A few years ago I was in a meeting and I didn’t say what I wanted to say to my boss. He wanted to promote a new person into a key position who had never worked with us before. A group of us all sat in the room listening to him make his case. I sat there with a knot in my stomach and said nothing. Of course after the meeting a few of us got together and talked about what a bad idea the whole thing was.
Fast forward a year later. The promoted person was a disaster. The metrics of his department weren’t being met and he was struggling. And, I sat there saying nothing again, as we all discussed what to do about it full well knowing that had I spoken up at the beginning, things may have been different.
I’m not proud of this of course. I can give you a million reasons for not speaking up. The boss really wanted this to occur, it was his horse in the race, not my problem and I didn’t think it would be that bad. I can also justify not speaking up by making the case that the gal (or guy) who speaks first is the one who’s head is on the guillotine for even suggesting something opposite of what the boss wants. The reasons and justifications abound.
Beyond all of those reasons however, there is something else that occurred within me that cost more than bottom line business results or perhaps being disagreed with in a meeting. The truth was, I knew I didn’t speak up and that was costing me more than any of the other catastrophic rationalizations I had made up. It was costing me an inordinate amount of energy to withhold my opinion and to keep managing the fact that I didn’t offer it in the first place. This is what we call being out of integrity. It isn’t a moral thing; it is an energetic one. Integrity means wholeness.
To withhold our feelings and thoughts leaves us feeling incomplete and not whole. And I am using the word “us” intentionally. The moment that I withheld my opinion potentially cost the business as well as my aliveness. It cost my colleagues too who became stuck in drama, would gossip about the issue, and pretend that we had all the right answers. I wasted months and months of energy watching the scene unfold. You may be thinking that my boss could have heard my opinion and hired this person anyway making my input in the room futile. True. But that isn’t what this is about. It is about my aliveness and being complete within myself.
Fast forward another six months. I did get complete with my boss. I revealed to him that I never told him that I thought the new hire was a bad idea when we he was considering the decision. I owned my vulnerability and fear about what I thought would happen. And now for the crazy part. He revealed that he wasn’t open to feedback like he was pretending to be at the time either. We had a good laugh about it and more importantly, we both finally got our integrity back.
It was clear things were on the wrong path sometime after Emmy number three, when my wife told me that if we had another year like that, she was divorcing me.
So I was looking for a better way. The idea of living in my zone of genius — doing that special thing that I did really well, where I was working in flow, effortlessly and joyfully creating great things – seemed like a fantasy to someone who had achieved nothing without hard work and sacrifice.
But by that point I had nothing to lose: I was on an unsustainable course and headed for a crack-up.
So I began stalking myself: looking for those little signs that I was in the zone of flow, working effortlessly and yet still getting things done, having fun while sharing my gift with the world. Gradually I began to see where my genius lay.
That’s when the trouble really started.
You see, my zone of genius had little to do with my job as a network news producer. The prospect of leaving that job and everything that came with it for the uncertainty of following my genius seemed crazy and terrifying.
And yet, the more I thought about it, the more dissatisfied I became with that job and life. Month after month, the conflict between what I wanted and what I was willing to do intensified. The pressure to change grew, and the terror of letting go of what I had grew, too.
Something had to give.
And it did. June 12, 2012. A beautiful spring day in suburban New Jersey. My wife and I enjoying the first few miles of a weekend bike ride. Salvation came in the form of a gigantic Honda that hit and nearly killed me.
It was one of the best things that ever happened to me, because in that split second between the time the SUV hit me and I hit the pavement, I had two thoughts:
- This really hurts. A lot.
- This is my worst fear realized. And that idea that I’d been living my life by – that I could save myself from what I feared by playing it safe – was just an illusion. Life could change in an instant despite my best efforts to protect myself.
During my months of recovery after that crash, I came to see that giving up the miserable safety of my life as I knew it was not such a big deal. Fear was not keeping me safe. So I might as well just take the chance of doing what I really wanted and live in my genius.
A few months later, another corporate reorganization caught up with me in the form of a layoff and severance package. By that time I knew it was my chance to go out and follow my genius. So I took the leap and so far the landing has been surprisingly soft, with greater rewards and lower costs than I ever imagined.
And that’s the point: we feel safe staying in the familiar, working from excellence even if it’s slowly killing us.
The idea of leaving that zone of the known seems dangerous. And yet the real danger lies in ignoring genius and continuing to play small.
So if you want to take the leap to genius, I have two pieces of advice:
- Don’t mess around and play for time, because the wake-up call can be painful.
- If you do decide to let fear get the better of you, make sure you have a good bike helmet.
More
- What’s Your Iceberg? – If you want to see this process in a fun form, check out this animation:
