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?

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What will you specialize in?

What will you master, and what will you not?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who in your industry is considered an expert?

Who do you know that specializes in anything?

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

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

My Industry:

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

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