Chapter 1
You Are a natural genius
Part 2.
The Ease of Genius
There’s a sense of grace and speed about genius activities. Visualize a skier going down a beautiful, snowy slope. The skier is exerting himself, breathing hard, but is by no means laboring or struggling. He has gravity on his side. He has momentum. And before he knows it, he’s at the bottom of the run.
In this same way, you can complete tasks at a rate you may not have thought possible. You can break the rules of how to do what you’re doing, always on the side of ease, expansion and excellence. Other people can’t understand how you do what you do, and sometimes you can’t either. You’re simply operating within your genius.
So if you are not enjoying your business or job every day, this should be telling you something. It may mean you are working way under your potential—that you haven’t even touched your natural genius yet. Unfortunately, this is the status quo of today’s workforce in general. For the most part, we are working hard to do the right thing, but we don’t even want to know what we are best in or how we can contribute most!
But if genius moments are so natural, easy, elegant and enriching, why aren’t more people aware of their genius? The trouble is, most of us were never taught what genius really meant. Even worse, people have generally been steered away from their genius in one manner or another. We like the way the brilliant inventor and futurist Buckminster Fuller puts it:
All children are born geniuses; 9,999 out of 10,000 are swiftly, inadvertently de-genius-ized by grownups.
Genius is Not Hard Work
We can speak of this from personal experience. If you stop and think about it, you may very well be able to do so as well. Here’s Otto’s story in a nutshell:
“In 1977, I was teaching an introductory chemistry class to 14-year-olds in Munich, Germany. The content was new to the students and required a different way of thinking. I did my best to help the students follow. I noticed one girl in the last row by the window reading a book under her desk. To show her she’d better pay attention, I put a challenging question to the class.
She raised her hand, responded correctly and immediately returned to her reading. I asked a couple more questions. Same story: she answered and turned right back to her reading. After class, I asked her what the book was.
She was shy at first because I had caught her. But when she saw I wasn’t angry, she brightened up. It was a book by the spiritualist writer Carlos Castaneda, and she gave me a spontaneous lecture on why I should read it right away. I was in shock. She had offended my belief that learning had to be hard. She had answered tough questions without even making an effort. And I had stumbled over my own genius, which is identifying the exceptional talents of others—just four weeks into my teaching career. How long did it take me to act on this? Oh, only 18 years!
You see, I had a mortgage to pay and a wife to please. And above all, I had resistance to my own core talents. No one had ever taught me to go that deep. Things always take longer when we do them alone.
But I can tell you that in the next 17 years of teaching, I saw the same story repeated over and over again. There was something that stood out for every student—a high performer bored to tears, or acting like a clown, or developing Attention Deficit Disorder just to distract themselves. Or a low performer hiding and embarrassed about not fitting in. Each had an area of genius, but typically it was not a subject in school. School was way too limited.”
The Difference Between You and The Well-Known Geniuses
The only difference between you and the people we typically come to think of as geniuses is that they were more driven to pursue it; or they might have had more support, or they might have been just at the right spot at the right time with their unique abilities so they couldn’t help but realize them. For those well-known geniuses, expressing their genius was not a luxury. They had an intense need to satisfy this specific core set of capabilities. What about you?
Here is where you can start. Ask yourself:
· What is my unique set of genius abilities?
· Which environment brings them out?
· How and where can I intentionally leverage them?
If you don’t know the answers to these questions, your genius is still dormant.
But why would you even want to pursue your genius? Isn’t it easier to simply try to fit in and be happy within normal standards? The answer is “no.” Geniuses who don’t live it often become frustrated on one level or another. They blame their job, their parents or other circumstances for their frustration. Unless they can nourish their core talents, they will never be satisfied. Otto is a perfect example:
“Until I gave up traditional teaching for Genius Coaching, I was never really at ease. I heard that little voice constantly, “There must be something more than this.” I was full of complaints about the school, the system and the world at large. But once I came to understand my genius, my resentment of school and society evaporated.
“I started working as an educational consultant with the natural genius of smart children. Parents came with intelligent kids who couldn’t function in school. The assumption was these children were slow learners, when in fact they were too fast. They first needed to learn how to slow down before they could excel at school.
School could only provide about 10% of the stimulation these kids needed. The rest had to be addressed outside of school. So it was natural for these children not to engage fully in school activities, which they experienced as boring in the first place. They didn’t need ‘learning-aids,’ they needed to be helped to understand their own exceptional talents and then figure out a strategy, with their parents, as to how to exercise these talents.
“I worked with children of all ages, typically from 6 to 22. It was amazing to see these children turn their lives around. But an even more remarkable phenomenon emerged from this transformation. Their parents started coming to me for help too. They felt they also had exceptional talents that they never learned how to use. This was when my understanding of genius began to be clarified.
“It’s not just the kids who do brilliantly in school. And it’s not just those who do horribly. Genius is in every single person. This realization was breathtaking for me.”
Discover Your Unique Set of Genius Abilities
Genius is the expression of our unique set of exceptional abilities. The trouble is, we don’t always take the time or have the encouragement to find out what those genius abilities really are. Often, we are drawn to a particular area of work that somehow helps us bring out our genius, but unless we intentionally dial in, we remain on the periphery of our genius and never hit the bull’s-eye.
If you are one of the many who doesn’t really know your unique set of exceptional abilities, review the following list of 5 clues for natural genius. Think about what you do that fits some or all of these criteria, and you can start glimpsing what your genius might be.
5 Clues for Natural Genius
1. You do it easily
2. You feel a deep satisfaction
3. You are recognized with a natural authority
4. You dismiss acknowledgement easily because you seem to do it too effortlessly
5. You don’t understand when others have a much harder time doing the same thing
Go through all areas of your life and examine them for clues of your genius. Ask yourself: Where did the 5 clues for my natural genius come out
· When I was a small child?
· When I was at school?
· With which particular group of people?
· Under which circumstances?
· When I am doing business?
· When I am with my family and friends?
In Otto’s case, teaching allowed him to be in the neighborhood of his natural genius without actually pursuing it. To be able to go all the way with his genius, he had to risk stepping out of the school system to start his own consulting practice. Genius doesn’t fit into all the neat little categories of professions that already exist any more than it fits into the subjects taught in school. Genius is so personal that it cannot be mass-produced or satisfied in a standardized way. Genius has to make its own place in the world. That alone is enough to stop most of us in our tracks, but we still hear that inner voice insisting: “There must be something more than this.”
Here’s an example of when your inner voice is trying to be heard. Marcia* came to us thinking she needed “Frustration Management” coaching. Although she was a highly successful vice president of operations for a healthcare marketing company, Marcia was tired of the day-to-day grind of putting out fires and of giving so much to an organization she really didn’t believe in. Even though many people work for companies they don’t truly believe in, it bothered Marcia a lot, and that caught our attention.
We discovered that Marcia is a certified herbalist and a master in the healing art of Reiki. Ironically, she had always considered these talents as side interests. Without even knowing it, she had built a career in the healthcare industry bringing her close to what her genius really is—helping people reveal their self-healing powers. Now she is developing a new business based on her passion, and although it is challenging and even scary at times, she is operating according to her true genius. She is skiing downhill.
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Ch. 1 Part 1 | Ch. 1 Part 2 | Ch. 1 Part 3