Are You a Genius and You Didn’t Know It?

When I first met Shankar, he was a successful senior engineering leader at a media company. He loved building up his teams and delighting stakeholders, and had accomplished some huge project deliveries including cloud transformations, managing dozens of website migrations to new systems, and leading technology strategy.

The interesting thing was, he had a hard time talking about his strengths and what actually made him unique compared to anyone else. That is, until he learned about the concept of genius zones.

What are Genius Zones?

The idea of a genius zone is that each person has a special combination of background, expertise, attributes, talents, and passions that differentiates them from most, if not all, other humans on the planet. For instance, in addition to your general engineering skills, you might be an expert in a niche area of engineering, good at writing, and skilled at diffusing tense situations. Combining those skills reveals one of your genius zones. There are many people who have each of those individual skills, but not many people have all of your skills combined (whatever your skills are). Your genius zone differentiates you from others and allows you to make a unique contribution at work, at home, and in the world.?

Let’s say you also speak Chinese, have experience creating products, and have a knack for bringing order to chaos. This combination of skills reveals a second genius zone. By combining all of your skills, attributes, and talents in different ways, you have many different genius zones.

When you choose to do work that allows you to fully apply one or more of your genius zones, you are able to do your absolute best work.

One of my favorite books on the subject of genius zones is The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. In the book, he actually describes four different zones we can find ourselves in:

1. The zone of incompetence: If you are doing work in this zone, you are engaging in something you are simply not good at. This is like me trying to create a clay sculpture. I have no experience with anything other than Play-Doh, and that's never pretty.
2. The zone of competence: You can get the job done, but not really any better than the next person.
3. The zone of excellence: In this zone, you are doing something you are very, very good at compared to most other people. This is what most people would call a strength for you.
4. The zone of genius: When you’re in your genius zone, you are in what author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow.” You’re taking advantage of your natural talents and doing what you earnestly enjoy. You have what could almost be called an “unfair advantage” over your competition.

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Alternatively, the author and speaker Laura Garnett defines it as a simple formula:

Your Innate Talent + Greatest Passion = Zone of Genius

However you choose to define it, discovering and identifying your genius zone will help you get clear on what work is best for you to engage in.

Even more important, this clarity will help you move beyond spending your time in the zone of competence and zone of excellence and into spending more time in your genius zones where you will do some of your best work and enjoy it!

Why Your Genius Zones Matter

I think of the Zone of Genius as a continuous spiral. You go higher and higher every day as you expand your capacity for more love, abundance, and success. It’s an upward journey with no upper limit. —Gay Hendricks in The Big Leap

All of us have genius zones whether we recognize them or not, and we are also constantly creating and expanding our genius zones as we learn and grow.?

Ideally we'll spend as much time in our genius zones as possible, but sadly, many of us rarely if ever create the opportunity to make that happen. We find ourselves getting stuck doing things we are good at (tasks in the zone of competence or even excellence) instead of engaging in our best work by utilizing our genius zones.

This can be an easy trap to fall into, as you likely have many skills and areas where you are competent or even great. These areas might be your zones of excellence. But your genius zone is next level, and allows you to utilize your very best abilities!

I noticed that when I had opportunities to teach and train others, I was not only good at it, but I loved it so much that I hardly noticed time passing. After realizing that, I combined that skill and interest with my wide engineering experiences, and doing coaching and training with engineers became a true genius zone for me!

Doing work within your genius zone makes it easy to focus. You will have to let go of some work and tasks that you aren't well suited for (and maybe some that you are well suited for), in order to focus on the tasks you are best suited for.?

Everything you have done and might do in the future can lead you to identify your genius zones and work within them as much as possible.

Challenges to Finding Your Genius Zones

Finding and living more in your genius zones isn't always an easy process. It's helpful to recognize the challenges to this process so you can diminish their power. There are three primary challenges to identifying and applying our genius zones, as defined by Laura Garnett:

1. You're not objective about yourself. It's impossible to fully separate your emotions and assumptions about your experiences from the pure facts. You can't be a "fly on the wall" or see an outside perspective of your skills and strengths, which makes it hard to understand your specific and unique approach to work and life.?
2. You've been conditioned by your environment. You only know what you know because of the experiences you've had and the influences you've been exposed to. Many of your views and opinions about what makes a great career path are likely influenced by your family, community, and society. This is why so many kids only think about a few career options, like firefighter, doctor, or astronaut. You may not even be aware, yet, of roles that exist that would allow you to fully apply your genius zones.
3. You want social validation. Sometimes people choose a career path, whether consciously or subconsciously, in order to please others, without any thought to their genius zones. Of course everyone wants to be liked and accepted by their family, friends, and others they interact with, but should that be the reason for making decisions about our lives and careers?

These roadblocks, while challenging, are not so powerful that you can't overcome them.

Stay tuned for the next newsletter where we dig into more about HOW to unlock your genius zones!

Take Intentional Action

Reflect on your experiences with flow.

Earlier in the article I challenged you to think about times when you've been in flow because activities that put you into a state of flow are likely part of your genius zone. If it’s difficult for you to come up with anything, start simpler. Make a list of the activities you enjoy and are good at in your work and other facets of life. Don’t filter anything yet. Set a timer and write for at least 5 to 10 minutes.

After your time is up, look at each activity on your list and consider how you feel when you are engaged in these activities. When do you feel most “alive”? When are you your best self? Have you noticed that while doing any of these activities, you tend to lose track of time because you are fully in the moment and having so much fun?

This is a start to discovering when you experience flow. But keep going!

Go another level deeper and consider what it is exactly that gets you into that state of flow. Is it the activity itself? Is it the environment? Is it the challenge you're facing? Something else? Look for patterns and clues. The more details you can identify and replicate, the more you can use that information to focus on these activities in the future. Consider designing some specific experiences to get you into flow in the future. Then try them out and see how it goes.

Accelerate Your Progress

This newsletter is an adapted excerpt from my new book, The Intentional Engineer. It was written just for intentional engineers like you. Go grab your own copy today at: https://amzn.to/3u6bJF2.?

By the way, the Audiobook recently became available, so go grab your copy on Audible or Apple Books!