I am beat! So sorry I am late with the winners – yesterday was a wild one after 6:00 PM. MPE and Wonder Boy left the house at about 2PM to attend a Redhawks game – the men in our family LOVE baseball. When Top Girl got home from work at about 6PM, she and I had our monthly Mother/Daughter dinner plans so Son-in-law and Rocket were on their own. Top Girl and I chose Greek and had a leisurely meal while going over a team building exercise she had signed her and her staff up for yesterday. She wanted them to work better together and our division of state government uses the Spectrum training program to achieve this. Basically it assigns everyone one of four colors: Gold, Green, Blue, or Orange. A person generally has all four colors in different orders………I used to be one of the exceptions to this rule however – when your primary color is suppressed, or there are too many of your primary color on the team, your secondary color begins to come through. In case you want to know, I am a very strong Orange primary color with Blue as my secondary………….green and gold are not really even in my wheel house. Top girl is a strong Green with Blue as her secondary which has come through recently because nearly all of her staff is a primary green………….confused? Here is the assessment so you can know what color YOU are! BTW, what color ARE you?
Our conversation drifted to a particular relationship she had with one of her staff who she said she just “never understood” until yesterday……..apparently, this woman is an Orange. Now that she understands how she works a little better, their relationship should flourish. Currently I am an Orange (Neon orange according to our trainers over the years) trying to work for a solid Gold. This is not a desirable combo for supervisor/employee nor is the relationship working at all and I can no longer create the things that most people believe come naturally to me – they DO, but it has to be under the right circumstances. For the first time in my adult life, I am failing at my job. I can point to the reason but I cannot change the circumstance. Spectrum or True Colors is a valuable training that many teams could benefit from. If you have the ability and the inclination I recommend it highly!
So here are the colors:
Blue:
These folks are compassionate and kind – thought of as push-overs. Generally very imaginative.
Gold:
Extremely schedule/time oriented. Not adventurous. Very structured and dependable.
Green:
Greens are totally comfortable eating alone in a restaurant or going on vacation alone. They will bring a book to read in case they have time to increase their knowledge about something. Often loners, they are concerned with how things are processed and almost always have a non-expressive face. Top Girl calls her 1 expression that very seldom changes, “total bitch face”. Sometimes I agree with her. :)
Orange:
Hyperactive, usually the class clown. Often they either turn out to be leaders for good or bad – depending on early childhood factors. They either are the Pied Piper or Charles Manson!
After dinner we drove home and as we drove I said: I need to announce the winner of the apron as soon as we get home. As soon as we got home, my phone rang and it was my mother. Mother has been having a great deal of dental work done lately in preparation for the fitting of dentures on the top. At 75, her beautiful mouth full of perfectly aligned teeth in the perfect color has given way to her age and weakness. Mother was not happy about having her teeth removed in favor of dentures but it was time. Mother is also afraid of the dentist although she has always gone – but as I said, she had great teeth so she never endured a lot of work until now. I guess the dentist thought it would be better not to tell her when the day of extraction was going to be. As usual, mother had her hair done yesterday morning and then prepared to be picked up (the dentist has a service) for her appointment. I guess she got into the chair thinking they were going to fill a cavity on her bottom row of teeth. The dentist told her that today was the day. I know my mother and I am pretty sure if she could have pushed the dentist out of the way and ran from the office, she would have done it, but her Southern Old Fashioned manners would only allow her to smile and say, “Okay”. She arrived home at 6PM last night but did not call us right away, she fell asleep. When she woke up at about 8:15, she was in great pain and starving because she had not eaten all day.
That’s when she called us. We had to jump into full on “fix it” gear on a dime! I was making mashed potatoes and butterscotch pudding as fast as I could, then there was the drive to her house to pick up four scripts and then off to Walgreens (thank you for being open 24 hours a day!) to have them filled.
Do you have any idea how busy Walgreens is at 10PM on a Friday night? Crazy busy! There we were sandwiched between the man and his wife who had been beaten up at some bar and spent the last few hours in the hospital’s emergency room, the elderly gentleman who thought this would be the quickest time to pick up his monthly meds, and the foster mother with three foster teenagers – one of whom escaped her clutch and bolted for the door. We soon learned that young girl had been in the behavioral health crisis center for attempting suicide earlier that day. During the hour we sat waiting for the medication we learned far more about perfect strangers than we ever should have and I was wishing they would have once again allowed smoking in stores in Oklahoma – not for me but for jittery man who got beat up sitting next to me. He wanted a cigarette and his pride was hurt so he wasn’t the most pleasant man I’ve ever sat next to. We got the meds delivered back to mother at a very late hour returning home to bed about 1:00AM.
Now you know why I didn’t post the winner last night BUT – it was a GOOD thing because in the chaos that was our Friday night Top Girl remembered that she had two perfectly good still-in-the-wrapper Red Gold aprons on her shelf in the garage that she had meant to giveaway last year but had never done it. So, she gave them to me and now there are THREE winners!
And the winners are: Stacy, Michael, and Terri C!
Congratulations! If you read this, please email me at Davidson(dot)kelli(at)gmail(dot)com with your address and I will get those into the mail to you next week! If I don’t hear from you in 24 hours, other winners will be chosen. I’m so happy for you and thank you very much! Have you check out my chocolate donut post? It’s wonderful!
***Pictures courtesy True Colors Training ****
