Role Flexibility

When we start talking about making changes to your role, this assumes you have a certain amount of flexibility in your role. If you work for someone else, or have a job in a company where your role is not completely your own to modify and change as you see fit, you need to achieve some level of role flexibility. Role flexibility is simply the level of ability you have for changing your role, what responsibilities you have, the tasks and duties that you are expected to perform. Entrepreneurs have high levels of role flexibility, and the higher up you get in management the more flexible your role typically becomes as well. Even if you don’t have as much flexibility in your role as you might like, there are things you can do to change your roles to make them more authentic.

If you don’t have much role flexibility, and you can’t make much change to your role, one of the best ways to convince your manager or organization that doing so would be in their best interests as well is to share a copy of Jay’s book (What’s Your Genius) with them. It’s imperative that you get some flexibility in your role because unless you are already in the most authentic role possible, if you can’t remove responsibilities that rely on your non-talents you wont reach higher levels of performance and definitely won’t reach the 5th level.

Of course, as Michael Lorelli said earlier, it really is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, so if you need to move some things around, lean on someone else, swap tasks (where someone else picks up some aspect of your work and you help them out with things they aren’t as good at) do it! If you don’t think your company will let you modify your role, don’t ask – just give it a try. Why are we suggesting you do something without permission? Because you are your own SEO! You are the one responsible for your success – no one else. Of course if you have flexibility use it, but if something in your role depends on one of your non-talents, and you can’t get “permission” to offload that responsibility somehow, it is better to offload it without permission and improve your performance than continue to depend on it and give up performance. Trust me, if you take initiative and figure out a better way to get results, and when you deliver those results, any problem management would have with how you did it shouldn’t be an issue. If it is, than it may be time to ask yourself if the role is the right one for you.

Remember, geniuses refuse to settle, and everyone Jay interviewed agreed that sometimes you just have to leave a role if it is too far from what you need it to be. Michael Lorelli represents these geniuses well when he states, “If your role is just too inauthentic you either have to suffer through or change roles because you can’t change your DNA.”

Just Do the Math

To reach the point where you are truly authentic, where you fill a roal, you have to modify your existing role. You do this by stripping away, slowly, your dependence on non-talents one at a time, and increasing your dependence on your talents, one at a time. It’s really as simple as addition and subtraction. Add dependence on one talent – subtract dependence on one non-talent. Your journey to authenticity, and the 5th level of performance, is a matter of adding and subtracting, adding and subtracting, until you are sufficiently authentic and there are no more talents to become dependent on or no non-talents to stop depending on. I guess you could argue that the formula for becoming an authentic genius would be:

((+1)(-1))∞ = 5th level performance

• Add one talent
• Subtract one non-talent
• Repeat

We talked about shedding responsibilities or tasks from your role if they don’t rely on your talents, but sometimes you might have to add new responsibilities or duties that do rely on your talents. If it possible that your role was created without considering your natural talents and non-talents, it is just as likely that it doesn’t allow you to maximize all of your talents as it is that it expects you to rely on your non-talents. These new duties or responsibilities might need to be created and this is one of the ways in which you can create a more authentic role for yourself. The same three C’s of becoming authentic apply in this aspect as well. Through complimentary collaborations, being the one who a responsibility is delegated to or changing the way the role is done, you can add new opportunities for you to be a genius too.

~ Starting now, set to making these changes in your current roles ~

Do whatever you can to shed your reliability on that first non-talent you just wrote down above (your minimizer), and do whatever it takes to increase how much you rely on that one talent you just selected (your maximizer). I say “first” non-talent and talent because once you manage to add and subtract to your current role, your task will be to return to your report and select another talent and non-talent to repeat the process with.

As I said, it is actually that simple. At least the objective is. I wish I could help you specifically with what actual changes to make, and how to shed reliance on non-talents and add reliance on your talents, but the specifics of your job will dictate how you do that. In a blog or book form, unfortunately, there is no way I can hold all the information I need to suggest how you do that, but with what you’ve learned so far you should have everything you need to determine that for yourself.

While a blog or book won’t be able to interact with you enough to help you with some of the specifics of changing your life to become more authentic, we have created some programs where you can get that level of individualized, interactive help. Check out the additional resources page at http://www.whatsyourgenius.com for links to where you can get this level of personal help.

