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? I have worked with Jay for many years assisting organizations and individuals achieve a higher level of performance.

“Create the self you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny spark of possibility into flames of achievement”
~ Foster McClellan

Congratulations, you are almost done! In truth, you’re only getting started because being authentic is a never-ending process of maintaining your authenticity by being ever vigilant and adapting to new duties, new goals and new direction in which life constantly takes you. For now, though, you have evolved from being blind to any inauthenticity in your life, and subject to a legacy of dependence, to the realization that you must be authentic, that you must become your own SEO, and that you can’t fear making mistakes on your journey to creating the you that you want to be. You have evolved in your self-awareness to gain greater understanding for your true genius, and you have evolved your self-concept to create an image of that authentic self you want to become.

Now here’s a riddle for you. If there are three frogs sitting on a log and one decides to jump into the water, how many frogs are left on the log? The answer is three, because deciding to jump and actually jumping are two very different things. So far you have been working in your mind. You have been considering attitudes, beliefs and gaining new knowledge. And hopefully by now you have decided to jump, but your final evolution is to leave the world of your mind and move into your reality, to actually make the changes in your life that you now believe are needed and possible. To achieve this final evolution, and finish your journey (or start it perhaps) you must actually create your authentic self – you must jump!

Comfort Zones

“You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover will be yourself.”
~ Alan Alda

One of the biggest things that prevent my clients from leaving the world of dreams and actually becoming more authentic in real life is that they fail to get out of their comfort zones. The comfort zone includes all the things we do often enough to feel comfortable doing. It is much like the querencia - a term in bullfighting that refers to the spot in the ring where the bull always returns for comfort. Former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Carly Fiorina, describes it this way, “Each bull has a different querencia, but as the bullfight continues, and the animal becomes more threatened, it returns more and more often to his spot. As he returns to his querencia, he becomes more predictable. And so, in the end, the matador is able to kill the bull because instead of trying something new, the bull returns to what is familiar - his comfort zone.”

It is the comfort zone's job to keep us in our place - doing what we've always done, the way we've always done it. And if we try to stretch out and entertain thoughts of doing something differently, like moving forward on that life dream we have, or doing anything that involves taking a step into the unknown, the comfort zone immediately spins into overdrive and begins looking for the consequences - mostly the negative ones.

The bottom-line results of these negative consequences are fear, guilt, anger, hurt feelings or unworthiness - the primary tools of the comfort zone. Early in life, these tools begin to shape our sense of right and wrong and form themselves into limiting beliefs that keep us in our own private querencia. If we dare to step outside the bounds of the comfort zone, these tools are used swiftly and with precision.

The weird thing is that you may have become comfortable being inauthentic, when being authentic should be more comfortable. In other words, you have become comfortable with being uncomfortable. To be authentic, this must change. You will have to get uncomfortable before you get really comfortable, and this takes courage.

“Comfort zones are plush lined coffins” Stan Dale