They Never Finish Anything. There’s Always More to Do.

They Never Finish Anything. There’s Always More to Do.

Once, I was holding a communication training program for a group of people, all of whom were working in the same room. The group consisted of about twenty people. The first afternoon, I handed out the results of the behavior analysis that each of them had taken earlier. Everyone read about themselves with increasing fascination, and most of them seemed very satisfied.

Except for one lady. She was extremely upset by her analysis. It was, in fact, completely incorrect. After confirming with her that it was okay to discuss it in front of the whole group, I asked what it was she was displeased with.

“There’s so much that’s incorrect,” she told us. For example, the analysis revealed that she could be a perfectionist. She wasn’t like that at all. I noticed the tiny smiles appearing on people’s faces. Apparently, her colleagues knew something she didn’t.

I asked her why she thought that the analysis maintained she was a perfectionist. She had no idea. The whole thing was a complete mystery. It was a totally useless tool.

Realizing that the woman was Blue, I was careful not to argue too much. She wouldn’t take me at my word. I was just some random consultant who had been working with this tool for a measly twenty years. What did I know?

Instead, I asked her to give an example showing that she was not a perfectionist. No problem, she had plenty. For example, she had three children, each of whom had three best pals. When she came home in the evenings, there were so many shoes piled up inside the front door that she had to do the high jump to get in. She began by shaking the dirt off the doormat and putting the shoes in order. She confided in me that she used to put size 10 at the back, as those guys went home last, so it seemed most logical. She placed the smaller sizes closest to the door in neat rows.

Then she went into the kitchen. What did she see there? Crumbs everywhere. All of these youngsters had been eating sandwiches, and the kitchen looked like a war zone. It took her twenty minutes to sanitize everything, put everything back in place, sweep, wipe the tables and worktops. Only then could she take off her coat and relax a little.

Her colleagues were in stitches. The woman looked around, not understanding what the excitement was all about. That any of this could even be remotely obsessive was beyond her. Her house was so untidy, that was her point.

The funny thing about this story is that a few years later I met the same woman but in a totally different context. She gave me a big hug and said that the analysis of her behavior was 100 percent correct. Stunned, I wondered how she arrived at that conclusion.

It turned out that she had kept the behavior profile in her purse for a while; the analysis had a list of behaviors and qualities, and every time she found herself doing one she ticked it off on the sheet. In the end, she had ticked all of them off. She liked the profile. An amazing tool, on the whole.