The other day, Sandy posted a great blog about setting goals and expectations for ourselves. In it, she compared the human mind to a farmer’s fertile field – soil that is rich but passive, leaving it up to the farmer to decide what crop to plant.

Her words got me thinking about the responsibility we need to take for our choices. At its best, that’s a two-part process. We need to pick the crop we want to plant. We also need to be willing to do enough weeding to give our crop a chance to flourish. In doing so, we need to be able to tell the difference between good seeds and bad weeds, even when they look a lot alike.

What do I mean by that? Well, take a glance at the following pair of traits, one good, one potentially harmful.

Good Seed:

Team Member X is a natural listener, a real “people person.” She loves a good story and shows a lively curiosity about the details of people’s lives. Six months after a patient’s last visit, she’s the team member who remembers to ask how the patient’s daughter is doing at college, or whether the family decided to get a dog. She always remembers team members’ birthdays, and she goes out of her way to make new hires feel welcome.

Sounds perfect, right? But these same personality traits have a potential darker side…

Bad Weed:

Team Member X loves a good story so much that, in the absence of one, she may embellish the truth a bit, just to keep things interesting. Addicted to drama, she sometimes stirs things up, reminding other team members of small slights that had already forgiven and forgotten, or surrendering to the temptation to turn office gossip into an art form. Basically, she’s a good-hearted person, but her outgoing nature sometimes tempts her to value excitement more than tact.

Oops.

In a case like this, a little judicious weeding can make all the difference in the world. By cultivating her warm, nurturing side but discouraging the impulse to indulge in less constructive

interventions, Team Member X can become the glue that holds the team together, not the wedge that drives it apart. Both roles arise from the same traits. The outcome all depends on which of those crops she chooses to nurture.

Do you have a character trait that works both for and against you?