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January 10 - January 29, 2022
Many of our fears are based on the workings of the ego, the part of us that’s focused on getting recognition and protecting us from social ostracism. In the Zone of Genius, your ego is unnecessary; living there is its own reward. In the Zone of Genius, you cease to care about recognition or ostracism. Once you make a commitment to inhabiting your full potential, your ego is suddenly faced with extinction.
“Fear is excitement without the breath.” Here’s what this intriguing statement means: the very same mechanisms that produce excitement also produce fear, and any fear can be transformed into excitement by breathing fully with it.
Each of us has an inner thermostat setting that determines how much love, success, and creativity we allow ourselves to enjoy. When we exceed our inner thermostat setting, we will often do something to sabotage ourselves, causing us to drop back into the old, familiar zone where we feel secure.
The temptation is strong to remain in the Zone of Excellence; it’s where your own addiction to comfort wants you to stay. It’s also where your family, friends, and organization want you to stay. You’re reliable there, and you provide a steady supply of all the things that family, friends, and organizations thrive on.
The fear of being fundamentally flawed brings with it a related fear. It’s the fear that if you did make a full commitment to living in your Zone of Genius, you might fail. It’s the belief that even your genius is flawed, and that if you expressed it in a big way, it wouldn’t be good enough. This belief tells you to play it safe and stay small. That way, if you fail, at least you fail small.
The gifted child is often convicted of stealing attention from other members of the family. One unconscious solution gifted children devise is to turn down the volume on their genius so the others don’t feel threatened by it. The other solution is to continue to shine brightly but turn down the volume on their enjoyment of it. If they can appear to be suffering, they can get empathy and sympathy from others instead of jealousy.
Worrying is useful only if it concerns a topic we can actually do something about, and if it leads to our taking positive action right away. All other worry is just Upper Limit noise, designed by our unconscious to keep us safely within our Zone of Excellence or Zone of Competence.
When things are going well, or when you’re feeling particularly good, you can always bring yourself down by manufacturing a stream of worry-thoughts. Once you’ve brought yourself down by worrying, it’s very tempting to inflict those worry-thoughts on others. If we’re in the grip of worrying while someone around us isn’t, we seem to have an almost uncontrollable urge to criticize that person until he or she jumps into the stream of negativity with us.
When I’m operating in my Zone of Genius, I am doing what I love to do and I’m enjoying what I have. My worry-thoughts about money were simply a sign. The sign said it’s time for me to expand my capacity to revel in the joy of having created abundance and love. To my knowledge, that combination is something new in my family lineage. It’s new territory, and I’m learning to live in it. To do that, I need to overcome thousands of years of programming that adversity is a constant requirement of existence.
When we shut out positive energy through deflection, we keep ourselves safely in our Zone of Competence or Zone of Excellence. Deflection keeps us from challenging ourselves, preventing us from expanding our capacity for experiencing positive energy.
Almost all of us have a story about why we don’t access our genius. When we are within that story, it is very difficult to know that it’s just a story. What makes those stories seem so real (hard to recognize as “just stories”) is that they were being told before we were born. We’re born into stories that keep us from accessing our genius. We grow up among those stories and become like fish that aren’t aware of the water they’re swimming in.
Whatever your story is, the first task is to find it. Identify your family story of why you shouldn’t access your genius. Once you’ve identified it, the next task is to lose your fascination with it. Don’t give yourself a hard time for being fascinated with it; you were born into it just like the rest of us. Just become more fascinated with the story of your Big Leap into the Zone of Genius.
When I maintain an attitude of cheerful wonder and keen interest toward my faults and flaws, I see them dissolve and transform much more rapidly than when I give myself a hard time about them.
Make a commitment to keeping an attitude of wonder and play while learning about your Upper Limit behaviors. Say this sentence in your mind as often as you like. It expresses the attitude I’d like you to embody: I commit to discovering my Upper Limit behaviors, and to having a good time while I’m learning about them. You can learn a lot more with a spirit of wonder and enjoyment than you can with an attitude of criticism.
Make a list of your Upper Limit behaviors. Here are some of the most common ones: Worrying Blame and criticism Getting sick or hurt Squabbling Hiding significant feelings Not keeping agreements Not speaking significant truths to the relevant people. (If you’re mad at John, he’s the relevant person to talk to. It doesn’t help to tell Fred that you’re mad at John.) Deflecting. (Brushing off compliments is a good example of deflecting)
When you notice yourself doing one of the things on your Upper Limit list, such as worrying, or failing to communicate some truth, shift your attention to the real issue: expanding your capacity for abundance, love, and success.
There is a huge fear underneath every complaint: If I took the Big Leap into my Zone of Genius, I might fail. What if I really opened up to my true genius and found that my genius wasn’t good enough? Better to keep the genie in the bottle and coast along in the Zone of Excellence.
If you’re like most of us, you feel sad or irritated about the amount of your precious time that gets eaten up in the necessary trivia of your day. As you get more successful, it’s common to feel a mounting pressure about this issue, an unnatural hurry-up that feels unhealthy to your well-being. I believe that the sense of mounting pressure is the call to live in your Zone of Genius.
your Zone of Excellence is a space in which you know how to function so well that you can attain great results without stretching yourself very much. It’s a box, though, because ultimately you find yourself stymied and unsatisfied within it. You’re doing the same thing over and over, and while it feeds the people around you, it doesn’t feed you. You need to get out of any boxes you’re in so you can taste the sweet freedom of living on a continuous upward spiral.
I expand in abundance, success, and love every day, as I inspire those around me to do the same.
Back-talk is what occurs when your old programming argues with the beautiful new idea you’re beaming into the depths of yourself. You say the USM to yourself—I expand in abundance, success, and love every day, as I inspire those around me to do the same—and a burst of mind chatter talks back to you with something like “Forget it. You’ll never inspire anybody to do anything worthwhile.”
when you say, “I don’t have time to do that right now,” you’re telling a polite lie to avoid saying, “I don’t want to do that right now.” By placing the blame on time, you avoid confronting the blunt truth of the matter.
Another way we limit positive energy is by needing to control or dominate the other person (or needing to be controlled or dominated). If we always have to be right, for example, there is no room in the relationship to be happy.
