Inform Yourself

Mourning the loss of my oldest dog Jazz. She was a 14 yr old Chow Chow who we had to put to sleep today after she suffered a stroke this morning. She was a great dog! I am going to miss her terribly.

If you’ve been reading my last few articles then you know about the Genius Project which was conducted by my good friend Mr. Jay Niblick. You’ll also recall that your ability to achieve 5th Level of performance (Genius Level) you must rely on your natural talents and be authentic to yourself. This post addresses the thought processes on how geniuses view themselves and their abilities.

Here’s another way to look at it. To assume that you – at your very core - need to fix yourself requires the presupposition that you must be broken, and that implies that God screwed up. I mean feel free to substitute whatever spiritual belief you have, but it likely doesn’t change the concept. Think about it. If you believe that at your very core that the way you were made is insufficient to achieve success, then you have to admit that you view yourself as flawed, or at best incomplete. Now I’m not talking here about developing new acquired talents, rather a belief that “I need fixing”. Acquiring new knowledge and experience is great. That’s a prerequisite for anyone’s success and something all 5th level performers (Geniuses) constantly do by the way. But when you attempt to fix who you are instead of fixing how you are, then you must first think who you are is insufficient. And if you think that then you can’t avoid the question, “Who screwed up?”

~ If you need to fix anything, it is the way you apply you – not you! ~

In reality it’s not what you are at your very core that needs work, but how you apply yourself that needs fixing. God created you for a purpose and you have a completely unique and incredibly powerful set of natural talents for that purpose, so it’s not what raw materials you have to work with that you should be concerned with – because the geniuses we studied aren’t. What you should be focused on is how you apply those raw materials.

Geniuses understand this. They don’t view their set of talents as flawed; rather any flaws they see come in how they apply those talents. Because of this radically different perspective on themselves, when they focus on correcting flaws, those flaws are in their application of themselves, not themselves. In other words, they achieve tremendous leaps in performance by adjusting their environment (what they do or how they do it) not themselves. They don’t change their talents; they change how those talents are applied.

Give yourself up to your inner genius and allow that which is you – as you were created – to do what it does best. Remember, regardless of whatever higher power you believe in, if you believe that such a higher power is infinitely more powerful and knowing then you, you have to ask yourself, “did that power know what it was doing when it created me?”

If you answer yes, then you can’t blame your God for making you incorrectly? If you still agree with me then any mistakes in your life are not, cannot be, in you, but in the application of you. In other words, God made you, but you decide what to do with yourself. If a problem exists it’s not with the thing God created, but how you apply it.

I say all of this because there is a huge difference between thinking you are broken and realizing that you are just not well aligned. The former is a racecar with a blown engine that must be completely rebuilt (broken). The latter is a perfectly good Ferrari trying to race in an off-road rally (not well aligned).

~ Success in not about developing talent – it’s about aligning it ~

If you’ve been reading my posts then you know about the Genius Project which was conducted by my good friend Mr. Jay Niblick. You’ll also recall that your ability to achieve Genius Level (5th Level) of Performance one must rely on their natural talents and be authentic to oneself. This post reveals some of the side effects of being inauthentic to oneself.

The effects of being inauthentic reach far beyond simple performance issues. The more disconcerting aspects of being inauthentic are what it does to you emotionally and even physically.

Being inauthentic is stressful, and I don’t mean healthy stress (eustress) I mean harmful stress (distress). Being inauthentic in the first place is stressful enough, but the lack of performance that usually results adds even more stress on top of that, and when you look at what modern medicine is just now learning about the impact of stress on the human body (let alone psyche), the effects are startling.

According to Dr. Leon Pomeroy, who was the founding President of the International Academy of Preventive Medicine, psychological and emotional stress can gravely affect the human body in many negative ways. There are a lot of things that cause stress and a lot of factors that determine our ability to handle it, but we do know that being inauthentic, and having to work in an uncomfortable job, having to modify your behavior all day long, constantly having to apply a non-talent – is definitely stressful. If your job requires this of you full time, then the stress this causes you is chronic.

