Interview with Jodie Toft

Credible, dramatic, honest, humanistic, humorous, inspirational, pragmatic, scholarly, and spiritual are a few words that I can use to describe my friend Jodie Toft. I met Jodie several years ago when she applied for a sales position at the establishment I was managing. I was taking a chance hiring her with no sales experience; but I felt her personality and enthusiasm outweighed the lack of sales experience. Now, many years later, we both have different positions with different companies, but remain good friends. The quality of our friendship encouraged me to ask Jodie to participate in an interview for this psychology class. With no hesitation, she agreed with the stipulation that I would not commit her to an insane asylum. This interview with Jodie has given us the opportunity to get to know each other on a psychological basis and to rehash many memories we have developed over the years.

The first set of questions we embarked on dealt with memory, learning, problem-solving, and intelligence. In the learning area, Jodie prefers to be adventurous and learn by hands-on as well as trial and error. She recalls when first entering the cellular industry in 1992; this experience led her down a road where someone taught her what she needed to know about the industry. An exciting industry where there was a vast amount of information that needed to be learned before she could begin selling. This learning experience Jodie did not have a choice on how she would be trained and accepted the challenge with open arms. I would be in charge of her training; I had high expectations of her selling ability based on her personality and enthusiasm, and desperately wanted her to succeed. I was persistent on repetition of the important facts; she claims the repetition helped her retain the information and lodged the important things into her long-term memory. Our training sessions occurred in the conference room where frequent interruptions were common. Jodie prefers to learn in an environment where there are no distractions; however, she indicated that the frequent breaks helped her to review the information to sort out the important from the unnecessary information needed to complete a sale. Observing a sale take place during our training session helped Jodie understand the important aspects that needed to be covered before the customer signed on the dotted line.

In Jodie's personal life, learning and training have become part of her daily life. Jodie has had many pets, and smart pets they are, as part of her family. As a child, Jodie learned how to correctly train an animal to obey; her theory was to use operant conditioning. From potty training to jumping through hoops, Jodie has successfully trained all her pets through using reinforcers. After a short time of training, her pets began to realize that if they did what their master wanted them to do, they would be rewarded with a treat. Today, Jodie has two well-mannered and well-behaved Great Danes that she considers to be her "girls" and spoils them every possible chance she can. Knowing that Jodie had been so successful in training her dogs, I turned to her for training techniques I could use when I got my Yorkies. She guaranteed her techniques would work, which she was absolutely correct.

Our conversation was centered on her "girls" for several hours. Knowing we needed to proceed with the interview, I asked Jodie how she felt about intelligence tests. As an Iowa State University graduate, she encountered many opportunities to take intelligence tests during her college career. She recalls taking one intelligence test and threw away the results. Jodie's belief as being intelligence requires one to be book smart as well as common sense smart. She recalls this intelligence tested based solely on being book smart. She referred to a previous coworker, from our telecommunication days, as one who would score very high on this test; he was book smart but had absolutely no common sense. According to Jodie, she does not have to take an intelligence test to prove she is intelligent.

The second set of questions we embarked on dealt with motivation, gender and culture, and personality. When I first met Jodie all those years ago, I thought her motivation level was extremely high. She proved this when she became one of