Unleashing Your Genius

“Deep within man dwell those slumbering powers, powers that would astonish him, that he never dreamed of possessing; forces that would revolutionize his life if aroused and put into action.”~ Orison Swett Marden

So, how do you jump? How do you take the work you’ve done so far in these posts to change your perspective on success and your role in it, and actually pull the trigger? It is a surprisingly simple process actually. It’s simple because you have already done the bulk of the work, and it’s simple because when you align your job with your talents better your performance will increase almost by itself. It does this because these are your natural talents. You don’t have to work as hard to be better when you rely on what your brain already does well. This is what we have been talking about all along.

It came to you with little to no effort because that’s how your subconscious mind works. Before any change can take place in the world, it has to take place in your mind, and hopefully by now you have experienced a change in how you think about yourself, your value, your talents, your path and your success/happiness. Taking that first step in the real world involves using the exercises you have already completed as fuel for the practical steps you are about to start taking. You will need to have your Genius profile (you should have this if you worked through the previous posts. If not, get this at http://www.whatsyourgenius.com) handy for this next step.

To start unleashing your genius I want you to look at pages six & seven in your Genius profile. There you will find the lists of “strength areas” and “specific strengths or talents.” In my prior posts I had you circle those talents that you were dependent on in your current role. Pick just one of the talents that you did not circle and this will be the one you will work to maximize your dependence on first. On the same pages you will see “weakness areas” and “specific weaknesses or non-talents.” I also had you circle those non-talents or weaknesses, which you were dependent on. I want you to select just one of those that you did circle, as this will become the first non-talent you will work equally as hard to minimize your dependence on. I recommend you select these talents and non-talents based on which ones are most relevant to the roles you fill right now. Go ahead and look at your Genius profile and select these items right now (i.e., one talent and one non-talent), and write them down in the space provided below.

Write the title of those two items down in the appropriate spaces below, then add a definition for each in your own words.

My Maximizer (Talent):

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

My Minimizer (Non-talent):
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

While it didn't show up anywhere in the hard data, there is one trait which showed up time and time again in the interviews we conducted. One of the questions I asked each interviewee was, “how do you define success and what is one of your greatest successes in life?” In almost every single case, every person gave me a very different answer than I expected. I was expecting to hear that they defined success as the achievement of business goals, or the money they had made, or fame, or power, or some other worldly manifestation and typical definition of success. What I heard, however, was that they defined success as “being happy”. When I asked them what they were happy about I was equally surprised. Again the happiness they described didn’t have anything to do with fame, power, money or what some might expect. What they were happy with was the relationship with their family and friends, or the feeling the got from helping others, or the satisfaction they received from their ability to give back, or the passion they felt for what they did, or the lack of stress and general contentment they had with their roles in life. These were how they defined their happiness.

Were they happy because they were successful, or were their happiness a key component to their success? In the end I decided it was the latter, and that their happiness was the driver of their success, not the result of it. I say this because from a pure logical perspective I can think of lots of people who have loads of money, tons of fame, piles of achievements and tremendous power and authority – but who are still not happy. However, all of the people I know who consider themselves truly happy also consider themselves truly successful. Therefore, happiness must be the key ingredient in defining your success, not the result of it.

It seems that happiness is the DNA of success. All roads branch out from this and all lead back to it. Think about it. You desire success so you can have lots of money so you can be financially secure - which will make you happy (you hope). You want to win the competition because you feel the need to prove yourself and others will admire you, which will make you feel better about yourself - which will make you happy (again, you hope). You have a desire to be in charge, on top, the big boss, which gives you control and prestige, which proves your worth – which will make you really happy. There are those who seek to serve others or improve the world, which satisfies their need to help and love others – which makes them happy. The key is, everything is really driven by happiness, and so success at its most basic elemental level is built on being happy, not on being “successful” in and of itself. The trick is figuring out what will really make you happy because when you know this, only then do you really know what success means to you.

~ Happiness is the DNA of success ~

Many of us, however, get caught up in chasing the means to an end, spending a life pursuing the trappings of success, not the happiness that makes up its true spirit. We get easily confused about what the true end point is and many times end up sacrificing our happiness in pursuit of some objective that was supposed to deliver our happiness in the first place. When we forget that the ultimate goal of being successful is to be happy, we can lose sight of that happiness and become fixated on achieving the means to that end.

In such cases the means actually becomes the end itself; and the end of our happiness as well. One person might get so focused on winning manager of the year that she ends up hurting others, even those she loves – which ultimately makes her unhappy. Another person might get so wrapped up in rising high in the organization that the ballast he jettisons to achieve such altitude ends up being his personal life – which ultimately makes him unhappy. Still another person might get lost in the race to acquire so much wealth and security that by the time they have it, they have alienated all those they would like to share it with - and they are unhappy.

