My wife, Kathlyn, and I have enjoyed Bonnie Raitt’s company as a friend, and have celebrated her evolution as an artist, for close to twenty years. She is a great living example of how to find your ultimate success by taking the Big Leap. Although she lives securely now in her Zone of Genius, her path to get there was long and arduous. In the first part of her career, Bonnie earned an excellent reputation as a blues musician. Her blues albums were seldom best sellers, but they always did well enough to keep her devoted fans happy and the clubs full. Like many of her idols in the blues lineage, though, she paid her dues by years of struggle with addictions. Battling her demons consumed a great deal of her energy, and it wasn’t until she got sober that she made her Big Leap. Two of her best friends, Stevie Ray Vaughan and John Hiatt, inspired her by kicking their addictions and succeeding in Twelve-Step programs. Finally she made the commitment to get clean and sober, and that’s when the real magic began.
With the new energy and clarity she gained through sobriety, Bonnie took a look at her career and made a fateful decision. She decided to jump out of the trap of “Excellent Blues Musician.” She made a conscious choice to launch herself into the bigger world of mainstream rock music. She was hearing songs inside herself that didn’t fit into the traditional themes, rhythms, and keys of the blues. So, she said a loving good-bye to the friendly confines of the blues world and took the Big Leap into the unknown. She recorded an album of the new music and went on the road with a new band. In her meditations, she visualized herself onstage at the Grammy Awards, receiving the accolades of the music industry for the new music. She even visualized the specific dress she would wear when she received the award. Not long afterward, she was standing onstage receiving a Grammy for that new album, Nick of Time, which went on to sell millions of copies. Now, nine Grammys, sold-out stadiums, and millions of albums later, she is living testimony to the power of claiming your Zone of Genius.
It took a Big Leap on her part to go from clubs to stadiums, but she took that risk and has reaped incredible rewards. Beyond all the Grammy Awards and other material benefits, though, is an achievement that’s purely a gift to the soul: the deep satisfaction of living in her Zone of Genius. That’s what I want you to experience. You know deep inside you that you will never be fully satisfied until you have anchored yourself in your Zone of Genius. To do less would be to hold back, and long ago you made a handshake deal with the universe that you wouldn’t do that. The seductive comforts of success, though, can lull us into accepting the status quo. In that state of comfort, it’s easy to forget the deal you made with the universe to use yourself fully.
SOLVING ONE PROBLEM AND FREEING YOURSELF
By its very nature, the Upper Limit Problem is unsolvable in your ordinary state of consciousness. If you could solve it that way, you would have solved it long ago. Solving the Upper Limit Problem is possible only by a leap of consciousness. Once you learn this way to solve problems, you’ll have a tool you can apply wherever and whenever you want to increase your success.
Specifically, the Upper Limit Problem cannot be solved in the usual way we solve problems: by gathering information or replacing one set of information with another. The Upper Limit Problem must be dis-solved, not solved. You dissolve it by shining a laserlike beam of awareness on its underpinnings—the false foundations that hold the Upper Limit Problem in place. When you shine the light of awareness on the underpinnings, they disappear. Then you are free to soar, explore, and rest at home in the no-limits zone of your ultimate success.
Our activities in the world occur in four main zones:
The Zone of Incompetence
The Zone of Incompetence is made up of all the activities we’re not good at. Others can do them a lot better than we can. Surprisingly, many successful people persist in wasting time and energy doing things for which they have no talent. When you focus awareness on yourself by using the tools in this book, you may be surprised to find how much time you spend operating in this zone. When you free yourself from this zone, you will be rewarded with a remarkable new feeling of energy and zest for living.
The best way to handle most things in your Zone of Incompetence is to avoid doing them altogether. Delegate them to someone else, or find some other creative way to avoid doing them. I got a call one Sunday night from a friend of mine, Thomas, a business consultant with whom I play golf from time to time. He told me he’d spent a frustrating weekend installing a new thousand-dollar printer at his home. Most frustrating to him was the four hours he’d spent on the phone with the technical-support people at Hewlett-Packard. I happen to know that he is just about as unskilled as I am at mechanical things. I also know that he bills his consulting time at ten thousand dollars a day. His hourly rate for over-the-phone executive coaching is one thousand dollars an hour.
I asked him how many hours in total he’d spent wrestling with the new printer. “Thirteen,” he said, sounding a bit sheepish. “Hmmm,” I said, “you spent thirteen thousand dollars trying to install a one-thousand-dollar printer. Did you ever get it working?” “No,” he said, “I eventually called a college kid in the neighborhood. He came over and got it working in an hour.” “And you paid him how much?” I asked. Thomas said, “At first he didn’t want anything, but I made him take a hundred bucks.”
I forgot to mention that his frustrating Saturday had been capped off that evening by an argument with his wife. You can probably guess what the argument was about: all the hours he was spending on the printer installation instead of with her and the family. Add that cost to the thirteen thousand dollars, plus the hundred-dollar “service” tab, and you have an expensive excursion in the Zone of Incompetence.
