Have you heard of the concept of your “Zone of Genius”?
The term was coined in one of my favorite coaching books, The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks.
Hendricks describes your Zone of Genius as the sweet spot where each of us operates at our best and enjoys our work the most. He argues that if you can find your Zone of Genius and structure your days so you work inside of it the majority of the time, you will create a career and life of flow, fulfillment and peak experiences.
I’ve written before about the trap of trying to find your purpose, how likely you are to waste your time and energy obsessively hunting for the perfect way to work so that everything feels amazing and nothing is a challenge. Yet I love to help people identify their Zone of Genius—the ways in which they work that come naturally to them, that feel great and allow them to shine as service providers and leaders in their business.
The longer I’ve coached people on stepping inside their Zone of Genius, the more I’ve come to realize that it’s not about one perfect activity or series of events.
Rather, it’s about creating a matrix of activities and experiences that require your gifts, stretch your skillset, and allow you to move toward targets or goals that are meaningful to you. That’s how you create a work-life that feels truly good and fulfilling, as opposed to constantly spending your time on the kind of task you’re capable of accomplishing but don’t actually enjoy.
One of the simplest ways to discover your Zone of Genius is to distinguish it from something Hendricks calls your Zone of Excellence.
Let me break these down.
Your Zone of Excellence is the type of work and ways of working that you have mastered through diligence, training, and practice.
You are excellent at creating and working in this way—hence the name—but it doesn’t feel truly effortless to you. You’ve earned these skills and must activate your willpower to start and stay engaged in them. Ultimately, because willpower is a limited resource, you lose steam and can only get back to working in this way through self-discipline and other tricks to “force” yourself to stick with it.
Your Zone of Genius, in contrast, is the ways of working and type of work that feel genuinely, or nearly, effortless for you.
These tasks tap into your innate skills and abilities and actually replenish your energy and inspiration when you do them. Yes, you will get tired and need to stop at some point because all mental effort requires burning the limited physiological resources of your brain cells. You also find that time passes unnoticed, and you could keep going or return to work happily.
I also find that when I’m working in my Zone of Genius, I experience a level of satisfaction that I rarely experience otherwise. It goes deeper than feeling pleased to have checked an item off my to-do list; it’s the pleasure of showing up and sharing those gifts and talents that I am uniquely (though perhaps not exclusively) blessed with.
Simply put, when you make the switch from the Zone of Excellence to the Zone of Genius, you move away from exhaustion and into a flow.
So how can you incorporate more of this genius state into your daily work life?
Basically, it comes down to how you approach the tasks on your plate, as well as being judicious about which tasks you take on in the first place.
If you know that you have a really hard time doing tedious work, like line edits, or in my case, spreadsheet management, then maybe you don’t take on the kind of jobs that require that unless absolutely necessary. For example, I would never want to be an accountant because it would scramble my brain to work at that level of detail with numbers regularly.
What if you have to do a task that’s outside your Zone of Genius? For example, I do have to maintain my accounting records and bookkeeping monthly. I could hire someone to do this for me, which is a quick way to outsource the stuff that makes my brain hurt, but for me, it’s important that I understand the flow of money and finances moving in and out of my business and household. So I approach this task by not taking it off my plate completely, but I use tools that feel intuitive and make sense for managing my numbers and only review them periodically. I know my limits, and I’m not afraid to tap out and ask for help when I need it.
I’m also comfortable using my Excel spreadsheets and highly personalized tracking system to stay on top of my numbers because I will never outsource this particular job I have to do as part of our household manager. If my business was to expand its size, where I would be managing a significant flow of data regularly, I would hire a bookkeeper and accountant to do the work for me. But at this point, the volume is so minimal that it’s no problem for me to do it myself on a regular but infrequent basis.
Let me give you another example. Several years ago, I realized that even though I have extensive training as a writer, I’m talking 20+ years of work crafting and editing written communications, I actually feel like writing content from scratch is in my Zone of Excellence, and not my Zone of Genius. I know this because when I sit down to work with a blank page, and I’m forcing myself to write, starting with a typed word or a handwritten word, I will feel frustrated and irritated and like I am essentially slogging through wet sand to get something out there.
