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

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.

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.

Once you have your new Roal (congrats by the way), now there is just one more thing you have to do in order to be finished with the Choose Thyself evolution. You have to believe in yourself. To have self-belief requires that you are satisfied with yourself, and as Thoreau said, “The man who is dissatisfied with himself. What can he do?” Self-belief is one of the most crucial traits we found all successful people to possess. Psychologists sometimes refer to it as self-efficacy, which is our belief in our ability to succeed in specific situations. Some refer to it as self-confidence that you have an innate sense that you will succeed. Still others call it a sense of entitlement wherein the individual simply expects that they deserve the best. This does not mean they expect to be handed the best, just that they deserve it, so they go and get it. They succeed because they feel they have just as much right as anyone else to be successful. Regardless of the various names given to it, for our purposes here we call it self-belief, and it is defined as, “one’s ability to believe they deserve to succeed and that they will succeed.”

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!

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?

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! ~

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?

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.