One thing I’ve learned from a lifetime of observing: being smart doesn’t keep you from doing dumb things. My grandfather had a colorful phrase he used: “stuck on stupid.” It meant that you kept doing the same dumb things over and over without learning from them. I felt a bit like that when I first realized how much time and energy got consumed when I was doing things I was not good at. It’s worthwhile to do something you’re not good at if the intention is to enjoy or master it. Skiing was like that for me. I grew up in Florida and never saw a snowflake in person until I was twenty-three years old. My first outing on skis was probably laughable viewed from the outside, but from the inside it was memorably painful. I fell so many times that when I got home that night I felt like I’d been hit repeatedly by a bus. It was worth it, though, because I wanted to enjoy skiing someday.
For my friend Thomas, spending all weekend fretting over a printer did not come from an intention of someday mastering printer installation. In his words, it came from “trying to save a few bucks.”
The Zone of Competence
You’re competent at the activities in the Zone of Competence, but others can do them just as well. Successful people often discover that they expend far too much time and energy in this zone. Not long ago I worked with a woman in her mid-forties who contributes a classic example of the Competence Trap. An executive in a small firm, Joan was referred to me by her medical doctor, who felt that some of her health issues were due to what I sometimes call “diseases of unfulfillment.” When people are not expressing their full potential, they often get illnesses that have vague, hard-to-diagnose symptoms. Chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia are good examples of what I’m describing. I’ve seen both of those illnesses disappear when people began to break out of their sub-Genius zones and move toward fulfilling their true potential. In the course of several sessions, Joan moved from talking about chronic fatigue syndrome to telling me about a workplace frustration that had recycled for several years. Because she was good at organizing things, she got called on more and more to handle tasks outside her job description, from the company picnic to the travel schedules of the other executives. “One of the executive assistants could do those kinds of things,” she told me, “but I end up doing them because it’s quicker to do it myself than to delegate and follow up on them.” I
asked her, “If you could stop doing that sort of thing, what would it free up time for you to do?” She mentioned a few activities, but none of them produced any expressions of liveliness or excitement on her face. I asked her to go a little deeper: “If money or your job description were not an issue, what would you really like to be doing in the company?” Here we struck gold. “I wouldn’t be doing anything in the company,” she said. “I’d be working on an environmental project I’m obsessed with. I think it could turn into something big, but there’s a big gap between thinking that and making a living at it.” That admission turned the key. We made a plan that first called for her to eliminate the extra organizational tasks that kept her in her Zone of Competence. It took her a couple of weeks to extricate herself and delegate those tasks to others. Just taking that initial step cleared up most of her physical symptoms. She felt so much better that the second part of the plan took an unexpected turn in a new direction. She decided to cut back to half time at the company and devote her newfound energy to working on the environmental project. Time will tell if she can stake out a life in her Zone of Genius, but at least she is not carrying the burden of unfulfillment and its attendant symptoms.
The Zone of Excellence
In the Zone of Excellence are the activities you do extremely well. You make a good living in your Zone of Excellence. For successful people, this zone is a seductive and even dangerous trap. To remain in this zone is to hobble yourself from taking the leap into your Zone of Genius. The temptation is strong to remain in the Zone of Excellence; it’s where your own addiction to comfort wants you to stay. It’s also where your family, friends, and organization want you to stay. You’re reliable there, and you provide a steady supply of all the things that family, friends, and organizations thrive on. The problem is that a deep, sacred part of you will wither and die if you stay inside your Zone of Excellence. There is only one place where you will ultimately thrive and feel satisfied, and that’s…
The Zone of Genius
Liberating and expressing your natural genius is your ultimate path to success and life satisfaction. Your Zone of Genius is the set of activities you are uniquely suited to do. They draw upon your special gifts and strengths. Your Zone of Genius beckons you with increasingly strong calls as you go through your life. (The Call to Genius is the name I’ve given to these inner promptings.) By age forty, many of us have tuned out the Call to Genius and are getting loud, repeated alarms hidden in the form of depression, illness, injuries, and relationship conflict. These alarms are reminding us to spend more time feeding our natural genius and letting it do its magic in the world. In this book I will show you how to heed this call and move gently and gracefully into your Zone of Genius.
I use the phrase “gently and gracefully” for a particular reason. If we don’t heed the call and make a gentle, graceful move into our Zone of Genius, we often get painful life whacks that tell us with blatant clarity that we’re not paying attention to the Call.
I recall a coaching conversation with Bill, a brilliant forty-three-year-old entrepreneur, who had been turning a deaf ear to his Call to Genius for far too long. He came in for one session, in which he told me about the bind he was in. Bill wanted passionately to pursue a certain new project, but he said he couldn’t do it because of pressure from his company, his wife, and others. He said they could not afford to have him take the several months necessary to work on the new idea. As he described the new project, I could tell it was clearly in his Zone of Genius. I counseled Bill to do whatever it took to make it happen, even if he could spend only an hour a day laying the groundwork for it. At the end of the session he told me he was going to “try” to find that hour a day, but I could tell by the look on his face that it was unlikely to occur. He told me he would call me in a month to schedule a second appointment “when things slowed down a little.” It was our last conversation, because Bill died of a massive heart attack a few weeks later.
