Inform Yourself

My good friend Jay Niblick, founder of Innermetrix International, recently completed a study called The Genius Project. His study became the basis for his latest book, What’s Your Genius? This post is the second part of the Second Evolution of finding your genius, Future Visioning.

The same is true for being authentic and choosing your direction in life. If the clarity with which you see your future self (your self-direction) is fuzzy and unclear than the drive, motivation, confidence and certainty you would normally get from knowing where you are going will be lacking. You will become that racecar driver who doesn’t know the course, and all of the same effects of such uncertainty will occur in your life. You will not commit 100%, you will hesitate more, you will become indecisive and your actual ability to succeed will go down. Basically, if you don’t create an image in your head of where you want to go, and if it isn’t sufficiently vivid enough, detailed enough, you actually inhibit your ability to be successful in life.

To help focus your drive, motivation and all of your natural talents you need to have a crystal clear vision in your head for where you are going. You need to create a vision for yourself that is so real that you can not only see it, but you can actually feel it, smell it, taste it and almost remember it as if it has already been experienced.

This is the level of clarity you must have for your direction in life, your point B on your life map if you will. And one way we’ve found to help people do this is to take our clients through an exercise Jay created, which Jay calls Future Visioning. The goal is to develop a vision of yourself in the future that is so clear and real that your mind can’t tell the difference, and as a result, it commits itself and its resources to this vision just as if it were real. When this happens your certainty goes way up, your conviction increases and you start to see any indecisiveness you had go away. You truly will believe that this future vision is as much a reality as anything you can remember from the past.

When it comes to creating this future vision, the past can actually help. Outside of the fact that your past actually happened and was real, the reason it seems real to you is because of the level of detail. When you remember a past event there are millions of little pieces to that memory that you probably didn’t even notice (e.g., the shadowing of a light on a table, the small cracks on the wall, the dust in the corner, the countless objects in the room which you never consciously acknowledged). The level of detail for things remembered is what makes that memory so real and it is your subconscious mind that provides most of this sense of reality, as it is the one capable of recognizing so much detail. Think of the difference in detail between a photograph and a painting. The problem is that many people fail to create a vision for where they are going that is sufficiently detailed or real enough to actually win their mind over and enlist all of their strengths and talents. They create fuzzy goals, or an incomplete vision. The result is that they achieve fuzzy or incomplete results. To create a vision of your future that will be real enough to focus your talents, release your doubts, gain your commitment and drive you towards achieving it, you must create a similar level of detail – a level approaching that of a past remember event or time.

The Future Visioning exercise is simply a process of using your past to help ensure a similar level of detail for where you see yourself in the future. To begin, start by answering the following questions for Future Visioning. Remember to make it as focused and specialized as possible. To develop your Future Visioning, go to http://www.whatsyourgenius.com and select Workbook from the Resources menu. Create an account if necessary. You will see the Future Visioning exercise in the menu. Have Fun!

What will you specialize in?

What will you master, and what will you not?

Once you have completed your Future Visioning exercise print it out and refer to it regularly, make changes to it and reprint it as things change in your life and plans. I recommend making it part of a quarterly life review, just like any good business person reviews their goals and objectives on a regular basis, and it’s equally as effective for any individual to do the same thing with their personal goals and objectives. And remember, no level of detail is too small. Just like the picture, the higher the resolution, the greater the level of detail and the greater the detail, the more your subconscious mind will believe in and chase after your vision. You want to create the highest resolution image for your future self that you possibly can.

Note: This exercise may take you several hours, even days, to complete as you will want to give it careful consideration. This is your future you are creating so take your time and trust that the effort you put in will return much greater results. No long “X’s” here.

Now that you have completed your Future Visioning exercise, and you have a more defined idea of where you want to be in the future, let’s work on how you can get there in the most authentic way.

My good friend Jay Niblick, founder of Innermetrix International, recently completed a study called The Genius Project. His study became the basis for his latest book, What’s Your Genius? This post is part of the Second Evolution of finding your genius, Future Visioning.

In the 1960’s Dr. Maxwell Maltz, an American Plastic Surgeon by training, conducted research to uncover why some of his patients failed to appreciate any relief from their mental suffering following successful plastic surgery. Even though the physical cause of their dissatisfaction was corrected, they continued to be just as dissatisfied with themselves as they were prior to surgery. Dr. Maltz wanted to understand how a person’s mental image of themselves influenced their interpretation of their physical image. After years of research into what drove people’s perception of themselves, what Dr. Maltz found was that our minds can’t tell the difference between a synthetic experience and a real-world experience – as long as that synthetic experience was sufficiently detailed or real enough. By synthetic experience he means imaginary, one held strictly in our heads and never having actually happened. In other words, if a person creates an image in their head that is real enough, even if it isn’t real or has never actually existed, their mind is likely to believe it as though it were a reality.