I knew a guy once whom most would view as very successful, at least by the more traditional definition of the word. He had all the traditional trappings of success. He started his own business and as CEO he had the power and control most assume is tied to success. His company went international and was a financial success so he had all the money anyone could ever need, which should have made him successful according to the traditional definition. He had something of a public fame, albeit within a niche community, but still thousands followed his advice and praised his work, which qualified him as successful. But was this man really successful? From the outside absolutely, but from the inside he wasn’t at all. To achieve his businesses success, he had sacrificed that which the geniuses we talked with consider true success. He had sacrificed his happiness. I’ve never known an “unhappier” successful person in my life actually. Sure, he put on a good front in public, but when you got behind the curtain he was angry, volatile, hostile, explosive, insecure and fearful that all he had built would somehow be taken away and based on his profile his only real value of himself was that which he had built – his company. He had sacrificed his relationship with his children and wives. He had sacrificed his health. He had sacrificed his closest friendships and eventually he came to run his company through intimidation and fear. In the end, he had fallen into the trap of chasing the means, not the end. To the world, he was a shining example of success. To himself, however, as he admitted one time during a private discussion late one night, he was a miserable wreck of a man who felt hollow and unhappy deep inside.

For a great many (all too many unfortunately) they fight so hard to get the trappings of success that they damage or destroy that which would really make them happy, like family, friends or even their health. The vital lesson that I think we can take from the geniuses around us is to not get caught up in the means to the end. To be successful means to be happy. So figure out what will really make you happy, then chase that end – always. Chase the end, not the means.

Action Step:
To help you define what success means to you, what is your definition of happiness?

My happiness is:

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

This realization of happiness as the DNA of success has marked the beginning of a transition in the lives of thousands of individuals. When it hits, they begin to see, perhaps for the very first time, why they have not been as happy as they wished to be, and once they make this realization, it is nearly impossible to ignore it and continues to be untrue to who they are and what they do best. I have witnessed a great many people, when they come to this point, decide this is the information they needed to give them permission to change their role, or even change their career and change their lives.

I often suffer a fair amount of good-natured ribbing from the executives of the companies I work with because they give me grief as being the guy who got paid to convince their people to leave. I say “good-natured” because in the end they understand and appreciate that it is in no one’s best interest to have an employee who isn’t a good match for the job.

Unless both sides of the equation are fully satisfied the job is unhappy with the individual and the individual is unhappy with the job and no one wins in the end.

Courage to Change
Management theorist W. Edward Deming once said, “It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.” Change requires courage because change is scary. The best way to overcome this fear of change is to make the fear of not changing even greater. I tell my clients, “If you make it easier to fail than to succeed, the only thing you will likely succeed at is failing.” By this I mean, you have to risk something significant enough to make it scarier to fail than to succeed at changing.

In the 8th through 11th centuries, Viking sailors were an acquisitive lot. They had expended their Scandinavian empire to include most of the North Atlantic European coastal areas, reaching south to North Africa, east to Russia and even the Middle East at Constantinople. When it came to invading new lands, the Vikings are rumored to have adopted an interesting and effective means of motivating themselves to succeed. When the Vikings would land on a foreign coast to conquer its lands, to ensure that is wasn’t easier to fail in battle and return to the safety of their boats and the sea, they would burn their boats. This meant that failure wasn’t much of an option because there was no real ability to retreat. Talk about not having an exit strategy.

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.~ James Baldwin

While we don’t recommend to our clients that they risk their lives as motivation to succeed in becoming more authentic, we think we can take inspiration from the Vikings by creating on sequences to not changing, not getting out of our comfort zone, that are sever enough to help us face our fears, overcome the obstacles we will encounter and endure in our evolution from dissatisfaction and frustration to genius success at something.

To share Jay's own examples of how he have made it harder (i.e., more painful) to fail than to succeed, when he joined the Navy he signed on to become a Search and Rescue Swimmer. As an enlisted person he signed a contract that meant for the next six years the US Navy owned him - literally. In return, they would provide him with the opportunity to attend all the special schools required to become a SAR Swimmer. This did not, however, guarantee he would pass these schools, just that they would allow him to enter. If he did fail to pass, the Navy still owned him, and since he couldn’t take on the role he had signed on for this meant they would assign me to another role. The assignments for those who fail their schooling, unfortunately, are usually all the jobs that no one volunteered for in the first place (like chocking chains on a carrier deck, which involves running under a jet or helo, often with engines running, and tying her down – which is also one of the most dangerous jobs in the military by the way).

