Embodiment and Uniqueness: Using the FEBI assessment with The Fascinate System™ to Empower Change
By Mark Seton, PhD
I first signed up to become a FEBI coach in 2010, although I was already very familiar with the 4 energy types through my experience and training with InterPlay established in 1989 by two dancers, Cynthia Winton-Henry and Phil Porter in San Francisco. They had worked with Betsy Wetzig, co-author with Ginny Whitelaw of the foundational text Move to Greatness. Over the past 15 years, FEBI has been an integral part of my training of actors, initially, and other professionals, in how to honour their uniqueness and wisely negotiate what energies they bring to both the tasks they love AND the tasks that are necessary for them to flourish. What I will share here is my particular application of FEBI in parallel with another tool, the Fascinate System™, that I have been trained and certified in over the past four years. I hope that what I share may be a stimulus for your own extended use of FEBI and how knowledge of one’s energy preferences can be both liberating and empowering.
The Fascinate System™ was developed by Sally Hogshead and supported by ongoing ‘brand’ research since 2006, to assist individuals and teams to market their services from their uniqueness – to establish fascination – rather than compete by comparing themselves to others. Like FEBI, there is an online written assessment that you complete and then you receive a report that interprets your responses in terms of what Advantage preferences you have that others see and value in you, that is, what other people find fascinating in you. The seven Advantages of the Fascinate System™ are Innovation (Language of Creativity), Power (Language of Confidence), Prestige (Language of Excellence), Mystique (Language of Listening), Alert (Language of Details), Passion (Language of Relationships) and Trust (Language of Stability). The Test identifies your top two Advantages that others likely observe and appreciate when you work at your unique best. As with FEBI, this test identifies the unique blend of preferences that each person manifests in their behaviours and mindsets. A combination of insights provided by Fascinate and FEBI can be very empowering for the individuals or teams who use these tools.
As FEBI users and trainers know, there’s great value in identifying one’s energetic preferences – Driver (thrust in Wetzig’s original terminology used at InterPlay), Collaborator (swing), Organizer, (shape) and Visionary (hang) – and how they all map onto the various tasks of everyday life and work. There’s great value in recognising how one’s habitual energetic choices may not always be the best-fit energy pattern for the situation at hand. By taking us into the body, FEBI literally lets us feel our way into new possibilities, gaining greater access to all 4 energy patterns, which, from my InterPlayer training, I foster with playfulness. This shift from cognition alone to embodied awareness and body wisdom cultivated by FEBI can make a big difference in making sense of and altering one’s habitual life in order to fully celebrate and ‘lean into’ one’s uniqueness.
In my coaching of professional clients across the performing arts, law, dispute mediation, and healthcare, I use this one-two system starting with the cognitive understanding gleaned from the Fascinate System™, followed by the embodied understanding and possibilities opened up by FEBI. This ensures clients can have a sustainable outworking or expression of their uniqueness.
As a case study, I had a client whose top two Advantages from the Fascinate System™ were Innovation and Passion. Matching the archetype of ‘The Rock Star’, this is an exciting way to be perceived by others as someone who can create new ideas with enthusiasm. However, my client expressed concern that such an expectation could prove hard to sustain in the face of others’ expectations. This is where I introduced my client to the 4 energetics and FEBI. My client took the FEBI assessment and we had a second coaching session.
What proved powerful was being able to map the Fascinate Advantages onto the FEBI patterns underlying them. In particular, the Innovation Advantage mapped well to Visionary (hang) and the Passion Advantage mapped onto Collaborator (swing). This gave us both an embodied place to play and experience how the client could draw, not only upon these energetics, but also temper them with the other two energy patterns (Driver and Organizer). In the Fascinate system, we speak of ‘Double Trouble’ when we overuse an Advantage, usually when we’re feeling stressed or threatened, which is similar to over-using or mis-using a FEBI pattern. Therefore, my client valued the many ways (guided by the FEBI Report) to shift patterns using breath, movement, music or other environmental cues to engage the appropriate energetic for the task at hand. My client came away knowing their unique self cognitively and behaviourally and also in a bodily, empowered way.
Working with clients like this, I have found FEBI and the Fascinate System™ to be complementary tools that help people reach greater clarity about how they’re perceived at their unique best, as well as how to proactively ‘lean into’ the challenges and opportunities of being fully embodied in their uniqueness.