Such stress triggers an overdose of hormones like epinephrine and cortisol that, over time, can become toxic to the human body. Chronic stress negatively affects your body’s ability to regulate it’s own processes (homeostasis). Your ability to absorb nutrients, lose weight and even fight off infections are negatively affected. Even the chemistry of sleep is also disrupted by chronic stress, and sleep deprivation itself only aggravates the symptoms even more. Some common side effects of chronic stress on the physical body are:

• The immune system. Under stress, the body becomes more vulnerable to illnesses, from colds and minor infections to major diseases. If you have a chronic illness stress can make the symptoms even worse
• Cardiovascular disease. Stress is linked to high blood pressure, abnormal heartbeat (arrhythmia), problems with blood clotting, and hardening of the arteries (atherosclerosis). It is also linked to coronary artery disease, heart attack, and heart failure
• Muscle pain. People who are stressed often have neck, shoulder, and low back pain. This may be caused by constant tension in the muscle because of stress. Stress also affects rheumatoid arthritis
• Stomach and intestinal problems. Recent research indicates that stress plays a significant role in gastro esophageal reflux disease (GERD), peptic ulcer disease, and irritable bowel syndrome

Chronic stress can negatively affect your thoughts and decisions as well. Psychological
signs and symptoms usually associated with stress can be:
• Increased irritability or sensitivity to minor disturbances
• Feeling jumpy or exhausted all the time
• Difficulty concentrating
• Worrying about insignificant things
• Frustration and a feeling of something being wrong somewhere, but not sure where

According to Elissa Epel, PhD and an assistant professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco, “The problem lies within our neuroendocrine system -- a brain-to-body connection that harkens back to evolutionary times and which helped our distant ancestors to survive. Though today the sources of stress are more likely to be an unpaid bill than a saber-toothed tiger, this system still activates a series of hormones whenever we feel stressed.”
"These hormones give us the biochemical strength we need to fight or flee our stressors," says Epel. “While this system works fine when our stress comes in the form of physical danger -- when we really need to "fight or flee", and then replenish -- it doesn't serve the same purpose for today's garden-variety stressors.”

According to Shawn Talbott, PhD, an associate professor in the Department of Nutrition at the University of Utah, our response to stress today doesn’t involve burning any of these extra hormones that we create in anticipation of having to fight or flee. These extra hormones are created but not used up and this build up adds to the detrimental effects of chronic stress.

Granted being inauthentic is not the only cause of stress in our lives, but being inauthentic definitely adds to our level of stress. And the more inauthentic you are, the more frustrated you get with your results, the less fulfilled you feel in your work, and the less success you achieve – the more stress you will suffer. And that’s bad news for your physical health and wellbeing.

Take a moment now and look at yourself. What side effects of being inauthentic do you notice about you? Please post your thoughts, comments, and findings. You are not alone!

In the course of doing the research for the Genius Project, Jay Niblick wanted to find out what differentiated those who suffered from The Problem from those who did not. That was his primary objective. But he also wanted to get a better understanding for just how significant the implications of The Problem were. What were the effects of such a large percentage of people being dissatisfied with their results, frustrated with their constant attempts to improve and left feeling unfulfilled with their jobs in general? The impact is sobering!

Just imagine what The Problem means to a single company. Think of the profits left on the table by a company with a workforce that is uninspired, unmotivated, and unfulfilled. Imagine the impact if even 10% of the workforce suffers from The Problem. What does it do to service levels when those who are serving don’t feel well served themselves? When you move past one company to all the companies out there, how many millions of dollars are wasted on remedies that fail to address the real problem and how many billions of dollars are never realized in the first place because a significant percentage of the workforce’s true potential is never maximized?

Who knows how much this problem is really costing the world, but here’s your chance to tell us what you think the real impact is. If you go to www.whatsyourgenius.com you can share your thoughts on this question and check out what others think about the real impact of The Problem as well. While the problem at the organizational level is probably immense, what The Problem
does to the individual is even more significant.

At the Human Level
Today Gretchen Dougherty is one of the top sales people in her company, but this wasn’t always the case. Her company sells home security systems, and Gretchen’s job as an inside sales agent is to prospect over the phone to schedule home visits where a field sales representative gives a security consultation (otherwise known to you and me as a sales pitch). She spends her days sitting in a cubicle dialing out to homeowners trying to get them to schedule a home evaluation. Gretchen gets paid a sales commissions for every security system that gets sold to people she scheduled.

When she first took the job she was taught that sales is a numbers game. They told her that she had to make a specific number of outbound calls every day in order to beat the odds and find that one needle in the haystack who would agree to a home visit. Gretchen was told, “If you want to make money, you’ve got to call on more people.” The best sales people in the company made approximately seventy to eighty phone calls a day, and ended up scheduling three to five field appointments, out of which one would normally sign a contract. Management really stressed to her the importance of making a high volume of calls. Each sales person even had a call quota for the day.

