In this coaching dialogue, Richard Canfield and client Kyle discuss how Kyle’s recent Kolbe assessment has reshaped his communication at home and work. Kyle describes gaining awareness of his "creativity mode" and using that insight to signal to his wife Megan when he needs uninterrupted focus, which has reduced interruptions and improved mutual patience. He also notes that the awareness helps him pre‑emptively adjust explanations for clients and patients, ensuring they receive enough context up front. The pair review practical tools: the printed A‑to‑A Kolbe report, Kathy Colby’s audio explanations, and the idea of creating a personal "pro‑tip" page. They explore Kyle’s implementer energy, especially in tackling home improvement projects, and confront his perfectionist tendencies by adopting an "80 % is good enough" mindset. Kyle shares a recent project with a virtual assistant (VA) where he set a three‑week timeline, aimed for 80 % completion, and explicitly checked the VA’s excitement and concerns. Richard suggests formalising standards for "done" using micro‑buckets and AI‑assisted check‑lists to reduce endless quality‑queries. Throughout, the conversation emphasizes self‑awareness of instinctual Kolbe strengths, iterative learning, and concrete habit‑building strategies for both personal and professional contexts.
Chapters
So happy New Year.
Yes. Happy next 12 months, man.
Yeah. How has. How was things around the. The rest of the holiday season after having some. Some. Some fun learning about your Colby?
Well, just being connected to my communication style is. Was probably the most important thing that happened. And it's the one thing that I think, because I come downstairs, I'm in full creativity mode, rocking and rolling, and then I find that two things. If I get interrupted, I'm like, oh, if I get interrupted, then it's gone. It's just if I try to come back here. So was able to explain that so that my wife especially, she. She just comes in and says, hey, are you in creativity mode right now? And I'm like, yep. She goes, okay, cool, I'll talk to you in a bit. And it's like, wow, that was awesome. And then number two is just, you know, I now catch myself explaining things to my wife where maybe it all made sense to me in the moment, but I was not giving her enough information up front for it to make sense to her at the same time. And so I catch myself even working with, you know, clothes, clients, patients, whatever, doing the same thing, going, all right, roll back the script a little bit, and then start from there so that people can be on board with where you're at, which is. It's been huge.
Wow, that's amazing. And so, you know, and then for your wife, from Megan, have you, obviously, I mean, the way that you're connecting on that, and it's like self awareness, self recognition, all of this. Everything that we do in this space is around a heightened degree of help, self awareness, but it's hard to be self aware of instinct because it's instinctual. But now you have a degree of that, so you're starting to see it. And it sounds like she's also starting to see it. And so is there anything that you've recognized, maybe with your wife, with Megan, that has also shown up as far as interactions or her asking for more detail or more clarity or information.
For a husband, it feels like there's more patience involved.
Okay.
And, you know, I realized, I mean, this is. I mean, we haven't had a chance to implement this as. As, you know, it's only been a short period of time, but I catch myself going, look, this isn't a, you know, 100% course correct. It's almost a little bit of. A little bit of the battle of Evermore, because you are who you are. But with Colby, you now have a new means by which to accept who you are and understand who you are, which then promotes facilitating changing much more versus before going. You know, you're trying to course correct but you don't understand where's the root?
Yeah. Course correcting can mean fighting instinct. So you also. It sounds to me like the way I would run it through Richard's program and spit it back out is as a check in point is you're with this awareness and maybe a little bit of clarity wouldn't be the word I would use. You now know how to advocate for certain elements of what you need a little bit more. Would that be a good way of addressing it?
Yes. Yeah. And it's. I think the number one key is you said the word awareness. If you didn't have that awareness, you know, I'll just use myself first context that I would think, how come you're not getting this? What part of what I'm saying doesn't make sense? You know, those used to be part of my script because I didn't have the awareness to go, hey, Kyle, you're here, they're there, come on down and join them and bring them up to you. So that having that awareness is a game changer, especially if, I mean marriage. Huge. Right. If you can make the team work at home, you can make the team work anywhere. So it's opposite. I find, especially, you know, working with clients that they make it work elsewhere, but they can't make it work at home because it's that much closer. I think mastering at home, you're going to be able to. To nail it elsewhere because it'll become that much more habitual. Because if you can make something at home a habit, you can make something outside the home habit too.
