I can’t think of anything compelling to add to my list of 10 things so I’m just going to start the Flower Exercise in Chapter 6!

“Petal” 1 of the Flower Exercise is “You and People. You can describe who you are in terms of the kinds of people you most prefer to work with or help – age span, problems, needs, physical or mental disabilities, education level, geographical location, etc.”

Automatically, I’d say that age is not important – my jobs have helped everyone from children to the elderly, but I definitely prefer working with intelligent people – whether the girl who wrote me a letter as a client or interns from Ivy League schools who worked for me at my nonprofit job or State Department officials I would meet for advocacy purposes. But also moral and ethical people – as some of the worst people I have ever worked with were lawyers, but just horrible human beings.

Worksheet #1 is based on the Holland Codes, but I’ve never had it more clearly explained so that I know my “People Environment” answers with certainty:

1. Investigative
2. Social
3. Enterprising

Worksheet #2 “My Favorite People” is actually an exercise where you use a prioritizing grid (the first time I’ve done this – thumbs up!) to rank your *least* favorite people and here are my results:

1. narcissists
2. controlling / verbally abusive people
3. sexual harassers
4. people who make sexist verbal comments
5. lunch thieves!
6. people who take credit for my work
7. people who have lied and thrown me under the bus instead
8. gossips
9. incompetent people
10. personally immoral people (even if it doesn’t directly affect me)

This has been a great exercise so far – it has made clear a lot of random thoughts in my head I’ve had about annoying people and work environments.

Okay! That’s been a couple of hours there – I think that’s pretty good for today! I really need to get back to starting my day with this.