Practical Genius (11 page)

How about we set a “no small talk” rule for all practical geniuses to live by? When I meet someone for the first time and he begins
to engage me on a small, safe level, I immediately look for a way to prompt him toward sharing something he really cares about rather than the evening weather report. Expressing genius is never about frivolous, meaningless, safe conversations that just fill the air. Think of every conversation—even shorties—as a chance to grow your genius and contribute to that growth in someone else.

Soft-asset types tell the smushier creative stuff about who they
really
are, as if to make excuses for the hard part of themselves they have to hold their noses to live with. But in the end, artists tell art stories. Moms tell mom stories. Lawyers tell lawyer stories. The question is, why do we continue to frame our stories by how we spend our time or, more precisely, how we make a living? We speak our professions well and are experts at sharing the details of our careers, but ask most people to share their passions or the unplugged version of their lives and most can’t—because they haven’t had much practice at sharing
meaning.

The goal in expressing your genius is to reveal it without silencing the hard side for the soft or vice versa. What will help you avoid that tendency is to try not to share from a place of assumptions, labels, and societal expectations of what is and isn’t appropriate to share. Remove those barriers and practice being honest and transparent, and whoever is listening will feel a sense of trust in return. Try this, I mean it. You will be shocked how easy it is, once you commit to quit talking about nonsense. The result will be edifying engagement, and most people will gladly follow your lead.

See where I’m going with this? This two-minute drill reveals whether you have a story at all, whether your story reflects a bias toward your soft or hard assets, and whether you let small talk and minutiae get in the way of the story you should be telling.

By the end of this chapter, you’ll have all the components you need to craft your own compelling two-minute genius story. But first let me share my own story with you.

When you begin to understand that every exchange you have with another person is an exercise in telling your story, you’re on to something. Gone are the days when you could hide the personal you behind the professional you. Here forever are the days when you project a positive, powerful, purposeful narrative that puts your genius out there in the world.

Why does your story matter? Because it tells the truth. Because it inspires, explains, or connects you with someone else. Because it is powerful, free, persuasive, natural, entertaining, memorable, and, above all, authentic.

Let’s look at mine. Here’s the story I tell about where I am right now in my life:

One day when I was in the third grade at my Catholic grammar school, I remember children being pulled out of my classroom and taken to a much nicer room down the hall that had beautiful windows and flowers on the windowsills.

I waited patiently for my name to be called to move to that nicer room, which had been designed and designated for the “gifted” students in my class. My name was never called. I went home that day and shared the story of that special room and the flowers in the windows and asked my mother when I would be called to go to that room.

As any good Latina would do, my mother marched into the principal’s office the very next morning, demanding to know why her daughter had not been assigned to the new gifted program.

The elderly nun patiently explained to my mother that although I was a sweet, well-mannered child, academically I was average. To a hardworking single mother with the highest hopes for her obviously extraordinary child, that was like a life sentence of disappointment for her and hardship for me.

My mom is a straight shooter, though, and that night she sat me down and recounted her conversation with the principal without mincing too many words. “Gina, this is a class for gifted students, and they think you are average. You will just have to keep trying,” she said, struggling to convince me of the truth of that.

As I look back on my educational experience and my professional career, I realize that my challenge has always been to try harder, to do more, to communicate more effectively, to do whatever it takes to get the attention I deserved for the intelligence and creativity and sheer determination that I always knew in my heart I possessed. Yet I learned early on—probably from my wise and loving mother—that I needed always to be ready to crash through the barriers to entry. If I had allowed that nun to frame my story, I would have ended up an average girl with an average life, and I knew even then that that was just not who I am.

I quickly tapped into the power of my own determination, my proud self-identification, and my ability to strategize around just about any kind of adversity. I learned how to master and market my strengths, which got me into Binghamton University and then earned me a full scholarship to Baruch College for a master’s degree as a National Urban Fellow. Take that, “gifted program”! Fighting to be sure that others understand exactly who I am and what I’m truly capable of—that is my truth; that is my story.

You may have noticed that my story is about my elementary school principal basically calling me a loser. Yet why isn’t that the takeaway of the story?

We’ve been taught our whole lives to hide our failures. Did you put that D+ spelling quiz up on the refrigerator with a magnet? Do you lead with details of unsuccessful projects or unfavorable job reviews on your résumé? Does your Facebook page exhaustively account for all of your failed romantic relationships? Nope. We learn from an early age how to spin our failures and put a lot of sweet
frosting on top to make ourselves more likable, more marketable. And that’s a good strategy... up to a point.