So it turns out writing in the most basic and traditional sense is not in my Zone of Genius, even though it’s an area of expertise I have mastered and something I’m capable of doing extremely well. Over the years, I haven’t given up on writing entirely. I’ve just found smart ways that I can create written communication so that it works for my work style and allows me to operate from my Zone of Genius. Like right now, I am speaking out loud and dictating this to voice notes because it’s infinitely easier for me to have a conversation with an imaginary audience or speak in a monologue than it is for me to sit down and type out a sentence from scratch. I have no idea why this is true, but I just love to talk.
So right now, I feel very much in flow, and I am enjoying myself as I create the baseline content for this newsletter. From there, I can use basic AI tools to create a streamlined structure or edit if required, but I also have expertise and a genuine enjoyment of editing. As long as the tax is already written on a piece of paper, I am fully capable of getting in there with both hands and enjoy polishing that content and making that communication sing. So perhaps not literally with both hands.
All of this means I can create written content in a way where I work primarily in my Zone of Genius, which is speaking out loud and editing. I get to minimize the amount of work that I struggle with, even though I’m very good at it, which is the writing from scratch part.
So if you’re currently feeling like your workload drains you more than energizes you and you spend more time feeling exhausted than you do in flow, here are some suggestions.
-
Double-check your physical health and needs. Are you sick? Are you tired? Are you thirsty? Do you need to exercise, take a walk, stretch, or lie down? Very often when we feel exhausted, we’re actually dealing with physical symptoms as opposed to something that we can mentally jujitsu our way out of. So it’s worth checking in.
-
Once you’ve confirmed that it is the way you’re working that’s draining you, you can invite more flow into the process by noticing which aspect of the way you’re working feels like a grind. Is there a specific point in the process where it starts to feel like you’re banging your head against the wall, or it feels like your eyes are crossing with boredom or tediousness?
-
Once you’ve identified what it is specifically that makes you feel drained during the creation process, then you want to start to think critically about what you can outsource or let go of versus what you want to hold onto. Maybe it’s possible that you no longer volunteer to bake cupcakes for the PTA if you genuinely hate the experience of getting into the kitchen and dirtying some bowls. I personally love cake batter, so you’ll never hear me say no to making a batch of cupcakes, but to each their own.
-
If you’ve identified that something needs to stay on your task list, or you want to continue doing it because it’s meaningful to you, then start to brainstorm ways that you can make it easier based on the kinds of activities that put you in a flow state. If you find meetings relentlessly tedious, but love to go for long walks, find out if you can join virtual meetings, while walking. Use automated services to do less of what makes you feel twitchy and spend more time doing the things that actually please you. If you love creating sales strategies but not communicating them to your team, maybe you can hire someone who will do the communications piece, or at least use ChatGPT to draft some emails for you that you can then go over so that they feel accurate to the strategies you’ve created.
Ultimately, the switch from exhaustion to flow is about paying attention to subtle energetic influences that are likely coloring your day-to-day work-life experience. You can start to notice when you feel energized or deeply satisfied by the work that you do. You can start to notice when something feels draining simply because of the way you’re working.
The more you start to pay attention to that subtlety, the more capable you’ll be. Learn how to make the switch so that you spend more time working in your Zone of Genius and less time grinding it out in those other states; they don’t bring you as much pleasure as possible. No workday will ever be perfect, and no job will ever check all the boxes, but you can certainly bake more pleasure Into your day-to-day experiences, starting with the small things that you can control.
Now over to you. Do you know the difference between your Zone of Excellence and Zone of Genius? How can you use this distinction to optimize your job and have more fun at work?
If you want to use my brain power to help you work in ways that feel more in flow and true to who you are, I invite you to explore private coaching with me. This is one of the things I often work with my clients on, and we tend to have some really phenomenal results. I’m all about eliminating the deadweight and finding ways to do more of the stuff that lights you up.
If you have any burning questions that I haven’t addressed in this newsletter, hit reply and ask. Either way, I wish you a day full of flow and fun ahead.
