It depends.
Chances are, you take “finish what you start” for granted.
Many of us are raised to follow that statement as a virtue.
It’s common advice.
And for many, it’s great advice.
For others, it’s an unnecessary burden.
How do you know which advice applies to you? Take the Kolbe A™ Index and discover how you naturally operate.
You’ll learn that there are three parts of the mind, and you’re often only considering two of them. The three parts of the mind are cognitive (thinking), affective (feeling), and conative (doing). The conative part of the mind focused on natural, instinctive ways of taking action and creative problem-solving.
The Kolbe A measures your conative strengths across 4 Action Modes®:
Jenna Cooper has more ideas than she knows what to do with.
This has been a huge asset for her at work, where she’s chief of staff at a large state health agency, and at home, where she’s a mother of two and a highly active member of her community.
Jenna is the kind of person who, on a whim in high school, scheduled a meeting with the superintendent to start a recycling program because no one else was doing it. As an adult, she has launched a neighborhood organizing effort on her own block — potlucks, a yard sale, a cleanup, a nonprofit tour, all in the last few months. The ideas come fast.
She’s also the person who planned her son’s birthday party from scratch and forgot the knife to cut the cake.
All of this aligns with her 4-3-9-3 Kolbe A Index result, which she learned more in-depth from David Kolbe on the Powered by Instinct: Private Sessions podcast.
On the podcast, David, an expert in human performance, explained that Jenna’s Natural Advantage™ is Idea-Generating Powerhouse.
“It’s so natural, for you,” David explained, “to see some stuff in front of you and just say, ‘Oh, we could do this, and we can do that, and we should try out this. Let’s do this experiment. And you know what? If it doesn’t work, we’ll learn from it.’ That’s very natural for somebody like you who leads with what we call the Quick Start.”
Jenna initiates the problem-solving process by coming up with ideas and thinking about what-ifs, and what experiments can be done.
In addition to her strength for innovation, Jenna is a 3 in Follow Thru, which means she has a strength for adapting.
“You’re going to have all kinds of ideas that you generate,” David offered, “And you’re going to start some of them. Some of them you just have because you’re driving down the road and this thing pops into your head, and it doesn’t go anywhere. Like, by the time you get to work, it’s gone.
Some of the ideas you’ll start, but you won’t finish them. And that’s quite all right. You don’t have a need to.”
David went on to explain that some people, like those with a 9 in Follow Thru, really have an internal drive to bring closure to things. But he gave permission to Jenna to lean into her strengths.
“People like you don’t have to finish everything. Start new ideas, and if you lose interest in them and they fall by the wayside, that’s fine.”
The key to making that work? Communication.
“You’ll need to figure out if it’s something that you started and now a bunch of other people are on board and working on, and you just drop it all of a sudden,” David continued. “That can create some other issues with those other people. But as long as you communicate as a leader, it works. You should always find ways to be free to be yourself.”