I have replayed that hour with him in my mind more times than I can count. Bill was seemingly in perfect health. His wife was a yoga teacher; they were both devoted to a healthy lifestyle. I’ve always wondered if there was a way in which I could have been more forceful with him in helping him make a life-changing, and possibly life-saving, commitment to his Zone of Genius. I’ll never know, but from that experience I made a commitment to myself to do everything I could to spend more time in my own Zone of Genius, and to make a passionate case to everyone I care about to do the same.
Given the right tools and a little wisdom, we can learn to heed our Call to Genius, sparing ourselves the unpleasant consequences of plugging our ears to keep from hearing it. The book shows you how to establish yourself in your Zone of Genius, beginning with a modest investment of ten minutes a day and culminating in spending upwards of 70 percent of your time expressing your true genius in the world. I hit the 70 percent mark in the mid-nineties, and rebirthed myself at midlife into a previously unimaginable degree of success in love, financial abundance, and creativity. That’s what I want for you. If that’s what you want for you, you will find precise tools here for identifying your natural genius and expressing it in the world.
TWO
Making the Leap
Dismantling the Foundation of the Problem
There is something important you should know about the Upper Limit Problem: when you attain higher levels of success, you often create personal dramas in your life that cloud your world with unhappiness and prevent you from enjoying your enhanced success. This is the Upper Limit Problem at work. In other words, the Upper Limit Problem crosses the boundaries of money, love, and creativity. If you make more money, your Upper Limit Problem may kick in and create a situation that causes unhappiness, ill health, or something else that blocks your enjoyment of your enhanced money supply. If you meet and marry the love partner of your dreams, your Upper Limit Problem may kick in and cause setbacks in your financial life. In short, you have a tendency to follow big leaps forward in your success with big mess-ups. These mess-ups rubber-band you back to where you were before, or sometimes some place worse. Fortunately, though, if you see what you’re doing in time, you can shift right out of the free fall and point yourself back up toward the sky.
See if any of these scenarios sound familiar:
You make a big financial surge forward, such as a big stock-market win or something else that causes a meaningful financial change. Almost before you’ve had a chance to celebrate, an argument or an illness or some other negative occurrence throws a wet blanket on the good feelings.
You’re feeling close to your love partner. Perhaps you’re sitting together quietly, sipping a glass of your favorite wine. Seemingly out of nowhere, an argument sparks into flame. The close feelings disappear; you’re embroiled in a conflict that stretches into hours or maybe even days.
You’re sitting alone in your office or your living room. You feel happy and at ease. Suddenly your mind swerves and plunges into a stream of negative thoughts. Seconds later you’re obsessing about the awful condition of the world or focusing on the dreadful color of your carpets.
Let me give you a more specific example. I assisted a powerful, wealthy businesswoman in making a breakthrough in the area of romantic relationships. In her mid-fifties when I worked with her, Lois told me in our first session that she could “do just about anything well except stay married.” Twice-divorced and now single for five years, she despaired of finding and keeping a good relationship. She even recited statistics: her odds of being captured by terrorists were better than her chances of finding love at her age. Lois was quite stubborn in clinging to her views, so it took us a few sessions to unwind the set of limiting beliefs she clung to around the availability of men. Finally she realized that it didn’t matter if men were scarce: all she needed was one. In a pivotal session, she made a firm, heartfelt commitment to attracting and keeping a healthy, loving relationship with a man.
At the beginning of the following week she called to cancel her
next session. She said she had met a wonderful man two days after our last session and had spent the most romantic weekend of her life with him. She thanked me for helping her make this shift and said she didn’t need any more help. I gently suggested that this was just the time she should come in. I explained that while breakthroughs are important and thrilling, it’s the subsequent stabilization and integration of the breakthrough into daily life that really allow the changes to be permanent. She listened politely, said, “Thank you,” and hung up without making another appointment.
About six months later I got an urgent message to call her. When I reached her, I could hardly understand her because she was talking so fast. I invited her to slow her breathing down, which helped her get her anxiety dialed down to a level at which she could communicate clearly. She told me that her new husband, the man she’d spent the glorious weekend with the last time I’d spoken to her, had counseled her on an investment that had lost over two hundred thousand dollars virtually overnight. He’d had some “inside information” on a stock that was supposed to go up and instead went down. The “sure thing” that was going to double her money overnight instead wiped it out completely.
“What should I do?” she asked. “Should I throw him out or leave or—”
“Hold on,” I said. “Has he ever done anything like this before?”
“No,” she said.
“And what’s his behavior been like over the past few months?”
“Wonderful,” she said. “I’ve never been happier in my life, until this happened.”
“And what does he do for work?”
“He’s a software designer. He consults for different high-tech companies.”
“So, does he make a good living doing that?”
The Big Leap Page 3
