Why I do what I do: Where I am coming from


Advice for interacting with others frequently includes:

  • Know your audience
  • Meet the learner where the learner is

And sometimes you will hear:

  • Let the audience know you
  • Let the learner know where you care coming from and how it impacts your teaching / coaching

The structure of a blog isn’t all that conducive to getting to know the readers of it or meeting every individual where they are at. But I would love to have those conversations, so please leave a comment or drop me an email. I can however note a bit more about where I am coming from. I could go on about the experiences that I’ve had that have helped shape my unique perspective, but I do have enough awareness that this is not the time or place to talk about growing up on a farm 😉

Instead I am going to share my standout assessment: AppellStandoutReport, which is pretty spot on:

Provider/Creator YOUR GREATEST VALUE TO THE TEAM:
You design better ways to serve people.
You put ideas in the service of people. Others may obsess over the bottom line, but you have more important things to concern you: the effects of systems and theories on people. Whether you are at the top of the org chart or on the front lines, you approach every task by figuring out whom it can help. Taking care of people is what matters to you, but your method of doing so is intellectual: you will excel when you are paid to analyze systems or data, see the patterns, and design a better solution. You will always be at your best as an insider, someone who becomes extremely familiar with the “raw material” you are studying, someone whose power comes from picking up on the subtleties. You are a designer of better ways of doing things. Not because the system itself matters; because the users of the system do.

It even notes my obsession with asking why:

“I ask ‘why?’ a lot. I guess it can get annoying sometimes, but I can’t help it. I’m the kind of person who hates assumptions. I need to get to the bottom of why things are the way they are.”