only distinct systems in terms of their mental/emotional/physical combinations but are actually different energy systems. In mentally centered people, for example, the nexus of energy is literally around their head. The nexus of energy for emotionally centered people is around the thorax, in the heart area. And the nexus of energy for physically centered people is in what the Japanese call the “hara,” underneath the naval. A person’s center often becomes readily apparent for us when they walk into the room, just on the basis of observation. What we’re picking up is not so much behavior as where the energy is located. I believe that at some point there will be a technology that can register this.

SS: Think about babies in terms of energy. Even when they’re sleeping, their energy is palpable. Let’s say that there are three babies, all about six pounds in weight and about the same age. When you pick them up, the mentally centered one feels like air, the physically centered one feels really solid, and the emotionally centered one feels somewhere in the middle.

Now, we haven’t even begun to explore this formally. But there is a lot of inquiry around energy at the forefront of medicine and physics these days. We’ve begun to line up partners who are interested in helping us underwrite some of these investigations into the link between the Human Dynamics body of knowledge and scientific research in related fields: brain research, medical research, voice spectrum analysis, energy fields, cognitive science—the list goes on and on.

We see this work as a new science of human functioning and human systems. This is the first foundation, the first iteration. There will be much more research, maybe 100 years, maybe more.

Explore more Human Dynamics resources from Pegasus

Visit the Human Dynamics website for more audio and video resources for parents and teachers, including the newly available Children's Park Design video