Practical Genius (7 page)

If you’re a free agent or work for an organization that doesn’t provide a constructive review process, just answer this simple question: What do you do best? Generate a list that encompasses your professional and personal experience, the projects you participate in at work or in your community, even talents that contribute to the success of your home life. For example, do colleagues seek you out for their projects because you’re a creative problem solver? Are you
the one who keeps your family on track, thinking ten steps ahead for each of you? Are you recognized as someone who can champion an idea, build consensus on a team, or take a project all the way to the finish line? The qualities that enable your skills and capacities are your defining strengths.

Here’s a way to think about your strengths:

What activities do you actually love doing because you enjoy doing them well? Do you look forward to doing them whenever possible?

What do you do well and effortlessly? What is it about your nature or personality that enables your success in this area?

Say you’re an Olympic swimmer. Besides excellent technique, physical strength, and lots and lots of training, what contributes to your success in this sport? Your competitive nature, your discipline, your precision, and your perseverance, for starters.

When you look at what you do well and can identify the underlying reasons for your success, you’re looking at your strengths.

Now that you’ve considered your skills and strengths, take a moment to consider your expertise, the most important of all hard assets. Your expertise is the body of knowledge over which you have the most mastery and authority. It’s the area of your professional life you have most invested in and was probably the focus of most of your education and training. Whatever your expertise—whether it be social media, specialty food, medical devices, or fitness training—it is probably the thing that has the greatest value within your portfolio of hard assets.

When I work with individual clients and ask them what their expertise is, some will say, “Well, I don’t know if I can call myself an expert, but I’ve spent the last fifteen years working on (fill in the blank).” Hello! You’ve spent fifteen years studying, working, and building capability within one subject area? That definitely makes you an expert, kiddo!

So if you are hesitating when considering your own expertise, remember that an expert is any individual who exhibits the highest level of mastery and performance of a specialized job, task, or skill. Since there isn’t an expert fairy who drops in to grant you the “expert” title, I will. Whatever your primary subject matter, from here forward think of yourself as an expert in that area. This isn’t to say you know all there is to know about it or don’t have infinite room to increase your experience and knowledge in that area. It’s really just to say you’re more of an expert than you might think you are. In fact, you’re more of an expert than most!

For example, one of my clients is a professional skydiver and instructor with more than twenty years of skydiving and ten thousand jumps under his belt. He recently realized during a full day of our working together that his expertise isn’t just the act of skydiving; more important, he is an expert in what he calls the “extreme focus” that is required to succeed as a skydiver. Using the same techniques he has used for sixteen years teaching people to skydive, he is now teaching others how to have a laser-beam, lifesaving kind of focus in other areas of their lives. He has leveraged his core strength and has further identified and refined his expertise.

If you have to pull out your résumé to help you identify your hard assets, do it! The goal of this first step is to get you to visualize the professional ingredients that contribute to the foundation of your practical genius.

Once you’ve assessed the ingredients that make up the professional you—the hard you, the logical you—you are ready to begin the exploration of the soft assets that contribute to the spice, zest, and energy of your genius. Although your hard professional assets may seem at odds with your soft personal assets, they are actually highly
interconnected and interdependent. So move through the following ideas with an open mind and be prepared to discover the rest of the ingredients that give rise and reality to your genius.

So many of us check half of our identities at the door when we enter our workplace each day. We leverage only our hard assets, and then we wonder why we feel disconnected when reflecting on our personal lives versus our professional lives. The qualities we usually ascribe to our personal lives and our private selves are what I call our soft assets—simply defined as our passions, creativity, and values.

Think about folks you know who’ve been on a track for twenty-plus years and complain of feeling dissatisfied and stuck. You’d feel miserable, too, if you were constantly striving to succeed with one hand tied behind your back, without the benefit of some of the most powerful and effective qualities you possess. We focus on our hard assets and undervalue and sublimate our soft assets—what a waste of half of who we are! The greatest lesson I’ve learned is that in order to become the person you really want to be, you have to flip that paradigm.

Today’s workforce needs professionals who can think inside, outside, and all around the box. We need professionals with empathy who can design collaborative initiatives from the heart to fight longstanding, intractable problems. Today people need to honor their innate desire to be autonomous and not have to sit in gray boxes for eight hours a day with carrots in front of them to get them to perform. The way we work is changing, which means we will not be alone in shifting the way we express ourselves and the way we go about integrating our work, play, and passions. The first step in making this paradigm shift is to know exactly what your soft personal assets are—and to put them in the proper place on your balance sheet.

What are your soft assets? They are the innate qualities of the
heart you possess and probably lead with on the weekends! Soft assets are the best parts of the personal you, the one who dances on Saturday nights, jogs on Sunday mornings, and plays hopscotch with your kid in the driveway while waiting for the school bus. You’ve identified your hard assets; now let’s look at what makes up your soft assets—your passions, creativity, and values.

Take a moment to think about your passions. What would you be doing every day if money weren’t an issue? How would you spend your time and other personal resources if you had infinite freedom and no restraints? Some passions have long been known as hobbies or favorite activities, but they’re really more than that. Your passions are where your mind wanders when you’re in a meeting that’s gone on too long or you’re waiting to catch a plane or riding the subway to work. Whether it’s cooking, playing the bassoon, or doing tae kwon do, in the end the passions we pursue contain major ingredients of our practical genius.

What if you’ve ignored your passions and interests for so long that when asked you really can’t think of any? Don’t panic. Close your eyes for a moment and think about what they were when you were sixteen. Summon your sense memories to remind you of what those passions looked like, tasted like, and sounded like, and how they made you feel. Once you have a visual, hold on to it and consider it the foundation for the passion part of your genius development.

For many of us, our form of play is our greatest passion, so don’t ignore play when considering your passion. Kevin Carroll, the renowned leader of the play movement, believes we all can find our inner genius through play: “Once you find your source of play let it be your life’s work so much so that no one, not even you, will be able to tell the difference between work and play.”

Use the notion of play as a prompt to think about your passions:

If you had twenty-four hours left to live, how would you spend your play time? (NB: You are not allowed to say “with family”!)

If I were your fairy godmother and could wave a wand and transport you to your happiest, most joyful place, where would that be? And what would you be doing there?

We all have a “hard-on” for something. Come on, you know you do. What is it? Is it food, dance, travel, reading, adventure sports, fishing, golf, music, technology, fitness?

One last tip for identifying your passions: think of one word that captures the be-all and end-all for you. I call this your “ultimate word.” My ultimate word is “freedom,” and each of my passions—traveling, scuba diving, and writing—gives me a euphoric feeling of freedom. What is the ultimate word for you? What does it say about your passions?

When was the last time you really used your creativity? Do you even think of yourself as a creative person? Or are you a “card-carrying” creative person who uses her creative abilities daily? Think about it: when was the last time you painted, sang a song, wrote a poem, came up with a new idea, or built something? Creativity is all those things and more; it’s your ability to make new connections between existing ideas or concepts. What is most interesting is that it’s fueled by the process of either conscious or unconscious insight. Whether you use it rarely or every day, you need to take a moment and think about your capacity for creativity. And think hard about it, because today it matters perhaps more than any other quantifiable human asset.