Dr. Maltz wrote a book called Psycho-Cybernetics, which details the results of his investigations. In it he described the human brain and nervous system as a “perfect goal striving servo- mechanism. Experimental and clinical psychologists have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the human nervous system cannot tell the difference between an ‘actual’ experience and an experience imagined vividly enough and in detail”, explains Dr. Maltz.

In the book Dr. Maltz provides an account of an experiment on the effects of mental practice on improving basketball free throws. The study, published in Research Quarterly, divided the subjects into three groups. Each group was tested for free throw accuracy at the beginning and the end of the experiment. The three groups were:
• Group one physically practiced free throws for 20 days
• Group two performed no practice at all
• Group three spent 20 minutes a day getting into a deeply relaxed state and visualizing themselves shooting free throws. When they missed, they would visualize themselves correcting their aim accordingly.

The results were quite remarkable. The first group, which practiced 20 minutes a day, improved in scoring by 24%. The second group, which had no practice, showed no improvement at all, and the third group, which practiced only in their minds, improved in scoring 23%. Amazingly, pure mental practice yielded almost identical results as were seen in the group that practices physically.

In the book Peak Performance, Mental Training Techniques of the World’s Greatest Athletes, Charles Garfield talks about a similar experiment conducted by Soviet sports scientists. The study examined the effect of mental training, including visualization like described by Maltz, on four groups of world-class athletes prior to competing in the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics. The elite athletes were divided into the following four groups:
• Group 1 – 100% physical training
• Group 2 – 75% physical training, 25% mental training
• Group 3 – 50% physical training, 50% mental training
• Group 4 – 25% physical training, 75% mental training

What the researchers found was that group 4 – the group with the most mental training – showed significantly greater improvement than group 3. Likewise, group 3 showed more improvement than group 2 and group 2 showed more improvement than group 1. The findings of research like this show that if you believe in something firmly enough, and can create an image of it in your head that is clear enough, your mind will accept it as real. The effects of this belief are very important because these effects manifest in the real world in better performance. If the belief you create is sufficient enough, your mind will react to it in all the same ways it would react to a real environment. Have you ever felt your heart beat increase at just the thought of being in danger when there was no real danger at all? Have you ever gotten sad reading a sad story or watching a tearful moment in a movie even though you knew it wasn’t real? The suspension of belief that movie makers and authors seek to create is one example of what Dr. Maltz was talking about.

The opposite is also true in that if you don’t possess a clear enough image for some aspect of your life, you mind will not believe in it and your attitude towards it will be like that of any other thing you don’t really believe in (i.e., speculative, unconvinced, uncertain, etc.).

This means that if the synthetic image you create of yourself is a negative one (e.g., fat, ugly, clumsy, etc.), and it is real enough, believed enough, it can actually become your reality. While you may be no less coordinated than the person next to you, with a sufficient enough belief that you are clumsy, you will drop the ball more. If you create a strong enough belief in your head that you are obese, as you look in the mirror the image your mind interprets is a far cry from the reality that your optic nerves convey. Although you may be withering away to unhealthy levels your brain sees an image of obesity and grotesqueness.

In my next post I will explain how this directly correlates to you defining Your Genius!

My good friend Jay Niblick , founder of Innermetrix International, recently completed a study called The Genius Project. His study became the basis for his latest book, What’s Your Genius?

This is the second part regarding the why success is so rare.

Instead of trying to be good at lots of things, pick something that you love and are very good at and figure out how to become even more specialized in that area, and how to make a living at it.

“I don’t know what the key to success is, but the key to failure is trying to please everyone”
Bill Cosby

The diagram below illustrates the concept of increasing performance by decreasing scope. Notice how the more specialized you become, the greater your chances of success are. I need to point out that this is not the result of any empirical study, but something very noticeable as a trend in those we’ve worked with.

Levels of Performance Scope/Specialization
_ Level 1 - Below Average/Poor (very broad, no specialization)
_ Level 2 - Average
_ Level 3 - Above Average/Good
_ Level 4 - Excellent
_ Level 5 – Genius (very focused and specialized)

The higher the level of performance rises, the narrower the scope or specialization becomes. Meaning: reaching the 5th Level of performance means becoming as specialized as you can.

When Marshall Goldsmith set out to establish his professional niche, he wanted to be the world expert in one very specific area, so he chose a very small focus that added exclusivity to what he did (i.e., coaching successful executives, typically in the Fortune 500, to be even better). By doing so not only did he reduce his competition but more importantly his specialization allowed him to occupy a space (role) that depended almost exclusively on his talents.

