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#42 The Genius Spiral

Gay Hendricks has a great little model to help us discover our genius.

Draw a square. Make four quadrants. In the lower right put “Incompetence.” In the lower left, “Competence.” Upper right, “Excellence.” And upper left, “GENIUS!”

The idea is very straight-forward: we’re going to live a much more powerful, fulfilled, happy life to the extent we spend as much time as possible in our genius zone.

Now, let’s do a quick little inventory.

What are you incompetent at? These are things that most others can do better than you can! (Mechanical stuff, doing stuff I'm not passionate about and cold calling would be some of mine.)

How about competence? These are things that most others can do as well as you.

What about excellence? What things do you persist in doing that you can do better than most people? (Building businesses would fall here for me.)

And, what about your genius? Some of Gay’s questions here: What is my unique ability? What do I love to do the most? What produces the highest ratio of abundance per time spent? What work do I do that doesn’t seem like work?!?

It’s incredibly important that we get incredibly clear on the answers to these questions!!!

Especially the genius questions.

My (strong) recommendation? Stop what you’re doing and pull out a piece of paper. Draw the quadrant. Label it. And just write 2 or 3 or 5 things in each little box. Start to see how much time you spend in each zone and feel into the power of what would happen if you stopped spending so much time in your less than genius zones and started living full-out in your genius.

Exciting. And, perhaps a little scary. (But just remember Fritz Perls’ wisdom that “Fear is simply excitement without the breath.” And remember to breathe. :))

Oh! Almost forgot. Gay’s recommendation on “Commitments”? (He’s really big on getting clear on what you’re committed to!)

• My commitment to living in genius inspires others to live in theirs.

• I commit to spending all my time in my zone of genius.

• I commit to spending the majority of my time in my genius zone.

Love that. :)

To the joy of committing to living our genius and inspiring others to live in theirs!

(And, for the those curious souls, my #1 genius? I love to study life and to share the essence of powerful lessons into fun, bite size bits of practical wisdom!)