Practical Genius by Gina Amaro Rudan, Kevin Carroll Read Free Book Online Page A

say, “Well, I don’t know if I can call myself an expert, but I’ve spent the last fifteen years working on (fill in the blank).” Hello! You’ve spent fifteen years studying, working, and building capability within one subject area? That definitely makes you an expert, kiddo!
    So if you are hesitating when considering your own expertise, remember that an expert is any individual who exhibits the highest level of mastery and performance of a specialized job, task, or skill. Since there isn’t an expert fairy who drops in to grant you the “expert” title, I will. Whatever your primary subject matter, from here forward think of yourself as an expert in that area. This isn’t to say you know all there is to know about it or don’t have infinite room to increase your experience and knowledge in that area. It’s really just to say you’re more of an expert than you might think you are. In fact, you’re more of an expert than most!
    For example, one of my clients is a professional skydiver and instructor with more than twenty years of skydiving and ten thousand jumps under his belt. He recently realized during a full day of our working together that his expertise isn’t just the act of skydiving; more important, he is an expert in what he calls the “extreme focus” that is required to succeed as a skydiver. Using the same techniques he has used for sixteen years teaching people to skydive, he is now teaching others how to have a laser-beam, lifesaving kind of focus in other areas of their lives. He has leveraged his core strength and has further identified and refined his expertise.
    If you have to pull out your résumé to help you identify your hard assets, do it! The goal of this first step is to get you to visualize the professional ingredients that contribute to the foundation of your practical genius.
    Once you’ve assessed the ingredients that make up the professional you—the hard you, the logical you—you are ready to begin the exploration of the soft assets that contribute to the spice, zest, and energy of your genius. Although your hard professional assets may seem at odds with your soft personal assets, they are actually highlyinterconnected and interdependent. So move through the following ideas with an open mind and be prepared to discover the rest of the ingredients that give rise and reality to your genius.
NOW IDENTIFY YOUR SOFT ASSETS
    So many of us check half of our identities at the door when we enter our workplace each day. We leverage only our hard assets, and then we wonder why we feel disconnected when reflecting on our personal lives versus our professional lives. The qualities we usually ascribe to our personal lives and our private selves are what I call our soft assets—simply defined as our passions, creativity, and values.
    Think about folks you know who’ve been on a track for twenty-plus years and complain of feeling dissatisfied and stuck. You’d feel miserable, too, if you were constantly striving to succeed with one hand tied behind your back, without the benefit of some of the most powerful and effective qualities you possess. We focus on our hard assets and undervalue and sublimate our soft assets—what a waste of half of who we are! The greatest lesson I’ve learned is that in order to become the person you really want to be, you have to flip that paradigm.
    Today’s workforce needs professionals who can think inside, outside, and all around the box. We need professionals with empathy who can design collaborative initiatives from the heart to fight longstanding, intractable problems. Today people need to honor their innate desire to be autonomous and not have to sit in gray boxes for eight hours a day with carrots in front of them to get them to perform. The way we work is changing, which means we will not be alone in shifting the way we express ourselves and the way we go about integrating our work, play, and passions. The first step in making this paradigm shift is