Knowing going in that the program had one of the highest attrition rates of all military training programs, approximately 64% of students fail to graduate due to medical injuries or voluntarily dropping on request, he figured the results of failing to graduate were severe enough that doing so simply wasn’t an option. He viewed this as my way or burning my boat so to speak. If he failed he was the property of the US Navy for six long years, likely filling the worst role they had to offer.

There were many times, as he lay there unable to feel most of the muscles in his body, and wishing he couldn’t feel those he could because they hurt like hell, that he contemplated dropping out. He watched a good many classmates hit their wall and give up. As they stood up from whatever abuse they felt was too much, and walked to the brass ship’s bell and gave it three rings, there were plenty of times where he was tempted to follow suit. He remembers one time where, if he thought he could have walked that far, he might have actually done it. In the end, though, his desire to win, along with the dread of sticking his head under a blur of moving rotors on a rolling and pitching flight deck some 18 feet from the edge, was enough to keep him still. Had he been in a situation where quitting was easier than persevering, had quitting meant he would have been let out to returned home to a safe and average civilian job, perhaps the temptation would have been too great, but he made sure it wasn’t easier to fail than to succeed, so he did.

~ If you make it easier to fail than to succeed, the only thing you will likely succeed at is failing ~

The great contributors in life are those who, though afraid of the knock at the door, still answer it.~ Stephen Covey

Some years later Jay did the same thing when he started his own consulting company. Having a nice job at Johnson and Johnson meant security, great benefits, a company car and all the advancement one could ask for with over 172 sister companies at the time. Such security is incredibly important to a young guy with two kids and a stay-at-home wife. But when he walked away from that to start his own business it meant he had to succeed. If you think the attrition rate for SAR School is bad, try starting your own small business. At the time, over 50% of all new businesses failed to survive past the first twelve months and 95% failed to make it past the five-year mark. When he quit he walked away from a steady six-figure income. He invested everything last bit of savings, took out a second mortgage on the house and created significant credit card debt to start the business. If he failed, they would lose their house, and probably have to claim bankruptcy. If the business didn’t take off how would he pay for food, or the boy’s college? Failing to succeed would definitely be harder than succeeding and so with that firmly in mind he stepped off to burn his second boat. Jay quit J&J and put it all on the line. Thankfully, ten years later, the business is still alive and growing.

These are just two personal examples of what we mean when we say, “If you make it easier to fail than to succeed, the only thing you will likely succeed in is failing.” Having a dream is great, and being tired of where you are is important, but what boat will you burn to ensure that you become the authentic genius you deserve to be?

For some it might be a personal boat, like the public embarrassment of telling everyone they are going to change, but then having to admit to them that they failed to do so. For others it might be a financial boat, as in throwing off the golden handcuffs that bind them to their current role to pursue their dream job, or even create their own dream company. What will you put on the line to ensure that you succeed in becoming the genius that you know you can be?
Action Step: What is your boat? What will you put at stake to help motivate you to change and become more authentic?

My Boats: _____________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________

“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

Cognitive scripts: the subconscious “self-talk” that we generate the themes or schemata we habitually apply to ourselves.

A cognitive script is the psychological term given to any messages we tell ourselves, about ourselves, all day long. These scripts can be described as tapes that we play repeatedly in our heads – those things we tell ourselves over and over again, often without conscious awareness. These scripts can influence our emotions and our behavior. They can also be positive or negative, and support our beliefs about ourselves, or create self-limiting beliefs and self-doubt. Some examples of cognitive scripts might include:
“I am a failure”, “I can’t do anything right”, “I will overcome any obstacle and I always do well on tests”. These messages are built from our experiences in life and eventually, through repeating these messages (scripts) enough times, they can become embedded in our subconscious and habitual enough that they develop their own power and are repeated even without justification from our environment anymore. People who suffer from a lack of self-belief often suffer, in actuality, from the problem of negative cognitive scripts. Regardless of why the scripts were developed, they have become habitual and now repeat frequently enough that they influence our reality and outcomes.

The good news is that cognitive scripts can be changed. Though you cannot stop the habit of playing any scripts in your head, you can replace the script that is played. One of the best ways to do this is simply through repetition or positive affirmation statements. Regardless of the fun that is poked at such “therapy” it actually does work. There are lots of examples throughout history of things once thought ineffective eventually turning out to actually work. In most cases it has had less to do with the thing in question not being effective, and more to do with our understanding not being advanced enough to actually understand why it is effective. The medical world offers up two of the easiest examples of things long practiced but only recently understood and approved.

