How to Find and Stay in Your Zone of Genius

Find out what keeps you consistently holding back and sabotaging yourself

“`You know deep inside of you that you will never feel fully satisfied until you have anchored yourself in your zone of genius.”

That one sentence hit me hard when I first read it in Gay Hendrick’s book The Big Leap. I felt the truth in it whilst I was on a flight from London to Boston for work in 2017.

In today’s newsletter, I am going to share:

1. The concept of the Upper limit problem

2. Four hidden subconscious barriers that keeps us out of our zone of genius

3. How you can find and stay in your zone of genius

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So many of us yearn to feel internally alive. To do work we love. To experience culture and travel. To be in the best shape of our lives. To wake up in the morning feeling energised and excited. To thrive in our relationships. No one has ever dreamed of a life of the opposite. 

Our zone of genius is when we are expressing our natural most authentic gifts. It’s when you know you are drawing upon your greatest innate strengths focusing on activities that give you energy and make you feel alive. 

What holds us back from being in this zone?

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1. Our Upper Limit Problem (UPL)

As we move toward greater success, expansion, love, abundance we all will encounter the UPL. 

In short, Henrick’s defines our UPL as our internal thermostat setting that holds us back from enjoying all the love, financial abundance, and creativity that’s rightfully ours. 

“The Upper Limit Problem is our universal human tendency to sabotage ourselves when we have exceeded the artificial upper limit we have placed on ourselves.”

This thermostat gets set early in our lives at a time we couldn’t think for ourselves. It remains in our subconscious. Unless we solve our UPL, we keep on finding ways to bring ourselves back down when we’ve blown past our old setting. 

Brianna Weist, in her book The Mountain Is You, shares a nice summary of this “we are programmed to seek what we’ve known. Even though we think we’re after happiness, we’re actually trying to find what we’re most used to.” 

Examples of this in our lives:

• You want to change careers but keep on coming back to what you’ve always done for work

• You try to change your financial habits but end up in the same financial place even once you’ve upgraded your income because you’ve now also upgraded your lifestyle lifestyle 

• You try to change your diet but return back to the same place 6 weeks later and blame the fitness program

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2. Four hidden subconscious barriers that keep us out of our zone of genius

Hendricks shares four barriers that keeps us out of this zone:

1. Feeling fundamentally flawed - we carry this feeling deep within us. You might notice yourself making mistakes or messing things up to confirm your own bias. 

   Imposter syndrome is part of this. We sabotage ourselves because we think we are bad. And good things can’t happen to bad people.

   This barrier also brings with it a fear of “if I did make a full commitment to live in my zone of genius, that might fail as well.” i.e. believing your zone of genius is also flawed and if you expressed it fully, you still wouldn't be good enough. 

2. Disloyalty and abandonment - a false belief that by succeeding, we are being disloyal to and leaving people behind in our past.