How to work in your joy & genius zone (+ why it matters)
Have you ever worked somewhere creativity goes to die? Where when you pipe up with a suggestion in the morning meeting and your boss stares daggers at you?
My guest Samantha Hartley and I both know this feeling well and are passionate about changing cultures like this to thriving, joyful workplaces.
It’s one of the reasons I was so excited to get together over our afternoon tea to chat!
Check out this episode to learn:
How long it takes to see lasting change - and the right way to adjust the engagement if an organization isn’t quite ready to commit
Why finding your perfect clients is the key to their success and yours
What Samantha calls “joy and genius zone” looks like and how to find it
Listen Here:
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Eye Opening Insight:
[7:49] “Very quickly I was at corporate and I was like, oh, no, no, no. This is like where creativity comes to die. If you, like make a suggestion in a meeting, people will look at you like, are you saying we're doing it wrong? And I was like, oh, okay. And I just left and I didn't have a thing lined up. I just left cuz I got burnt out and really, the answer to everything is being in the depths of misery at corporate is the reason I do everything that I do right now. I'm, I just work to be the opposite in every possible way. That's why joy is a major factor of my business.
[11:55] “So perfect clients, exactly what they need is exactly what you do, and you're kind of like, you're together. So the other thing is they're gonna have to be, your clients. If you're gonna work this way really on transformation, you're gonna have to have clients who really want that.”
[17:15] “So I have a term which is the joy and genius zone. And the reason I call it that is cuz when we say genius zone, like we all know what we mean, right?
Like, yay, sure, like it's the thing that you're great at. But there are things that we're great, that we're great at or really good at that give us energy or deplete our energy. And to me that's the difference between a genius zone and then a joy in genius zone.”
I loved this conversation with Samantha and I had a lot of insights myself. If you too had an eye opener from this episode, let me know in the comments!
And even better: would you leave me a review? It makes my day to read them.
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ABOUT SAMANTHA
One day at corporate, my buddy Roy and I went out to lunch. (Almost no one ever left campus during the workday, which I found quite unhealthy.) Over lunch we talked about a problem we’d been working on in our group and came up with a cool idea.
When I got back to my cubicle (a place you put someone from whom you expect no concentration or work to be done), I put together a PowerPoint to make our idea easier to understand.
When we showed my boss, her response was not “Oh, that IS cool” or “That’s the dumbest idea ever.” Nope. She said, “How long have you been working on this?”
Instead of initiative, she saw conspiracy.
Although I haven’t worked at corporate in years, I bring this up because many of my clients are ex-corporate too. They’ve escaped environments that were sometimes toxic, where new ideas were viewed as a threat. Where creativity and innovation were impossible, because those can only thrive when people feel safe.
In self-employment we create our own spaces, and choose our own clients.
Importantly, to me, many of my clients go back and work with corporations, often in roles that make things better for those in cubicles. In fact, I see my work, in lifting up corporate consultants, as helping that person who really wants to stay at corporate and make it the best company she can.
Earlier in my career I was the marketing manager for a business that grew from $48 million to $120 million in just three years. That explosive growth spoiled me and sparked my obsession for getting jaw-dropping results for my clients.