Positive affirmations are another example of something practiced throughout the history of mankind, but because science has not formerly understood the science behind it, it has been much maligned in popular culture. Such work has been the fodder of many a comedian, and the majority of scientists have tended to view affirmations as a fanciful but ineffective way to pacify someone’s need to feel like they have some control over something they really don’t. Recent scientific advances, however, say that we actually do have more control than perhaps they once thought.

Modern day treatments like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) provide a means to replace irrational or negative scripts with rational or positive ones. CBT is practiced all over the world by the majority of clinical psychologists and psychiatrists, and it has been proven to be an effective tool in helping to change habitual opinions or beliefs. This serves as a good example that repetitive thinking activities are an effective way to replace old scripts with new ones.

Habits are either the best of servants or the worst of masters. ~ N. Emmons

When we talk about your level of self-belief, we’re talking about how you see yourself (i.e., what do you say in your mind about yourself). It is unlikely that you give it much thought, but a significant influence over how you feel about yourself is due to the cognitive scripts you play in your mind. To develop your self-belief you have to change these scripts. As so many of us have heard, you can’t get rid of a habit, you can only replace with it with another one. Practice replacing any negative scripts you have with positive ones. This exercise will be an ongoing part of your personal development in maintaining a positive self-belief.

Successful people believe strongly that they can make desirable things happen in their lives, and that they deserve them. All of the successful people we studied had high levels of self-belief and as a result they not only felt they deserved to succeed, but that they would. This self-belief creates in them a certain sense of independence as they view their success as their own birthright and not something to be left to chance, or in the hands of others. Successful people are their own SEO’s, guiding their own fate.

A significant part of self-belief is self-acceptance. As humans, we will all surely fail – many times. We likely fail more than we succeed in many ways. To learn a new thing requires that we fail more than we succeed, but geniuses don’t worry about failing. Many people carry a false impression that to be good they must be perfect and as wise as possible, admitting only those failures that are insignificant. But this simply isn’t possible. To become wise one must first make all the errors he can. It has been said that, “To be wise requires good judgment, and good judgment requires experience and experience requires poor judgment.” To be the best you have to make lots of mistakes. Many people, however, would rather erase their mistakes and acknowledge only that which they did well. They hold out a false hope that they can create an image of themselves that only consists of their successes. In order to truly appreciate yourself, however, you have to appreciate all that you are – including your mistakes and your weaknesses.

“A great attitude does much more than turn on the lights in our worlds; it seems to magically connect us to all sorts of serendipitous opportunities that were somehow absent before the change” ~ Earl Nightingale

~ The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continuously fearing you will make one ~ Elbert Hubbard

There is an old Chinese saying that goes, “Recognize beauty, and ugliness is born. Recognize good, and evil is born.” In other words, it is impossible to qualify something as good without accepting the existence of things that are not good. You can’t learn to love yourself, and truly believe in yourself, until you are willing to accept that which is not good about you as well. You can’t appreciate yourself fully without acknowledging all that is you – both good and bad. The Chinese concept of Yin-Yang depicts this dichotomy. The image represents this duality, one that exists in all of nature, in all things and even in you. It represents the light and the dark, the positive and the negative, the right and the wrong – and the balance between all things that exists.

The enlightening aspect of this concept is that just as the circle itself is not whole without both the light and dark sides of the circle, so too is your acceptance of yourself not complete without acknowledging both the good and the bad of who you are. You cannot feel whole about yourself until you acknowledge both, and without being whole, you will struggle to have true self-belief.

By acknowledging the dark side of your circle you remove its power. You demystify it, and you take control over it. And by gaining control over it, you strip it of much of its power to undermine your confidence, your self-belief. We fear things we don’t know or understand, therefore not knowing or understanding your mistakes and failures empowers them by making them fearful. We end up fearing them; that we’ll make more of them; that perhaps all we can make are mistakes. This can be the impetus for self-limiting beliefs like the self-doubt that many suffer from.

If it is true that we fear things we don’t understand, then if we can come to understand something better, we will fear it less. Just as understanding your talents is a part of self-awareness, so is understanding your non-talents. Geniuses understand their non-talents. They shine big bright lights on their mistakes, acknowledge them readily and instead of wishing they weren’t so, they consider them learning opportunities that help them refine their authenticity even that much more. Their mistakes help them find their quiet path. Thomas Edison once said, “I am not discouraged [by failure], because every wrong step discarded is another step forward.”

