Hidden Brilliance

by Katie Rasoul

  Copyright © 2018 by KATIE RASOUL.

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Publishing Services provided by Paper Raven Books

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  To my husband Jason, who makes everything more fun and more possible.

  To Nolan, who was the turning point for realizing just how grand life could be.

  To baby, who reminds me daily to honor the present.

  Part I: The Story

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: The Weight

  Chapter 2: The High-Achieving Introvert

  Chapter 3: Growing Up

  Chapter 4: The “Right” Career

  Chapter 5: The Board Room (Feeling Small)

  Chapter 6: The Business

  Chapter 7: Meet Bridget

  Chapter 8: The Board of Directors

  Chapter 9: The Lemon Pancake Monologue

  Chapter 10: The Lesson

  Part II: The Work

  Introduction

  Activity 1: Values and Value

  Activity 2: Definition of Success

  Activity 3: What to Do and What to Give Up

  Activity 4: Levels of Listening

  Activity 5: Feeling “Enough”

  Activity 6: Fear of Future

  Activity 7: Showing Up When Your Assignments Come

  Activity 8: Allowing Yourself Permission

  Activity 9: Experiments in Bold Moves

  Activity 10: Be Still and Alone

  Activity 11: Staying Friends with Your Inner Child

  Activity 12: The Action Plan

  The Ending (or, Commencement)

  References & Recommended Reading

  Acknowledgements

  

  Part I: The Story

  Introduction

  It took me 34 years to realize that some of the rules I lived my life by were not inherent to everyone. You know when you have only ever known one way, and so it didn’t ever even occur to you that there might be others? That was what I realized this year.

  It is a bit jarring, in fact, regardless of what the old or new truth is, to all of a sudden become aware of an entirely new path. You can’t help but ask yourself, “Was that always here? Why didn’t I notice it before?” It is also totally normal to ask yourself, “What is true? Is this old truth that I’ve held for decades right, or has my whole life been a lie?”

  Okay, so it doesn’t have to be so binary, but hell, sometimes it feels like it is.

  Hidden brilliance is not about intellect or hard work that can’t be seen. It is about a life beyond valuing achievement. It is the idea that once you move beyond your own limiting beliefs, there is a whole other level of awesome life that is available to you once you simply unlock the door and are brave enough to cross the threshold.

  In this book, I will share with you my own personal journey through climbing the ladder, exiting corporate America, and staring face-to-face with the personal turning point to have a whole new understanding of achievement in life. The purpose of this book is for you to experience a glimpse into the unknown through the thoughts and feelings of a high-achieving introvert waking up in the world. My hope is that you will see yourself in this story and use the journey as a catalyst for your own awakening towards an incredible, brilliant life.

  The second half of the book will take you through some of the same activities that were critical in my voyage to clarity and are here to serve you as well. See yourself in the story, and recreate the personal growth for yourself.

  Go forward now. Here is the real me, and I can’t wait to meet the real you.

  Chapter 1: The Weight

  “Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds

  like excess.” – Oscar Wilde

  In sports, it is common practice to add extra resistance when you train so that when it comes time for the real competition, your body feels lighter and easier to move than when you trained, preparing you to give your best performance when it matters most. In the same way that weightlifters add extra pounds to their barbells and race car drivers add extra drag to their cars, I have been carrying a weight for decades, training for this moment. All of my life, I have been preparing for something really big.

  It wasn’t until the weight became unbearable that I even realized it was there. The weight I felt was a heavy load made of a sense of responsibility, a need for achievement, and a tendency to go “all in” on life. In a matter of a handful of moments, at the age of 34, I realized that I had been carrying around something very heavy with me practically my entire life.

  I have always been intrinsically motivated, constantly driven to achieve big things by plans of my own creation. I chose my path based on how I would view it for myself or how it made me feel. At first glance, this approach to life feels very self-aware or forward thinking. I assure you, though, that it was not, because it was clouded by rules and filters that I had imposed on myself and that simply didn’t serve me. Perhaps this approach did serve me at one time. I can’t begin to fathom what my life would be like had I not been the conscientious, Type A rule follower I was when I was growing up. Would life have turned out the same? Or would countless tiny decisions of lesser quality have added up to me being an unmotivated degenerate that never amounted to much? If this type of drive ever did serve me well, at some point, it stopped.

  After years working for large companies and corporate environments, I started my own company. I loved the work that I was doing in talent development and organizational culture, and I wanted to add in a professional coaching model to my work. I now serve as a professional leadership coach, and strategic advisor for leadership development, company culture, and the employee experience. I have the opportunity to help high-potential leaders realize even bigger and more fulfilling lives through coaching, and it is my purpose in this world.

