When I first started this blog almost three and a half years ago, I had a lot of pent-up energy around thoughts that I really wanted to express.  Many of those early essays came from coaching lessons that I’ve given over the years and/or real hot button topics for me.  Now that those urgent thoughts have been shared, I’ve settled into a pattern where my writing is driven in large measure by what’s currently going on in my life. Those daily observations always connect back to “deeper thoughts”, so I get to fulfill my desire to share those ruminations in the context of what I’m experiencing today. 

What is sure to dominate my writing for months to come is the major renovation work Trish and I are undertaking on our home.  We love this house.  Trish has lived here for almost 30 years.  It’s a modest house in a fabulous neighborhood, conveniently located, and with great neighbors.  Trish has watched all their kids grow up.  I have been slotted into the crowd.  No one seems to be leaving.  We toyed with moving into one of the new 55-and-older communities popping up but decided instead to invest in this house and stay put.  I’m getting the kitchen of my dreams.  We are getting the second full bath that Trish always wanted as well as the master suite that she didn’t know she wanted until I told her she did. It’s a big project and neither one of us has undertaken anything like it in the past.

Originally, the title of this essay was going to be “Decisions, Decisions, Decisions” because that is what is going on right now:  a thousand decisions, big and small.  Fortunately, we’ve worked out a system that is helping this process go fairly smoothly.  I’m a Big Picture kind of gal and have focused on the layout of the kitchen and the choice of appliances.  I also am very comfortable with a wide range of decorating styles, as long as whatever is done is in good taste and put together well.  Trish has a genetic eye for design and, while not someone to lose herself for days in a tile shop, doesn’t get paralyzed by choice like I do.  We have agreed that she’ll take that first cut at design choices, aided by her brother who has an absolutely amazing eye for design and experience building from scratch, and I will provide any needed input at the end.  This means I’ll provide a tie-break vote if needed and generally agree with her choices because they are fabulous.  And they are!  I am so thrilled with how this is coming together!

I am enormously grateful for how this process is playing out because, as noted above, I get paralyzed by choice.  Give me two or three choices and I can make a decision.  And I will come to that decision quickly.  Give me a blank sheet of paper and say, “Design a kitchen, soup to nuts” and I will get nauseous.  This got me thinking back to a tool I used in my working days called the CARE profile.  Well, it was called the CARE profile back in the day.  Now it’s called the Team Dimensions Profile and is offered by a company called Training Solutions.  Find out more about it here.  I’m not shilling for the company and, in fact, may get sued for talking about it without permission but it has real merit.  The tool is used to help leaders put together balanced teams.  Understanding where you are in this CARE profile, though, is pretty useful regardless.

The basic concept is that we can’t all be good at everything from ideation through to completion of a project.  Everyone has different strengths.  The key is to understand your own strong points and then surround yourself with people who have abilities where you do not.  The acronym, CARE, stands for: Creator (generating the idea); Advancer (building on an idea to increase the possibilities); Refiner (winnowing down the choices); and, Executor (working out the details and implementing). 

I am a combination of Advancer and Refiner.  I have the occasional brilliant creative idea, but more likely that vision is a synthesis of other things I’ve seen that I put together in a new way.  Our kitchen design came out of tours of our neighbors’ houses, seeing what they had done and picking out what would work best for us.  Our final design is actually a tweak on one neighbor’s kitchen that we really like.  And while I’m pretty good at building on someone else’s ideas, or encouraging others to do such, I am best at narrowing down the choices by working through how something would function in real life.  Executing?  Yeah, best leave that to someone else.  Not a detail person, here, and too much of a perfectionist.

At one point in my career, we moved a number of our labs into a new building.  Labs are complicated beasts, yet the ability to plan the layout is a rare opportunity to really improve workflow.  We had a team in one of the labs who always worked well together and this move was no different.  One, a highly creative scientist, took a blank sheet of paper and produced a very clever layout.  The other, a detailed execution-focused scientist, made it practical and do-able.  We needed both.

Even choosing the appliances nearly did me in.  Wow, are there a LOT of choices!  I searched on line.  I asked friends for their thoughts.  I was afraid that I wouldn’t make the BEST choice and I’d have to suffer with the result.  Finally, I sat down and did two things.  First, I made my list of “threshold” requirements.  Any appliance in a given category that met those requirements would be good enough.  I didn’t need “perfect”.  Second, I chose two brands (GE and Bosch) that got high marks from my trusty Consumer Reports across the board.  We went to our local appliance retailer, list of threshold requirements in hand, and toured around.  I took his suggestions and dug into the websites to look at cousins of his picks to make the final choices.  Then I slept for a week.  Meanwhile, Trish and John were touring through granite shops, tile shops, faucet web sites, you name it.  I simply could not have done it.  The results, however, are amazing. 

For some reason, all of us tend to think that we need to be able to do everything equally well and we beat ourselves up if we fall short in even one area.  That’s just nonsense!  If we look honestly at those around us, we’ll notice that no one is truly strong in every part of that CARE profile.  I’m an Advancer/Refiner and proud of it!  Be proud of what you are, too.  And look to surround yourself with people having strengths in other areas.