When Geniuses shine the light on their non-talents, they aren’t obsessing over how bad they are. Rather they are telling themselves that it’s OK to be flawed. They see the acknowledgment of these flaws as Edison did – as just another step towards the right answer.

Something to be careful of, though, when you acknowledge your flaws, is not to go too far in the other direction. While you must acknowledge your mistakes and flaws to learn from them, at the same time you don’t want to fixate on just those flaws. You have to strike a healthy balance between acknowledging your non-talents and not obsessing over them. If you go back to the image of Yin and Yang think of the ideal target as a balance between both sides of the circle. You don’t want the black space to be absent (completely ignoring your non-talents) but you don’t want that black space to take over the majority of the circle either. Either way, you are not fully whole.

This process of exploring yourself or introspection leads to self-talk, which is what you say to yourself about yourself. We each develop habits for talking to ourselves about ourselves. Psychologists call the messages we play to ourselves cognitive scripts and they can be either positive or negative. You have to develop positive, healthy, well balanced scripts in order to achieve the best levels of self-belief.

Next: Cognitive Scripting!

C3 - Lose the role altogether:
One of the most common reason for chronic failure is chronic inauthenticity, and as I said earlier, the first step in creating your authentic self is acknowledging your inauthenticity. Kierkegaard said it best when he said, “Face the facts of being what you are for that is what changes what you are.” Many times people feel that their roles are just too inauthentic, too far from your quiet path. They would have to delegate or modify the majority of their responsibilities in order to make it authentic enough. If this is the case for you, the best thing to do may indeed be to find another role altogether. If your role is so inauthentic, if you are forced to be more of what you are not than what you are – all day long, then getting out is probably your best solution. The problem with quitting, though, is that it is scary. We’ve all heard the same old saying, “Winners never quit!” As scary as it may be, though, shouldn’t living a life where you feel you are always making mistakes, and never feeling fulfilled or satisfied be even scarier?

Quitting is difficult. Quitting requires you to acknowledge that you’re never going to be #1 in the world, at least not at this. So it’s easier just to put it off, not admit it, and settle for being mediocre. To quote Seth Godin, the problem is that, “you grew up believing that quitting is a moral failure. Quitting feels like a go-down moment, a moment where you look yourself in the eye and blink. Of course you were trying your best, but you just can’t do it. It’s the whole Vince Lombardi thing. If you were just better person, you wouldn’t quit. “ In reality, Geniuses quit all the time. They know what they are good at and what they are not good at, and they quit focusing on that which they are not good at all the time, and instead pour that energy into getting even better at what they are very good at.

We can take a lesson from the pages of wisdom that Jack Welch, former Chairman of General Electric, has left for us. His philosophy was that if GE couldn’t be number one or two in any category or market, either figure out how to be number one or two, or get out of that category. He knew that, at least as a company, when you were number one you controlled your own destiny. So forget the humiliation of failure associated with quitting. Realize that quitting the stuff that you don’t do well frees up your resources to obsess about that which you are naturally good at. Many will tell you that “Quitting is for losers,” but as Seth goes on to say, “quit or be exceptional…average is for losers!”

We promise you this. Once you shine that light on your inauthenticity, once you embrace the truth of your own quiet path and once you decide to take back control of your own success and stop accepting what you get (even if this means quitting your job), the relief and excitement you will feel will be incredible. The positive emotions associated with such a life-changing decision will far outweigh any trepidation you have for the risks that quitting or changing may create. Can you sense just the smallest amount of excitement deep inside you right now at just the thought of being in a whole different place one year from now? Is there a little voice whispering inside right now saying, “Man wouldn’t it be so great to be…?” The question you have to ask yourself is, “Why not?” Why should you continue to settle? Why should you continue to accept less than what you deserve?

Why should you be just above average in one role when another role out there holds the promise to unleash your real genius? Sure you can come up with lots of rational lies, but in the end…why? Get real. Get authentic. Get satisfied. Quit trying to do that which is not you, and…just do you!

To become aware of what your Roal should be I’ve created a simple Roal Building workshop that you can complete through an online account at http://www.whatsyourgenius.com . Click on resources and select Workbook from the menu. Your task will be to take your existing goals (ones which may not take into consideration your natural talents), and adjust them so that they are authentic for you. Once you merge your authentic role with your goals, you will have your new Roal.

