Thinking about your Zone of Genius helps you set priorities in what you do. For many people, tasks blur together: a quick call to a client, a quick look at LinkedIn, a quick update of the administration. But those small tasks often take up far more time than you would like. By working in your Zone of Genius, you focus on the important tasks you are truly good at.
The four zones of work
In his book The Big Leap, Gay Hendricks invites you to think about the things you do in your life. You spend your life moving between different zones:
- Zone of Incompetence: things you are not good at and that others can do better.
- Zone of Competence: things you can do well, but at which others are equally good.
- Zone of Excellence: things you excel at and often receive recognition for, but from which you get less enjoyment.
- Zone of Genius: things that reflect your unique talents and passions. Things that give you energy and at which you are exceptionally good.
Do the things you do in the first three zones not make you happy? Then outsource them. Find someone who gets energy from carrying out those tasks, so that you spend most of your time in your Zone of Genius. Hendricks writes that we experience more satisfaction and happiness when we spend more time in our Zone of Genius. Good employees who are in their Zone of Genius doing different tasks than you are therefore the ideal solution.
Discover your Zone of Genius
The activities you love most are found in your Zone of Genius. These are the tasks that make you get up in the morning and think: great, I get to do this today. Ideally, these tasks in your work and business are the things that generate the most money. You may not see the direct result, but they are part of your unique way of working. That means your business is better than the rest.
To discover your Zone of Genius, you first need to identify your talents, passions and strengths. These five steps will help you do that:
- Step 1: Make a list of all your skills, hard skills and soft skills.
- Step 2: Ask yourself: which skills make me happy when I put them into practice?
- Step 3: Identify your passions. What topics could you talk about for hours, or spend hours on? Think about how you can integrate these passions into your work.
- Step 4: Reflect on past successes. What gave you satisfaction earlier in your work? What do your successes have in common? Which unique talents did you use in those situations?
- Step 5: Ask for feedback. It can sometimes be difficult to articulate your own talents and strengths. Ask a family member, colleague or friend to help you.
Go through these five steps regularly, so you can eliminate the tasks that drain your energy and remain in your Zone of Genius.
Eliminating tasks: two options
After the five steps, you have probably found tasks that make you happy. But what should you do with the remaining tasks? They still need to be done, after all, and preferably not by you.
Option 1: reduce the task
If there are tasks that you find repetitive and that tire you out, look for a way to automate them. If, for example, you are a recruiter who is not really keen on extensive hour-and-a-half interviews with each candidate, determine what you truly consider important for a new colleague. After all, you can see their education and work experience on their CV, so it really does not need to be discussed again in the interview. Of course, it is important that someone with the right experience is in the right position, but it is even more important that a person clicks with a team. And you can determine that within half an hour if you remove all the must-dos from the conversation.
Option 2: outsource the task
Quite simply: let someone else do the tasks that drain your energy. If you are a manager who gets no energy from keeping track of tasks in spreadsheets, then somewhere in the world there is someone whose eyes light up at a perfectly working file full of automations. There are two benefits to this. First, you no longer have to do the task you do not feel like doing. Second, the task gets done faster by someone who does get energy from it.