I really love that. I think that's a great distinction. I think that everyone should take a page out of your book when it comes to that. Speaking of pages out of the book or in the book, we talked about printing the indexes and so you had a version that when you and I met and to do a consultation, you had a version already printed. I sent you the version that I had, which you requested. Did you print that off? Because you're more of a 3D paper kind of guy. And color. Right.
New one. The one on one.
The A to a report.
Yep.
Yeah.
And then the one I scribbled notes on when I was talking with you the first time.
Got it.
And so it's, it's nice to have the A to A because I was like, what is a toa? What does that mean? And I was like, it's Megan and I, my wife and I with a comparison with notes and tips and tricks, the carnivals, which is really pretty cool.
And prior to, you know, you had the reports, you'd only had them for a short period of time. You had a chance to access audios of Kathy Colby explaining, you know, the components. After we met, did you go back and listen to anything from Kathy again or you just kind of printed everything so you could go through it and put a little bit more focus on the conable tip areas?
Yeah, so I listened to everything before we met. My wife, she's like, just give me the Coles notes. Okay, so the Coles notes. But since I have not gone back to listen to her. So that's a good tip because maybe there's something that I wouldn't have been aware of the first go around that I, you know, perhaps would pick up on now and solidify.
That's a good, good what I would suggest because the way the report and the, and the functionality works on the Colby site, if you go back and listen to the audios, they take you from, you know, color bar to color bar. Okay. I would actually encourage for you, I think you should go to the last one, which is implementer, because that's where you initiate action and listen to that one first and then almost go kind of in a backwards order to some degree based on where your bars are. So rather than listening to it in the order that the platform is designed, listening to it in the order your instinct is designed. And you know, another thing that we talked quite.
You should have a pro tip page.
Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, that was a brand new one. I just came up with that right now.
Put that one down.
My Colby is to be inspired in the conversation to some degree when we're having a great conversation. So another thing that I thought was really interesting, in our conversation you talked a lot about home projects. You know, we talked about the use of your implementer energy and then and the need to do the physical projects around the house. And also we talked quite a bit about the desire and there was a way that you put it, I mentioned it as, you know, there's no point in even starting unless we can build it right. Like, you have to make sure we might as well build it right the first time so we don't have to go back and fix it later. And to a degree that was almost creating like, like a version of analysis paralysis. But it's, it's a different variation of it where you need a certain degree of materials Quality elements in place in order to make sure that something is going to be your version of functional. And so we talked a little bit about the concept of 80% is good enough to get started rather than 100%. And the reference point was that your 100% is everyone else's 120%.
Yeah.
And how is that kind of connected for you since our conversation?
Well, Richard, as a recovering perfectionist for the last 20 years, you know, obviously there was some feedback in regards to, in our conversation we were talking about my next project involving multiple practitioners honing down to chiropractic. So anyway, I created a whole new system, new module that's specific to one practitioner, got a hold of my VA and said, all right, so sorry, this is version four. I said, good news is I paid you for the first three that we're never going to use. Let's do this fourth one. We're going to start with the website. I've given it a timeline of three weeks. Let's see what we can do within two. But know that I want to be able to have this 80% done before we press play. And I was like, but I said it. And so she probably was like, okay, this is new. Sounds good to me. And I, and I did say to her, I said in that communication, I says, does this worry you or are you excited? And she goes, I'm excited. I said, wonderful, let's give her. Okay, yeah.
So just almost, you know, it's so interesting to have like almost the visceral reaction of you like even communicating it that way. But you followed up with the check in on, on the teammate, like, okay, how will this work for you? And to gauge that sort of thing. And I think what would be helpful then just to add an idea in that VA relationship, because you've already had a working relationship up to this point where she's learned there's an expectation almost of a certain degree of completeness or quality. And it may have created, and I don't know, but you can tell me if I'm correct on this. It may have created almost like an increasing amount of check in points. Hey, is this good enough? Is this enough? Is this sufficient? Like that type of querying. So what I might suggest that you consider is maybe you know, working with an AI tool or something, a chatgpt flush out. What would some of your standards be? You know, what does done look like in this little micro area? This micro area? This micro area. So think about setting them up into like, into like buckets, five or six, maybe seven buckets and try to figure out what does, what does complete look like to you inside of that little micro bucket. So then you can provide almost like a guidebook to the teammate of like, hey, this is what I'm hoping for as a standard. And then ask yourself the question, when is the check in point required?