~ Quit trying to do that which is not you, and…just do you! ~

C2 - Change the way the role is performed:

The next option for improving performance is to change the way the job is actually performed. When a duty or task is a more integral part of your role, it is probably something that you can’t just get rid of and so complimentary collaboration might help there. Many times, however, some of the tasks people perform are not nearly as vital. Many times managers assign responsibilities to a job arbitrarily out of convenience or even just as a random assignment (e.g., someone’s got to do it). Often these expectations are given without much thought, if any, for the natural talents of the person filling that role. Many times they create roles that are looking for a superman, where many of the talents are even opposite and just down right impossible to find in one person. We’ve seen thousands of roles that were looking for someone who was: empathetic – yet detached, detail oriented – yet big-picture focused, competitive – yet cooperative, compassionate – yet aggressive, strategic – yet tactical. No human on the planet could be all of these things at the same time. The problem is that people assume that natural talents, like skills and knowledge, can be developed, so with enough intelligence and hard work a good employee would get proficient at all of these things. It’s ludicrous to think that anyone could be all this, at least to a degree approaching 4th or 5th level performance anyway.

The best thing you can do to help yourself reach higher levels of performance is to change the way you fulfill a role based on what works best for you. Many times a great deal of the competencies that managers list are purely subjective and have little to do with reality anyway (trust me, one of the core deliverables at my company is helping corporate clients determine exactly what competencies are really needed in a given job, and many of them don’t have a clue). Changing the requirements of a role means working with the same objectives, but finding new ways to reach them. It requires flexibility to adjust how you fill your role, but if you are chasing the final objective anyway, which you should be, then how you get there is not as important as getting there in most cases. What should be of most importance is the best way for you to get there effectively. Gretchen’s story in Chapter __ is a great example of how someone can change the role to better fit their natural talents. She didn’t delegate, she changed the rules of the role.

Often times this simply means completely getting rid of a duty or task. If you can’t get rid of it, create a complimentary collaboration to get some help with it, but if it’s not an important part of the job and just some assignment left over from all those who previously filled your role - some inherited part of the role that exists more because it has always existed than for any real practical reason - ask yourself why you would continue to do it. Justify your answer to yourself. “Because they tell me I have to”, or “Because that’s the way it is done”, or “Just because” are miserable answers so don’t accept them from yourself. If you can’t find sufficient reason for it to exist, then dump it. One good rule of thumb is to imagine you are creating your own company, and you have to create a list of responsibilities for a new role. You own this small start-up and so you will be paying the person who fills this role, not some huge conglomerate. Would you include the tasks or duties in question if you were starting from scratch, and why? If you can justify the existence of these tasks, then go back to the first step in this section and seek to find ways of creating complimentary collaborations; because while important to the job, you still don’t do these things well. If you can’t justify including these tasks in your own new company’s role, however, then why should they be in your current role – really.

Action Step:

Unlike the previous post’s action step, where the tasks or duties were a more integral part of the role, other duties are often just randomly assigned and could just as easily be offloaded or even done away with completely (i.e., removed altogether). Think of two tasks or duties of your role that,

A.) rely on your non-talents, and
B.) are not truly vital to achieving your overall objectives or goals.

1.

2.

Ask yourself if these duties or tasks really make sense. Are they there because they have always been there? Are the really practical? Look at the example we saw in Gretchen where the responsibility to make a certain minimum call quota each day was limiting her ability to achieve. In the end, the daily call quota wasn’t really an important part of the job. It was more than likely something a manager created to try and improve performance. It’s doubtful that anyone had every really questioned the efficacy of such a rule and since it persisted all it actually did was hurt performance in Gretchen’s case. Take a look at the two tasks you wrote down above and figure out how to remove them.

Next, we’ll look at the third C, Losing The Role Altogether.

The Three C’s of Becoming Authentic
In preparation for the upcoming Roal Building exercise we will give you, there are three core things you can do to become more authentic:
• Complimentary collaboration
• Change the way the role is performed
• Change the role altogether

C1 - Complimentary collaboration: This means finding someone who has a talent where you do not; partnering with someone who is strong where you are weak. The most well known form of this kind of collaboration is known as delegating, but sometimes you partner with someone on a higher level than simple delegation. You might actually partner with them to share dual responsibility for an outcome on a higher level. This is often the case with high-level executives who create collaborative relationships with a partner or another senior executive who carries out the duties that the other should not because it would create a weakness by relying on their non-talents.

