Have you ever felt like life was a roller-coaster? You have ups where life is going great. You’re on top of the world. Everything is going your way. You’re performing at peak at work, home, everywhere. Things couldn’t be better. It could be something simple like a job well done at work. Or it could be something huge like making a big sale.
And then, the next thing you know, you are arguing with your spouse or children. Or you’ve got a cold or feel sick, or some other way the Universe is letting you know what “reality” is. Like someone or something is telling you, “don’t go feeling too comfortable up there at the top, because that ain’t going to last for long, you know.”
Do you know that feeling? Up one minute, then down the next? Some say life is 50/50. 50 percent great and 50 percent terrible. Life just naturally has those ups and downs.
Well, Gay Hendricks says phooey to that. Life doesn’t have to be 50/50 or any other percentage. It can be 100% happy and great. Hendricks says we totally set ourselves up for failure (or pain, or sickness, or unhappiness) because we can’t handle the joy. The someone or something telling us to not get too comfortable during our highs is our own selves!
Overall, this is a pleasant book with some great, overarching strategic ideas and principles, and a few practical tactics as well.
The first thing this book could use is a Glossary. Hendricks starts using quite a few terms and phrases without really defining them first. So here’s a glossary that I would have found helpful.
Glossary:
- The Big Leap: jumping out of your normal rollercoaster life into one of continual happiness
- Upper Limit Problem: reasons why you keep coming out of your Zone of Genius. When you attain higher levels of success, you often unconsciously create barriers for you enjoying that success. You follow big leaps with big mess ups.
- Zone of Genius: A state of living where you enjoy the ultimate path to success in love, money and creativity
- Zone of Excellence: A state of living where you do really well at everything, everyone else enjoys you in this state, but you still feel something is missing.
- Zone of Competence: A state of living where you do OK. Others can do what you do better. Being stuck here leads to chronic illness and fatigue, and a feeling of an unfulfilled life.
- Zone of Incompetence: A state of living where you do things that you’re no good at. The lowest point in your rollercoaster life.
The thoughts in this book fit really well into the Life Coach Model that my wife, Jessica, uses in her life coaching: CTFAR. Basically, the model states that all of our Results come from our Actions which are driven by our Feelings which are created by our Thoughts as stimulated by our Circumstances. Our circumstances are neutral (neither good or bad). Our thoughts, which we control, determine the positivity or negativity of the circumstance and generate the feeling we have. And those feelings are the fuel that drives our actions. Our results from our actions can sometimes be seen immediately, and sometimes it takes time to measure accurate results.
The Big Leap is good at pointing out the different ways we use our thoughts to limit our success. While the Life Coach Model states that life is 50% good and 50% bad (the roller coaster of life), Hendricks says this is only because we make it so. We could have a 100% good life if we would just let ourselves.
Two things I will focus on here are what Hendricks calls the 4 Hidden Barriers to living in your Zone of Genius, and the 4 questions to help you find your Zone of Genius.
4 Hidden Barriers
Hendricks writes that there are at least four barriers that keep us from reaching our full potential. These thoughts help us create that Upper Limit Problem he talks about.
Feeling Fundamentally Flawed
Limit: Causes cognitive dissonance as you try to hold two opposing thoughts as true: you have worth vs. you are worthless.
Breakthrough: These are just thoughts. You can choose your thoughts. Choose to think you have infinite potential!
Disloyalty and abandonment
Limit: Your success means being disloyal to your past and/or abandoning others.
Breakthrough: Have the hard conversations, and be loyal to yourself.
Believing More Success = More Burden
Limit: Success just means more burden for me, or that I’ll be more of a burden to others.
Breakthrough: You can’t control how others think about you. You are not guilty if others think you are a burden. And success = options!
The Crime of Outshining
Limit: Your success is taking success from someone who needs it more.
Breakthrough: Everyone creates their own success. You can’t steal anyone’s success. Success belongs to the beholder.
Genius Questions
It’s not until the fourth chapter that we get to learn what Hendricks calls the Zone of Genius. It’s a great build up, I suppose, and the name is pretty self explanatory. The following questions, Hendricks has discovered, can help you discover what your Zone of Genius will be like, and help you work towards getting there. The questions are not asked and answered as you would a quiz in history class; they are prompts to help you explore your genius with wonder.
- What do I most love to do?
- What work do I do that doesn’t seem like work?
- In my work, what produces the highest ratio of abundance and satisfaction to amount of time spent.
- What is my unique ability?
I usually don’t like that last question. I am insecure about my uniqueness in the world. I have had too many times where I think I have a unique idea, but when research it, there are many, many people who have already documented the completion of the idea, and have done a much better job at it than I could have even dreamed of. But that’s not what Hendricks is talking about here. He doesn’t mean, what are you the best at in the world, or you are the only one in the world that can do ____? He means, among your abilities, skills, interests and desires, which is uniquely special to you? What seems to be a special skill or a natural gift for you (regardless if no one else or everyone else in the world can do it)?
Hendricks offers that your unique skill is often buried deep within other skills, and like a matryoshka doll, you need to dig deep in order to discover your true unique abilities. To do this, he offers a series of questions:
- I’m at my best when I’m ________________________________.
- When I’m at my best, the exact thing I’m doing is ____________________________.
- When doing that, the thing I love most about it is ____________________________.
You recognize your unique ability is close when you feel an inner glow of wonder and excitement.
Gay Hendricks
I have yet to pull myself apart to discover my unique ability, although I have wondered about it for many a year. There are so many things that I like to do that don’t seem like work, but that’s about as far as I get with probing myself for genius. Perhaps I fear I’ll be too successful at it and be disloyal to my fellow beings stuck outside their Zones of Genius.
