When Candy Whirley ’97 was 30 years old, married and a mother of two, she was managing a restaurant in Kansas City, Missouri when a local corporation asked her to teach a customer service class to their employees.
“After I gave them the ‘how-to speech,’ I realized that that was what I was supposed to be doing with my career,” she said.
So she went to college, earning an associate degree from Maple Woods Community College and a speech communication degree from Missouri Western. She began her public speaking career right after graduation and started her own business in 2001.
Her career brought her back to Missouri Western last fall when Claudia Baer, student employment coordinator, invited her to campus to give a series of three workshops on leadership and workplace culture.
Her first session, “It Takes 4 to Tango,” helped participants identify which “animal” personality they were and how to work together and communicate with the different personalities. Her second workshop included lessons on generational differences and time management, and in the third, participants learned about Whirley’s W.O.W. Philosophy (Way of Working), which was about learning the importance of coaching your employees.
“I’ve always loved helping people,” she said. “I like to teach them how to work better and understand themselves and each other.”
Whirley said she’s held a lot of workshops and talked on a lot of topics over the years, but her people and relationship skills workshops seem to be the most popular. “I’ve been teaching about personality differences for 19 years, and people are still hiring me for it.”
Her talks have taken her all over the country and the world, including speaking to a group of 4,000 in South Korea, where her talk was translated in eight different languages.
“I just love it and cannot imagine doing anything else,” Whirley said. “It brings me so much joy.”
It Takes 4 to Tango!
Are you a chameleon, lion, lamb or owl? And how do you work and communicate with the other animal personalities? Candy Whirley ’97 helps people figure that out in her book, “It Takes 4 to Tango.” She calls the book a “guidebook to help people live and work better together and stop driving each other crazy.”
In her book and in her workshop, “It Takes 4 to Tango,” Whirley describes the characteristics of each animal and explains how each animal likes to communicate and work.
Chameleons? They love change and are very flexible.
Are you a lion? Then you are results-driven, goal-driven and always searching for the bottom line.
Lambs? Team-oriented and gentle.
And owls? Analytical, research- and data-driven.
Additionally, Lions and Lambs are polar opposites, as are Owls and Chameleons.
The book offers a number of exercises and insights, and also contains a 30-day program journal to help the reader better understand the four animals and practice working better together.
“In the dance world, it takes two humans to tango,” she says in her book. “But in the real world, you will meet lots of people with different personalities and their own ways of dancing. With them, it takes four to tango!”