Many leadership development programs tell you that in order to be a great leader you have to smooth the edges and fill in any holes. To become a better leader you need to become well-rounded. Develop talents in these areas and you will be a better leader, or so they tell you. The higher up the ladder you go, the more likely you are to hear this kind of advice. When you are the top-executive, you are expected to be better at most things than those you manage or lead. We hear this so often, but it just isn’t true. How many top executives do you know who are excellent (geniuses) at certain things, but just horrible at others?

Regardless of whether you delegate or create some higher-level partnership, sharing or offloading the responsibility for accomplishing tasks which rely on your non-talents is vital to increasing your performance. Let’s look at a couple of examples. Many times we find sales managers who are very good sales managers, but they were not the best sales person. Professional sports coaches are another good example. How many great sports coaches do you know who were star athletes? Sure, the great sales manager and the great sports coach both played the game, and maybe they even performed very well, but in most cases they weren’t the absolute star. Just because you lead sales people doesn’t mean you have to be a better salesperson than they are. Your job isn’t to sell - it’s to lead. You aren’t supposed to be a better sales person, just a better leader. This is the case because the talents it takes to lead a team of athletes or sales people are very different than what it takes to be the individual star player or star sales person. When you find yourself responsible for something that relies on one of your non-talents - outsource it. Collaborate with someone who has a complimentary talent to your non-talent.

“No man has the ability to step outside the shadow of his own character” ~ Maximilien Robespierre

Michael Lorelli delegates all the time. In our discussion on how he deals with non-talents, he said, “If it’s simply not in my DNA, I try to align myself better, not change myself. I supplement my non-talents through others and delegation instead.” As you create your roal, give lots of thought to any dependence you might have on non-talents, and build into your roal those people you might create collaborative relationships with so they can be responsible for what you are not great at, and vice versa.

Action Step:

1. What are two aspects or tasks of your current role that force you to rely on a non-talent (based on your Genius profile)?

Name some people you know, at work, who excel in these areas.

2. What are two aspects or tasks of your current role that do allow you to rely on a talent (based on your Genius profile)?

3. Can you think of anyone at work who isn’t good in these areas and who you might collaborate with to help them fill their own blind spots?

Think of how you could partner with someone to end your reliance on non-talents and help them do the same by helping them handle some of the things that rely on their non-talents. Talk with this person, or persons, about creating some complimentary collaboration.

In my next post we will discuss the second C - Change the way the role is performed.

The title above is not a typo. You have goals in life, and based on what you’ve learned about your natural talents so far you also have an understanding for what your authentic role should be in achieving those goals to ensure that you are maximizing talents and minimizing non-talents. When you incorporate your authentic role with your goals, you create something new, a synthesis between your direction, your abilities and your duties. Jay calls this synthesis your Roal. In other words, your roal is the combination of your goals and your authentic role. Your roal is your job basically, but only after you have managed to change it so that it has goals that are realistic (based on your talents) and the way you do it (your role) is authentic as well.

For example; will your roal be the strategic person who creates policies, rules, structure and does the long-range planning (master in the head), or will your roal be the tactical, hands-on implementer who drives results and action today (master for the Hand), or will your roal be the person who coordinates others to achieve results and ensures that the human element is fully optimized towards achieving the goal (master for the Heart) – or any combination thereof.

Goals (Objectives to be met)
+
Roles(way of achieving authentic goals)
=
Roals (My authentic way of achieving authentic goals)

One precaution we give to our clients, as they create their Roals, is that any roal is what you do, not who you are. “I am more than just my roles” is a thought that while not hard to remember, is also very easy to forget. We shouldn’t blame ourselves too much. It wasn’t all that long ago that we really were defined by our roles. Consider your last name for a minute. For a great many of you your last name was derived based on either where you came from or what you did. Last names like Cooper (one who makes barrels), Baker, Priest, Farmer, etc. Our ancestors were given names to signify what roles they filled, and in many cases they were born into these roles with little or no chance of choosing their own direction. In doing so, these roles were more than just a current job. Granted, we’ve come a long way since then, but many people still suffer from role identify issues where their self-worth, their “self” in general, becomes inextricably tied to (if not replaced by) their role.

The thing to always remember is that a role is only the application of a thing – it is not that thing itself. A word helps define a thing, but it does not become that thing. By calling the object you are sitting in “chair”, that chair does not become a word. It is still a chair – defined by a word. While your roles may help define what you are, they should not be substituted for who you are.

In my next post, we will discuss the 3-C’s of becoming authentic.

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.

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!

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”?