  In the first year of business, this personal drive of mine, which has always gotten me where I needed to go, finally came to a tipping point. I was now my own boss, the only person laying out the goals and expectations, and the weight started to feel unbearable.

  It was the same weight that I had always felt and managed to tolerate or ignore, but now it was getting heavier. I was feeling as if my whole body was being compressed, and I was fighting to keep my space. One day, like a lightning bolt, it struck me. I felt compelled to put what I was feeling into words. Then this sentence came to me:

  I am being crushed by the rising expectations for greatness because I don’t have anyone holding me back anymore.

  There it was, written on a sticky note. After it came out of my pen, I just stared at it for a while. Well, shit. What did that mean, exactly? How did I even get to this point? And how do I move forward from here?

  

  I was being crushed by the rising expectations for greatness. This phrase has double meaning for me. My own expectations of myself for greatness were rising because no one was there to tell me when I had done “good enough” so that I knew when to stop. At the same time, I had always needed and waited for other people’s approval of “good enough,” not just so I knew when to stop, but also because it let me off the hook for doing anything truly scary and great. I think the idea of doing something truly huge
scared the shit out of me. So, now, I was being crushed by the fact that I was the only thing holding me back from being great. I no longer got to silently blame anyone else, or the system, for not allowing me to reach true greatness. The blame could only fall on me now.

  Let me be clear: when I say “good enough,” I really mean absolute excellence. This is the classic, skewed scale that many high-achievers use for themselves. I don’t have to win, be first, be the best, or have the sole recognition. I have never been competitive or really cared about winning. What I care a ridiculous amount about is being truly excellent in everything that I do. So, when something is “good enough” for someone else, it means that it was the best meeting anyone has planned to date, or the most thorough, creative, and strategic plan that has ever been brought before the boss.

  And this is where the weight gets heavier. As stakes got higher, roles at work got bigger, the importance of the outcomes and the pressure I put on myself got heavier and heavier. As an adult, because I couldn’t remember a time without the weight, I didn’t even notice it was there. I thought it was perfectly normal to over-prepare for every meeting or presentation, to feel stressed to strive for excellence in everything that I tried, and to be unable to honestly answer the questions “How are you?” or “Are you okay?” I either lied and said I was great, or I burst into tears without explanation. That was WAY too complex of a question for me to actually answer honestly.

  When you take this weight and need for success and put it into life experiences that you simply can’t control, things get stressful. Pregnancy, and subsequently parenting, were two of those situations for me. Both of these scenarios have been a wonderful experiment to teach me to chill the hell out, and that sometimes “done is better than perfect.” Even though OF COURSE you know the best way to load the dishwasher, when you are ten weeks pregnant and just trying to survive the day without puking or falling asleep in a meeting, you have to come to terms with the fact that your amazing husband can load the dishwasher however he wants if it means you don’t have to do it. As a parent, I had to realize I was much less annoyed playing with my toddler when I let go of how I thought you were “supposed” to play with a certain game, and just let him teach me.

  I had carried this weight, this need for excellence and success, since I was old enough to care about anything. There is a principle I learned in coaching that says “How you do anything is how you do everything.” The first time I heard that, it did not resonate with me. And, as I learned about the weight that I carry, that my need to do literally everything with excellence and to the best of my ability, it suddenly clicked. I do nearly everything in the world with the same drive for excellence. I find this to be different (albeit similar) to perfectionism, because I can’t even define perfect. Excellence creates this upward opportunity to always get better, where perfectionism to me denotes more of an exact, perfect way.

  The journey to free myself from this weight has taken me down many winding paths. Many of the treks I took are summarized in the exercises in Part 2. But before that, I had to learn more about myself. It turns out I had a lot to learn.

  Chapter 2: The High-Achieving Introvert

  “Achievement is not about what you’ve done, but what you’ve gained from your experience.”

  – Lynn Hill

  Do all high-achieving introverts fight this internal battle with the heavy weight they place on themselves? Perhaps not all, but inevitably there is someone out there realizing for the first time that the weight they feel, possibly also self-induced, is there and it is heavy. For many of us introverts, there is a rich inner monologue that constantly strategizes and incessantly scans the environment to observe and take in information. When we pair that with intrinsic motivation, it can be a powerful base for intentional action.