Gretchen, however, thought differently than most of the other sales people. Unlike the majority of them she had a very high natural talent for empathy. It was this empathy that actually got in her way because while other sales people would spend no more than a few minutes trying to push for an appointment, Gretchen found herself talking to people for five, ten even fifteen minutes or more. She knew she had to generate a high volume of calls so she was constantly trying to suppress her empathy and not connect too much with the person on the other end of the phone.When she did this, she was not being true to who she was. She was awkward and preoccupied with watching the all-holy clock that sat next to her computer. The more she tried to ignore her natural tendencies and think differently so she could follow the script and stick to a time limit, the more awkward and ineffective she became. Gretchen was in trouble. She wasn’t performing well at all and the top question on management’s mind was would she quit before they fired her. She was definitely ready to quit when I first met her. I had been asked by her company to consult to them on why she wasn’t performing.

After Jay spoke with Gretchen, and did some preliminary work it became pretty clear right up front that the issue seemed to be a poor fit between her and her role. Because of this he gave her a battery of assessments to help understand what her true talents were and how well they were aligned with her existing role. One of these assessments was the Attribute Index that we used in the Genius Project.

The moment he saw the results it was obvious to him what the problem was, and Gretchen confirmed. Her extremely high empathy was causing her to want to connect with the people she was calling far more than the predetermined time limit would allow. The rest of the sales people in the company didn’t have anywhere near her level of talent in this area, so they didn’t have any problem running scripts and pushing through enough people until they found one that would agree to an appointment. Getting on and off the phone as quickly as possible wasn’t a problem for them, but it was proving to be a big problem for Gretchen. She felt bad about talking at people instead of talking with them. The result was that Gretchen was trying to be something she wasn’t and it was negatively affecting her performance in a big way.

Luckily, the company was pretty open-minded about how to fix the problem. They had spent a lot of money training Gretchen and, already suffering from a higher human turnover rate, they gave me the latitude he needed to attempt to correct the problem. What did he do? He simply told Gretchen to figure out how to be true to who she was. He told her that the objective was fixed (schedule X many appointments per week), but the way she went about doing that was up to her. He asked her how she would do the job if she were in charge. He said, “Just do you.” As a result, Gretchen got rid of the clock on her desk and decided that she would not have a daily call quota, or any call quota for that matter – just a single quota for how many appointments she scheduled.

A very interesting thing happened when she did this. Gretchen, instead of suppressing her natural tendencies, started letting them guide her. She spent much more time with those she talked with. She got to know them and understand their needs much better. She once even told him about one call where she learned about the caller’s teenage daughter, what her name was, how often she was home alone, where she was going to college and what she was majoring in. This was typical of the level of communication Gretchen was having with the people she called on. She was really connecting with these people.

Instead of trying to force herself to ignore her empathy, Gretchen was now using that natural talent to connect with people on a much deeper level than the rest of the sales reps were. Doing so meant that she spent a lot more time with each person, and only made as few as twenty to twenty five calls per day. But doing so also meant that she was establishing relationships with people, relationships that were returning results. Despite the fact that Gretchen was making less than 20% of the calls the other reps were, she still averaged to book three to five appointments each day. Even better than that, instead of the company average of one signed contract for every five appointments, Gretchen was averaging two signed contracts for every five appointments.
Pretty soon, the field sales people were fighting to see who would get to call on the appointments that Gretchen had scheduled because they knew their odds of making a sale were a lot better.

The lesson of this case study is that by being inauthentic Gretchen was hurting her performance. When she became authentic, though, not only did her performance reach the expected levels, but actually exceeded them. When she was inauthentic she was no more satisfied with her job than the job was satisfied with her. Now that she is authentic, though, she views her job as a vehicle for her passion for meeting and helping people and now she is as satisfied with the job as it is with her.

If you ask the field sales representatives who they want booking their appointments, they will tell you, “Gretchen man, she is a genius at finding people who sign contracts.”

The Long “X”
Gretchen is a good example of what Jay calls the Long “X”, which is a simple but effective way of understanding the relationship between how much effort you have to put in versus the results you get back.

When you are authentic, you are making sure that the work you do, and how you do it, is well aligned with your natural talents and the result is that you achieve more success with less effort. When you are inauthentic, you allow your success to be dependent on your non-talents and what results you get are hard won and feel like they took lots of effort.

The benefits of being authentic are significant, not only from the perspective of how well you perform, but also with regards to the satisfaction and sense of fulfillment have you got out of your life. Basically, being authentic is much more productive. You just do better when you are authentic.

The Long X is a term that describes the level of results you get when you are inauthentic as opposed to authentic. When you are inauthentic you are inverted and feel like the effort that you put in exceeds the results you get back. When you become authentic you become converted and you start to feel like you get back more results than the effort you felt you had to put in. Authenticity is the Geniuses secret to consistently high 5th level performance.

The following is more information that resulted from my good Friend Mr. Jay Niblick's The Genius Project. The findings are pretty astounding. The implications are even greater!