Your task in becoming more authentic is to prune your role to become more exclusive, more rare - more specialized. In so doing, at the same time you prune your dependence on non-talents and leave your success dependent only on that which you naturally do very well. You in effect create a strengths-based reality.

To help you determine how you can become more specialized, list your industry below and any sub-categories that exist in that industry. If you can’t think of any that’s great because here is your chance to create some. If you get stuck here’s some tips. Look at others to see how they have managed to specialize in their own niche:

Who in your industry is considered an expert?

Who do you know that specializes in anything?

What is one area of your industry that is very complicated or in high demand?

If you can’t think of anything within your industry, could you become a consultant to that industry, thus creating a specialization in the consulting industry?

My Industry:

Industry Sub-Categories (areas within that Industry that could be considered a specialty):

Based on what you have learned from your Genius Profile, which of the Subcategories above could you specialize in? Which parts of your industry do you find more enjoyable, exciting, interesting and in which parts have you found that you are just plain “better”?

My good friend Jay Niblick , founder of Innermetrix International, recently completed a study called The Genius Project. His study became the basis for his latest book, What’s Your Genius?

One thing he found common among the geniuses he interviewed was their concept of rarity. There is a large body of work out there supporting the argument that the more specialized you become, the more your chances of success increase. Specialization isn’t a new idea. Over two thousand and five hundred years ago Confucius saw the folly in trying to be too many things when he said, “The person who chases two rabbits catches neither.” Specializing in a niche area is one key to being very successful.

We’ve all heard the old mantra, “you can’t be all things to all people.” My work has proven to me that there is a direct but inverse correlation between the levels of performance one achieves and the scope or degree of specialization they have. Lower to middle levels of performance tend to correlate with broader scopes of practice whereas the higher levels correlate with higher degrees of specialization. In other words, the more you try to be, the less you will achieve.

The geniuses we've worked with are anything but generalists. They all specialize in a very fine area of expertise. Think about some of the professionals you know for a moment, like doctors, lawyers, scientists or coaches. In the medical community we see a clear association between “the best” and the degree of specialization. Medical professionals have created some of the most specialized levels of practice in any industry. The orthopedic community, a specialization in and of itself already, has developed specialists (experts) in the hand, sports medicine, spine, upper extremities and lower extremities, even those who specialize in just elbows. In law, already a specialization, you see a field that has fractured into narrower and narrower levels of specialization with tax lawyers, trial lawyers, defense attorneys, certain kinds of medical malpractice attorneys who focus on only certain kinds of medicine (to keep up with the hyper-specialization in the medical community perhaps). Look at Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking, both genius physicists, but a specialized kind of physics - theoretical physics (as if physics wasn’t already specialized enough).

Randy Haykin is a great example of a guy who understands the role that rarity plays in being successful. “I’ve always believed in thinking outside the box, thinking in ways that others simply are not, and playing where few others are playing. I like taking the rare perspective on things,” says Randy. As founding Vice President of Marketing and Sales at Yahoo! Inc. in the early 1990’s, Randy brought this appreciation for rarity with him from Apple. Randy summarizes his approach by saying, “I wanted us to be the biggest fattest fish we could be - in the smallest pond we could find.”

Anthony Robbins captures the same kind of thoughts on rarity when he talks about success. “One of the reasons I think a lot of people fail to achieve what they truly want is that they never direct their focus; they never decide to master anything in particular. In fact, I think most people fail in life simply because they major in minor things,” says Robbins. The person who tries to do everything, be everything, usually accomplishes nothing.

The more specialized you get, the more niche a market you create or serve, the greater the likelihood that you will reach the 5th level of performance will be. Why? It’s simple really. Aside from the fact that in almost every single category of life or business, specialists significantly out earn generalists at every turn, the bigger problem is that trying to be all things to all people fails to focus all of your genius in one targeted area. Like the light of the sun focused through a magnifying glass, the more diffuse the focus, the less power it has. The more focused that beam of light is, however, the stronger it is.

If, as a child, you’ve ever lit a leaf on fire on a hot summer day you understand what we're talking about. Spreading yourself too thin is basically futile. It doesn’t work, at least not very well. He who is a jack-of-all-trades is a master of none, and 5th level performance requires mastery. If we remember that the key to becoming truly authentic is to reduce your success’ dependence on non-talents, then by reducing the variables in that success you make this task easier. If you are attempting to be a genius at lots of different things, you will surely have a hard time of it. You might become adequate at many things, but not an expert at any of them. Even those who have talents in all areas or classes of talent, the rarest of patterns by the way, have non-talents. Everyone has talents and everyone has non-talents.