The Importance of Evaluating Data & Character in Your Life (Part II)
In Part I we examined the importance of evaluating data in your life which represents objective balance. Now, in Part II the Baby Boomer will discuss the subjective balance in the importance of evaluating character.
Being able to evaluate character leaves the mind behind as you tend to rely on “gut” feelings and your heart being careful not to let your emotions run rapid and get the best of you and your ability to make good decisions. Making certain, while you’re evaluating character, you also must evaluate data to keep things in perspective and provide the necessary balance as they both go “hand in hand”.
When looking deeply at character one should examine the areas of integrity, selflessness, and responsibility. Integrity encompasses one being trustworthy, transparent, authentic, honest, and loyal. Selflessness includes being humble, courageous, respectful, teachable, generous, trusting, caring, and just. Finally, when examining responsibility is one reliable, dedicated, intentional, self-disciplined, future-focused, and confident without being conceited.
The Baby Boomer, after so many years, has come to the conclusion that in order to make good decisions you must evaluate the data before you and the character of the people by taking the time to actually write down the positives and negatives from your analysis–better known as a “Ben Franklin Checklist”. Never forget that for every decision there is a consequence so do your due diligence so you’ll only make good decisions which will definitely affect your life.
My twenty-year hobby career was being in the transportation industry. Our brand at JL was the Driving Team who built a relationship with our customers thus creating value even though we were an expensive service. By being professional, dependable, safe, and discreet our Driving Team’s goal was to exceed their customer’s service expectations each and every time where we strove for perfection, but excellence was accepted.
As you may recall, in my career with the supermarket industry I grew to detest both the Legal Department and the HR Department as they attempted to interfere with your decision making not really understanding the importance of just doing the right thing vs what ultimately the decision could cost the company. They created such a complicated hiring process requiring you to “jump through hoops” to get someone hired which seldom included evaluating one’s character. Needless to say, I was fortunate enough to be in a position where I could ignore them and make decisions without them being involved. Nothing is more irritating in an interview than when a question is asked by the HR interviewer, they then automatically put their head down to take notes while the candidate is answering their question rather than looking at the candidate giving them the full attention they deserve. The Baby Boomer thinks this is very disrespectful and impolite. No wonder we think we’re just a number in today’s society.
Hiring a member of the JL Driving Team was extremely important in maintaining the success of the company for all the apparent reasons. We didn’t have a sheet of paper with set questions, we just had a conversation. The data we evaluated came from looking at their driving record and doing a background check. In having this conversation, we were able to evaluate one’s character by finding out if the candidate possessed integrity, selflessness, and responsibility. Hey, it goes without saying, we also wanted them to be friendly, polite, and conversational. Normally, our conversation would take place over lunch. It was said that J.C. Penny would take potential candidates to dinner and if they salted their food before tasting it, he wouldn’t hire them. We weren’t necessarily that way, but having good manners at lunch was very important.
An example of evaluating character involving a life decision is choosing your health care providers whether it be your primary care physician or a specialist like a cardiologist or a cardiac surgeon in my case. This past week has been a bit strange which I plan to explain in another post, but it’s hard to believe we’re coming up to a year since I had my open-heart surgery.
Last year, when I was admitted to the hospital late on a Thursday evening, the next day I was visited late, due to a communication snafu, by a cardiologist who said he should perform a heart catheterization, but wasn’t sure when it could be scheduled. I was having to change from my current cardiologist due his moving to a new hospital out of the area and began to gather some data on this gentleman. Well, he left and came back after fifteen minutes to let me know he was able to schedule the procedure right away which showed me he possessed great character not having me to linger through the weekend not knowing what was going on. The catheterization showed the need to have open-heart surgery and the cardiologist informed me who my cardiac surgeon would be and he would see me some time over the weekend. Naturally, I did data research on the surgeon and found him to be highly qualified. He and his team of three others visited me Sunday morning. He was very thorough in explaining what was going to happen and, like the cardiologist, had outstanding bedside manner. I was also impressed that they were all professionally dressed wearing crisp white doctor’s coats. The surgeon assured me all would go well and even placed his hand on my shoulder tapping it giving me added reassurance–thus demonstrating great character.
Folks, as I’ve mentioned in the past, the Baby Boomer is a “control freak”, but when you go “under the knife”, you lose complete control. Your destiny is in the hands of perfect strangers who you have to succumb too and trust hoping for the best as you’re under general anesthesia. In this case, I did have confidence all would be well as I had evaluated both the data and character of my cardiologist and cardiac surgeon. Needless to say, I did choose this cardiologist going forward, and he has been nothing less than spectacular.
To summarize, please keep in mind the importance in your life to evaluate all the good data and have the ability to measure character so the decisions which will significantly impact you will be good ones resulting in positive outcomes for you and your family.