Playing in Your Genius
All of the concepts I use in my Comma Club coaching consider the professional and personal spheres of life, and seek to create harmony between them.
One of my daily affirmations is “I do what I love and I love what I do.” I believe that, since we have to work, we should do our best to work at something we love. If we can unify the motivations in our personal and professional lives by doing what we love, we can create simplicity and harmony.
Today I want to talk about how finding your genius can help with this.
Over the years, working through the coaching process, I have discovered and polished my genius statement:
“My genius is instantly creating genuine relationships and playfully getting people excited about their life’s purpose and their opportunities, inspiring them to have the courage to believe in themselves and to create and build a meaningful and joyous life while playing in their own genius.”
So not only did I build my life around my genius, but I’m playing in my genius right now!
Your genius doesn’t necessary come easily, but it does come naturally. It fits in with how your mind works automatically, and it is in an area that you feel is intrinsically rewarding. For these reasons, it’s something you should build your life around.
To get this started, I recommend the Kolbe A™ Index as an assessment test as a tool to help you discover your conative abilities, the mode that you initiate tasks in. Simply put, I’ve seen it change many lives. Look it up online, or contact us at Baldwin or through the Comma Club to learn more. It’s affordable and it’s worth it!
Like most play, the opportunity to master challenges is much of what makes playing in your genius enjoyable. It’s also how it’s possible to “play” for a living–we’re talking about real challenges.
When we’re challenged in good proportion to our skill, our brains work extremely well, and we can even enter a state of flow, or “being in the zone.”
When we must pull from and apply our experiences and understanding as we simultaneously give our full sensory attention to the task at hand, our brains light up like a pinball machine. We lose our reflective self-consciousness (that “inner voice” or “inner critic”) and time passes differently.
When we look up, we’ve accomplished significant progress. What fantastic feats you can accomplish when the barriers to investing your full attention are removed! That is an experience of playing in your genius and achieving flow.
Having the experience of being truly engaged and fully absorbed in what you’re doing, and accomplishing higher orders of productivity and creativity, is why I recommend that everyone finds their genius and builds their life around it as much as possible.
We are so thoroughly conditioned to conserve energy that we can hold back all the time, and never fully engage in our lives. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that leads to its own kind of burnout and apathy. Don’t let that hold you back.
The cure for this is taught to Navy SEALs using the 40% rule: When you think you’re exhausted, or you’re going as hard and fast as you can, you’re only at 40%. You still have 60% of your potential to tap into. That’s how powerfully conditioned we are to conserve our energy and effort. Our inner voice secretly wants us to pace ourselves well below what’s necessary. Such an important thing to know!
Finding and developing your area of genius will help you find the most productive places you can engage yourself, and then get out of your own way so you can fire on all cylinders for a while and feel what it’s like to tap into the higher gears of your potential.
It’s similar to physical fitness in that, before you cross a certain threshold of intensity, you’re only aware of the results that come from low-intensity exercise. Your imagination has an artificial limit that restricts what you believe is possible.
I want everyone reading this to experience their “higher gears” more often. By playing in our genius, we come to feel our full power, our ability to make a difference in our world, and feeling that and knowing that is powerful learning for every area of your life.
Playing in your genius is like tapping into a new level of intensity of creativity, productivity, and passion in your life. Do what you can to find your genius, play in it, and build your life around it. Call me if you need help. I love to see that happen!
Cheers!
Dave