“The precision of naming takes away from the uniqueness of seeing." – artist Pierre Bonnard

Living in the Omaha area, one gets exposed to Gallup Strengths Finder. They are HQ'd here, many local people list their top 5 strengths in LinkedIn, and sometimes strengths are displayed prominently in placards in offices. If you haven't heard of it, it's a self-assessment that identifies your strongest talents. In the 2000's it grew into a popular management tool for knowing who your people are, and why they might do the things they do. It's supposed to help with hiring, and improve interactions with co-workers.
There are other, similar, tools to help managers and in the mid-2000s I took a fancy, expensive one at the behest of one of my investors. He thought it would improve our interactions. This version was similar to Gallup's, but it was done with phone interviews, recordings, transcripts, and a debrief with a licensed psychologist. I don't know if my investor ever looked at the results, but I remember exactly one tidbit from the exercise.
Go for a walk multiple times a day.
This was something I did at the time without prompting. When the daily press of business started to build up overwhelm, I got up and took a walk. Sometimes around the building, sometimes around the block. It helped me work through whatever was jumbling up in my brain. Looking back, I wonder what the investor was hoping would come from this exercise? Our communication never improved. I'm not sure those tools help with that anyway. "Interesting thought Greg, but of course you'd say that, you're a Flummigator," seems ineffective.
I thought about this episode in my life earlier today when I found myself wandering through the garden searching for cabbage worms. Gardening must be my new walking. A mindless activity that lets my brain unwind the knots forming from work problems. I don't go on walks through the building anymore. Instead, round and round the yard I go.
The fall crops are planted and like magic all my brassicas are filled with cabbage worms eating their leaves. They grow fast! Overnight they'll take down a leaf and be 10X their size the day before. The best way to get rid of them is to grab and flick, or squish. All my current problems are worked out as I interrupt these little lifecycles.
And stand back if I happen to see an egg dump from a moth. I go into hyper-destroy mode like Ripley in Aliens. Squish, squish, squish. Get away from my cabbages you bitch!
Nature might need me to go back to walking.
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