  Most people do not think of high-achievers as introverts or stereotypical introverts as high-achievers. We have a misunderstanding of what it is like to be a high-achiever or to be an introvert. I write this book with the understanding that high-achievers are self-motivated individuals with a certain mindset that drives their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to certain outcomes of achievement. When the outside world sees “high-achiever,” it is usually attached to someone who has earned a lot of awards or has accomplished a lot at a faster rate than others. Outwardly, we appear to be the people who are good at everything we do, and everything we touch seems to turn to gold. When I set my daily Google Alert update on the phrase “high-achiever,” most of the articles featured young people who accomplished a lot very early in life, like 4.0 GPAs, perfect SAT scores, and athletic superiority. Only a handful of articles addressed the self-inflicted pressure high-achievers feel or the weight they feel thinking they are never doing enough. If they did, they appeared in the form of grim stories about high-achieving high school students who simply couldn’t handle the pressure and turned to suicide.

  High-achiever has been a buzzword for a while and seems fairly self-explanatory. Introvert, on the other hand, is more evasive, and the world seems to be in the beginning phases of truly comprehending what it means to be an introvert. Thanks to the work of Susan Cain’s book, Quiet, online communities like Quiet Revolution, and Jenn Granneman’s Introvert, Dear, the world has a better understanding of what introversion really is. Those of us who are introverts finally are starting to feel understood.

  People tend to mistakenly categorize introverts as just being shy loners who don’t like to talk to people. While that can be true, that is often not the case. I won’t repeat the great work of Susan Cain and Jenn Granneman here, but the basics of introversion boil down to how people respond to stimulation and how we receive or expend energy. For our purposes here, we will think more about introverts and extroverts by how they gain or give energy. Extroverts tend to gain energy by being around other people and might dislike too much time in solitude. Conversely, introverts tend to gain energy by having quiet time alone and might feel drained after a lot of group time or a big party.

  In businesses or other organizations, there is often a premium placed on leaders who show courage, share ideas in meetings, and perhaps showcase great work. And oftentimes those leaders are successful. However, many introverted leaders display a quiet strength that can be overlooked when the loudest voices are the ones most heard. Introverts are often misunderstood, especially high-achieving introverts who are usually successful without even realizing their full potential.

  High-achievers who don’t identify as introverts may find that they are more extrinsically motivated than their introverted counterparts. Extroverted high-achievers might thrive on competition and find it easy to speak up in meetings, use their voices, and articulate their big ideas to others. They may process ideas by talking out loud and working in groups, and may feel energized by big visions. High-achieving introverts still have big visions and great ideas but are more inclined to process them internally and tend to speak up only when there is something important to say. We may even feel overwhelmed by our own big ideas, because we are capable of receiving so much information through deep observation that it feels like drinking out of a fire hose.

  Often when I read articles or books about introverts, particularly in the “career” chapters, I find myself saying “YES!” to the introversion tendencies but then feel a disconnect when suggestions about how to apply my new understanding as an introvert to daily life falls flat. On any given day, you can read articles about “handling collaboration at work,” “surviving a job interview,” or the misery of “open concept offices.” The topics are never aiming high enough to reflect my own big dreams at work. I keep searching for literature that acknowledges my unique tendencies as an introvert and address high-achieving topics like, “leading the C-suite,” or “tips for introvert leaders preparing for keynote speaking.” They don’t really exist.

  If you have ever taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) personality assessment, you may have found a personality classification that suits you. I am considere
d an INFJ (Introversion | Intuition | Feeling | Judging) which is the rarest of all the classifications at only about 1.5% of all MBTI participants. I would vouch that we are a complex bunch: organized, decisive, committed, creative, and empathetic. Sharing can sometimes be challenging for introverts, particularly in leadership roles. For some, small talk may be painful. For others, sharing personal details with people who aren’t in your inner circle feels wrong.

  As an introverted leader myself, I can share a glimpse into my thoughts, and perhaps this may be helpful in understanding the “why” behind some observable behaviors:

  Talking (or not): I am an observer, a listener, and a thinker. It serves me and my team well in many ways. I prefer to talk when I have something impactful to share but don’t prefer to speak as a way of processing my thoughts.

  Quality over quantity: In relationships, I prefer to have a few close people in my inner circle, rather than 30 best friends. The idea of sales “funnels,” or finding more potential buyers to put in your business pipeline, annoys me because I prefer fewer, stronger relationships.

  Leading: I value one-on-one time with my team members and understand how to best tailor to each person’s needs. I really listen and love complex problem-solving. Also, I see my team is my inner circle, so they get to know a lot more about me.

  Thinking: I am carefully calculated, hold high standards, and have meticulously thought about the potential outcomes of all options. It’s like playing chess when most of the world is playing checkers.

  Meetings: I love an agenda and information sent in advance of the meeting so I can take time to well prepare my thoughts. Being asked on the fly feels like I do not have sufficient time to reflect on my answers.