Speaker (Dave Kashen) presents Commitment #8 from the 15 commitments of conscious leadership: a leader’s commitment to live in their zone of genius. The talk defines ‘genius’ as an attendant spirit—work done effortlessly, regardless of payment, yielding disproportionate returns—and contrasts it with zones of incompetence, competence, and excellence. The speaker emphasizes the courage required to shift away from comfortable excellence into unique genius and lists common fears leaders hold (going broke, provoking jealousy, creating burden). The chunk ends by posing the challenge: are you willing to make this transition, a hallmark of conscious leadership?
Chapters
You commitment number eight of the 15 commitments of conscious leadership says, I commit to live in my zone of genius. Now, when we work with leaders and teams and organizations, it's often very common that people will say, what's my zone of genius? People love to know about themselves. They like to take assessments, they like to take surveys. They want to learn about themselves. They want to know what is it that I do really well. But what we've discovered over the years is this is a courageous commitment. Because when a leader decides to live in their zone of genius, they're deciding to move out of their zones of incompetence, competence and excellence. They're going to change the way they invest their time and energy in the world. And this will always feel risky. Do you see? Most of us have become incredibly successful living in our zone of excellence. Our zone of excellence are things that we do exceptionally well. We do it better than most people. And when we do it, people respond. We get paid for it, we get promoted. This has been our go to thing for much of our career. But it's not our zone of genius, or people spend time in their zone of competence. This is stuff that I do pretty well. I do it about as well as anybody else, and it becomes a time filler. It's just kind of doing the government work of our lives. And people get used to doing their zone of competence. Some leaders are still spending time doing things they're incompetent at. They're not good at organizing their files. They're still organizing their files. They're incompetent at hiring people. They're still in the hiring process. They're incompetent at speaking. They're still speaking. You see, when you face into this commitment, you have to ask yourself, am I willing to be in my zone of genius? Now, what is genius? That word turns some people off. They think that Beethoven was a genius or the Rolling Stones are genius. Genius just means attendant spirit. It means that which has been in you all of your life, your uniqueness. Genius is that thing that you do effortlessly and easefully. And when you do it, you lose track of time. When you're in your zone of genius, you get a disproportionate return on the investment of energy expended. Genius is that thing that you do that, believe it or not, you do it whether you got paid for it or not. But whenever we think about the zone of genius, we think, could I really do that which I love so much? What comes into our mind are all of our beliefs about what would happen if we devoted ourselves to our zone of genius beliefs? Like, we'd go broke. That's the starving artist who lives in their genius but goes broke. Or we think if, if I really lived in my genius, I'd outshine everybody around me and I'd have to live with the experience of people being jealous and resentful. Or we think if I lived in my genius, it would just create burden. So the question are you willing to live in your zone of genius and transition out of your zones of incompetence, competence, and excellence? This is a defining trait of conscious leaders.
