Becoming More Fully Oneself
What happens when you become a fuller expression of yourself? Explore ideas around finding and expressing your own unique individual genius.
A Direction of Travel is more than a vision.
It is a practical and inspiring construct that seeks to answer a complex question:
What is meaningful and purposeful to me now and in the years to come?
It becomes a guide for decision-making, a source of motivation and a call to action.
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Very few people are ever called a genius.
Einstein, Mozart and perhaps one or two others on whom society has agreed to bestow the title. Most are dead. Most are men. It is an oddly exclusive club.
The moment we decide that genius belongs only to the exceptional few, we quietly decide something else. That the rest of us are here to be merely competent, to do our jobs, to play safe.
This is a costly and limiting idea.
The Genius Propositions
Revised and edited fromEnabling Genius
In The Meaning of Genius, I suggested a different understanding of the word genius. Not exceptional intelligence or capability possessed by a fortunate few, but the embodiment of human potential. If we begin there, a number of propositions follow.
Mindset is often treated as something fixed: something we have, rather than something we can develop. But our attitudes, beliefs and habits of mind shape what we see, what we pay attention to and how we respond.
The question isn't whether we have a mindset. It's whether the mindset we have is serving us.
“Imagine a teacher, she’s looking out a room full of young children, her charges. They are of all sorts of sizes, all colours and genders, with all sorts of talents and abilities. Imagine she asks herself this question: ‘I wonder what the unique individual genius of each and every one of these children is’”.
I said these words at a conference. The room went silent, thoughtful. It is quite literally a transformative question.
It’s a commonplace that we humans ‘have potential’. It’s uncommon for that potential to be realised in an intentional, meaningful, glorious way.
Genius Thinking
We often try to make thinking happen: we search for the answer, solve the problem, or force a conclusion. But what if thinking has its own internal logic? When we allow thinking to unfold, notice without immediately judging, widen and focus our attention, and look at a situation from different perspectives, we create the conditions for insight.
The Pillars of Genius
In examining how people who have demonstrated ‘greatness’ in their lives learned to excel, four fundamental ideas showed up with clarity. These are the Pillars of Genius. There is more to excellence than four simple ideas, however these are foundational. Without any one of them genius will simply not emerge.