I was ten years old when my dad gave me the chicken coop.
Not as a chore. As a gift. He pointed at this old, abandoned structure on our property – grimy, neglected, smelling exactly like you’d expect an abandoned chicken coop to smell – and said it was mine to do with as I chose.
I was over. The. MOON.
My first order of business, after cleaning out all the mess, was gutting the entire interior. Then I started gathering scraps of wood from sections of the barn my dad had taken down and built a floor. Then countertops. Then a loft space at the top. I watched my dad build things and then repeated it myself, figuring out what I didn’t know as I went.
My sister wanted to play mud pies in there once it was done – pioneer women in our little reclaimed chicken coop. I played with her a couple of times. But it wasn’t the playing I wanted.
I wanted another project. I needed another project.
So I decided to build a front porch.
The only photo I have of me and my little brother from that time shows me mid-build, plowing away at that front porch, already scanning the woodpile for what came next.
I didn’t know it then. But I was already doing what I’d always do. And I was already loving every minute of it – not because I had to, but because for me, the work was the fun. That thread – work as something I genuinely love, not something I endure – runs through everything. I’ll come back to it properly when we get to the Values Bridge piece.
But it starts here, in a chicken coop in the country, at ten years old.
What Kolbe Actually measures
Most personality assessments tell you who you are — your type, your tendencies, your traits. Kolbe is different. Kolbe tells you how you work. Specifically, it measures your conative instincts — the part of the mind that drives purposeful action. Not how smart you are, not how you feel about things, but how you naturally take action when left to your own devices, free to be yourself.
There are four Action Modes in the Kolbe framework: Fact Finder, Follow Thru, Quick Start, and Implementor. Your result is a four-number score. Mine is 5-4-5-6.
That means all four modes are present and contributing – which is actually the point. Kolbe is explicit about this: don’t let anyone reduce you to just one mode. The full picture is the picture. But the numbers do tell you where your energy concentrates most naturally, and mine concentrates in Implementor, with a strength called Restore.
How I Found Out
Kolbe came to me through a job interview.
I was in consideration for a role, and as part of the hiring process, I was asked to complete the Kolbe A Index. I did, and I waited. When the decision came back, I wasn’t hired. Not because of my skills or my experience, but because my result was too similar to the owner’s. Same conative profile, same instinctive methods. And they’d learned – or feared – that two people operating from the same place on a small team could create more friction than momentum. A mismatch in fit, not in ability.
I understood it. I wasn’t devastated. But I was curious.
Because I’d walked away from that process with something the job itself wouldn’t have given me: a clear picture of how I work.
And once I read through the result, I couldn’t un-see it.
The Full Picture: 5-4-5-6
Before I get to Restore, it’s worth saying a few words about the full result. Because 5-4-5-6 tells a story about how all four modes show up together in me, and that story matters.
- Fact Finder at 5: Explain. I gather and share information by contextualizing it. I paraphrase, add context, clarify, and highlight what’s important. I don’t drown in data or oversimplify it. I translate it into something usable.
- Follow-Thru at 4: Maintain. I sustain systems rather than building rigid ones from scratch. I coordinate, reduce redundancies, and accommodate structure without over-regulating it. I keep things moving rather than locking them down.
- Quick Start at 5: Modify. I respond to challenges and adjust on the fly. I can handle last-minute changes, navigate uncertainty, and mediate between a vision and the current reality. I’m not the one who generates chaos – I’m the one who moves through it.
- Implementor at 6: Restore. My dominant instinct. Repair and renovate. Protect what’s been built. Fix what’s broken. Remove obstacles – real and imagined. Bridge the physical and the virtual. This is where my energy lives most naturally.
What I find striking about this result is how well it holds together. Explain, Maintain, Modify, Restore – these aren’t random. They’re a coherent picture of someone who takes in information clearly, sustains rather than rigidifies, adapts when things shift, and always, always moves toward what needs fixing.
The “Fix-It” Default
Before Kolbe, I knew I had a “fix-it” default. I just didn’t have a framework for it.
When a client came to me with a disconnect between what they intended and what their clients were experiencing, I went straight to it. When a team dynamic was fractured, and nobody could figure out why, I went straight to it. When something in a business was quietly broken, and the person running it had stopped being able to see it, I went straight to it.
Kolbe showed me it was more specific than a personality trait. It was a conative instinct – something operating beneath personality and preference, something that shows up regardless of context, industry, or relationship.
Restore. That’s the word. And once I had it, I started seeing it everywhere.
It showed up in Restorative – my second CliftonStrength. It showed up in the Counselor profile in DISC. It even showed up in the way I’d described my own work long before I had the assessment language for it: I help people close the gap between where they are and where they meant to be.
That’s restoration. It always has been.
The Shadow Side
Every instinct has a shadow – and the Kolbe is honest about this in a way I appreciate.
For Restore, the shadow looks like staying in situations longer than is useful because the instinct says there’s something salvageable here, even when the evidence says otherwise. The pull toward repair is strong. Sometimes too strong.
I’ve lived that shadow. More than once. Learning to distinguish between what’s genuinely restorable and what needs to be released – that’s the ongoing work. The instinct is an asset. Like any asset, it needs discernment.
A Note On Team Dynamics
The story of how I found Kolbe is worth sitting with for a moment – not just for what it revealed about me, but for what it revealed about teams.
The owner who didn’t hire me wasn’t wrong. Two people with the same dominant instinct on a small team can absolutely create friction. Not because either person is wrong, but because a team needs the full range of conative strengths to function well. When everyone’s pulling from the same place, certain things get done brilliantly, and others fall through the cracks entirely.
That insight – that fit is about more than skills and personality, that how people work at the instinctive level matters for team health – became something I carried forward into my work with organizations. It’s part of what The Valued Workforce® addresses. But that’s a longer conversation for another day.
What This Means For Your Own Excavation
The Kolbe isn’t asking you to change how you work. It’s asking you to see how you already work – clearly, accurately, without judgment.
If you’ve ever wondered why certain kinds of problems energize you, and others drain you, the answer is probably in here somewhere. If you’ve been living with a default – a fix-it instinct, a builder instinct, a systems instinct – and never had language for it, the Kolbe might be the tool that names it.
For me, it named the default I’d been living with since I was ten years old in a chicken coop. The job didn’t work out. The self-knowledge did.