Martha Beck is one of America’s most famous life coaches, but her own life has not been without challenge and heartbreak. She has suffered from fibromyalgia for almost thirty years. She is a mother of three, including a son who has Down syndrome, whom she wrote about in the very moving
Expecting Adam: A True Story of Birth, Rebirth, and Everyday Magic.
She left the close-knit Mormon Church and has written candidly about the sexual abuse she endured as a child. With all of this, Martha has a PhD from Harvard and her own new show on the Oprah Winfrey Network and is “one of the smartest women I know,” Oprah says. Her career seemed to benefit from the same recipe of equal parts of heart and mind and is a great example of a woman who walks and talks her practical genius without ever censoring herself.

I think there’s a lot to be gained from not only learning from but also sharing publicly our tougher moments. I propose that we stop burying the less triumphant moments of our lives and start letting them play a valuable role in our storytelling. When you’re secure enough to out your weaknesses and share a few of your greatest misses, you convey to others that you have no fear. One of my spiritual gurus, Reverend Chris Jackson, always says to reveal your greatest weakness immediately to others to show them that you have nothing to lose. It is only when you have nothing to lose that the magnitude of what you have to gain can fully empower you. “Gina,” he told me, “When you reach a place in your life where you are ready to take the risk of telling the truth, that is when life begins teaching you plenty.” Listen to your life experiences; your personal truths are filled with rich expression and valuable content.

My story, just like any good two-minute story, consists of four important components—the narrative, the themes, the vocabulary, and the illustrations. I’ll break them down for you here, show you how to find these components for yourself and then how to use those components to build your own unique, winning genius story.

Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. There’s a narrative arc to every tale that allows the listener to be brought along and participate in the emotional transaction that takes place in the telling. Does the story
you’re
telling right now have a narrative arc? Or is it a series of random non sequiturs or some kind of self-glorifying highlight reel or worse? This is the stuff that makes the listener look for the exit signs of your conversation. Hell, those kinds of stories can make
you
want to make a run for it yourself.

I have a client, Lauralee, who attempted to sidestep this part of her practical genius learning. She was convinced (and was trying to convince me) that there wasn’t a particularly interesting narrative to share about her life. She is a sales executive with a conference planning company, and she believed that the work she was doing in the here and now was the only story anyone needed to hear about her.

But with a little prodding, I discovered that early in her life, Lauralee had been bitten by the travel bug, and in fact she’d traipsed around the world, working with a traveling carnival. Hello! She was a
carnie?
By the time we got to that part of her story, I was hooked.

I think that Lauralee felt that revealing the more carefree part of her early life wouldn’t encourage people to take her seriously. But I knew that the opposite was true: this story revealed a kind of adventurous spirit and a passion for travel that would be memorable and inspiring to those who knew her. To inspire Lauralee to reveal her story—her narrative and themes and all the words that could help express her genius—I asked her to choose photos from her many albums that she felt reflected what was distinctive about her life experience. Her two favorite photos were both reflective of the risk taker Lauralee, one riding a camel in Dahab, a Bedouin camp in the Sinai desert, and the other on a bamboo raft floating on a river in Chiang Mai in northern Thailand.

LAURALEE SHAPIRO

LAURALEE SHAPIRO

By the time she finished this homework, her entire perspective on her narrative—what she now understood was her
real
story—had changed. Suddenly she saw all of it as clear as day. She had been focusing on telling her safe corporate story (where she’d gone to college, what types of responsibilities she’d tackled at her most recent job) and had ignored the best part of what she had to share.

“I knew that the intrepid nomad was still in me somewhere, but it felt like a long-dormant volcano,” said Lauralee when I later asked her about the experience. “Then I met you, and the volcano began to rumble back to life.” She hadn’t made the connection that her globetrotting past was actually her greatest competitive advantage. As she shifted her story toward her incredible real-life experiences as a modern-day gypsy, she began to grow in her work and her personal life took a bold turn. “I realized that the risk taker was still in me and I just needed to find her again, albeit an older and wiser version.”

In the months that followed this exercise, she examined her life and asked herself on a regular basis, “What if I wasn’t afraid?” Telling herself a new story (or in her case, a new version of her old, best story), her genius breakthrough started to roll. “My business has since begun to flourish, and I have found a personal joy and balance in my life that was like a buried treasure I once would have traveled around the planet to discover,” she told me.