There is a myth about strengths and weaknesses, which states that we all possess them naturally. In reality, we don’t. No human possesses any single weaknesses. What we do possess are natural talents and non-talents. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those that think it is too negative to tell someone they have a weakness and wants to call them “opportunities for development”. He actually hates this term because more often than not it supports the incorrect view that one can fix a weakness by developing natural talents. If one of his clients is suffering from a weakness he tells them so straight up, but the key is that this weaknesses isn’t natural, it is manufactured. Weaknesses and strengths don’t exist naturally, only talents and non-talents do. If, however, one relies on a non-talent, they turn it into a weakness. Likewise, if one doesn’t rely on my talents, they are never a strength for them.

In other words, you are ultimately in control of your strengths and weaknesses. Granted you have to work with the potential strengths you have, in the form of what natural talents you possess, but it is totally up to you as to whether you allow yourself to be dependent on a non-talent – or try to rely on a talent. You may be born with talents and non-talents, and there is nothing you can do about that, but you are in charge of whether those talents and non-talents become strengths and weaknesses. If you allow your success to depend on your talents, you create a strength. If you allow your success to depend on your non-talents, you create a weakness.

This might seem like he's talking about some minor difference of semantics, but I assure you that this is much more than a simple play on words. Understanding this concept requires a total change of perspective. Most people buy into the myth that they possess their strengths and weaknesses and fail to understand that they don’t actually possess them, they create them. The power is theirs as to whether they exist or not.

The key is how you apply yourself, and the impact of this understanding is incredibly important because once you realize that you create your strengths and weaknesses, you realize that you are in control. You realize that you don’t have to suffer from weaknesses which were given to you and about which you can do nothing. You are in control because while you definitely have non-talents, nothing in the universe states that you have to depend on them and if you don’t depend on them, then they aren’t weaknesses now are they? Make sense? Both talents and non-talents are only “potential”. Natural talents are only potential strengths and non-talents are only potential weaknesses. The thing that controls how these potentials turn out is how you apply yourself.

If one fail because of their weaknesses, it is their own fault. Not because they didn’t fix their weaknesses, but because they allowed their success to depend on my non-talents. They created a scenario where their weaknesses outweighed their strengths. Either way, the control lies with them and no one else.

Geniuses understand this. Their locus of control lies internally within them. They know that they are the only ones responsible for whether they benefit from strengths or suffer from weaknesses. They manage to turn potential strengths into actual strengths by relying on their natural talents and they manage to leave potential weaknesses as just that – potential weakness. They do not allow their success to become dependent on their non-talents, which would manufacture a weakness. Their primary focus is on maximizing their dependence on talents and minimizing their dependence on non-talents. Peter Drucker said, “your job is to make the strengths of your people effective and their weaknesses irrelevant.” While obviously influenced by the industrial era mindset, because he’s talking to management not the individual, the message is none-the-less spot on. The key is the focus on minimizing dependence on weaknesses, not eliminating them.

Geniuses don’t have more talents than anyone else. They are just as flawed and imperfect in their natural abilities as the next man. Geniuses don’t have fewer non-talents, they just have fewer weaknesses because they are very aware of their non-talents and they do a damn good job of not depending on them. To quote Dr. Marshall Goldsmith again, “there are a whole lot of things I stink at Jay. I just make sure I don’t have to do them to be successful.” The level of success these Geniuses achieve is hard to argue with. They achieve significantly more success with less effort, while finding more passion, satisfaction and happiness.

The Numbers
From a pure statistical perspective, Geniuses are quite rare but they significantly outperform the non-geniuses across the board. The percentage of 5th level performers in the study was only 9% of the total population (n=300,000+) but the difference in their results was astonishing:
• The most successful people outperformed the next closest level not by 10 times, nor by 100 times, but by as much as 1,000 times in some cases
• The average level of self-awareness for the 5th level performers in the study was 92% compared to 62% for the 4th level performers and less than 47% for the 1st through 3rd level performers
• Those who were 5th level performers had levels of authenticity that were 91% versus the levels of authenticity seen in the 4th level performers of 79% and in the 1st through 3rd level performers who were at 63%
• The differences between the level of self-awareness and degree of authenticity, and the correlation of these two factors with performance, make a very compelling argument for

The data showed us that there is a direct and positive correlation between the levels of awareness you have for your own abilities, the degree to which you are authentic to them and your overall level of performance. These data showed that those who performed at the lower levels had lower levels of self-awareness and authenticity. The higher people were in performance the greater their level of self-awareness and authenticity became. The great news about this is that self-awareness and authenticity are acquired talents and as things you can develop – you can develop your ability to reach the 5th level of performance AKA The Genius Level.