Why your excellence might be in the way of your genius

This week's show is with Adam Quiney, Adam is an executive leadership coach specializing in working with the Smartest People in the Room. Adam's clients don't simply change; they transform their lives and the way they show up in world, creating massive impact in their relationships, companies, and families. They go from being natural born leaders that create followers, to transformational leaders that create leaders. Adam brings the concision, skills and brilliance that he honed in his previous careers as a project manager and a lawyer. His clients include lawyers, doctors, executives, world-class designers, olympic athletes, financial professionals and CEOs across North America and Europe.

A couple of surprising facts about Adam: He trained with the founders of popping, locking, waving, tutting, and various other funk styles and he's played a card game called Magic the Gathering since it first started, and owns the most powerful card ever printed. It sells for around $4,000 when in mint condition. To Adam it’s priceless, because it’s his gold medal in the nerd olympics. Adam's a self-confessed straight up nerd and I think that's got a lot to do with why he and I get on so well.   This conversation is a part 2 to the last conversation Adam and I talked about spectrums of being - another way to describe it is our essence, that unique beauty and power that is there within every one of us. That show was a brilliant one so if you haven't already listened to it, I'd very much encourage you to do that straight away! I'm in the process of doing the exercise that Adam suggested as the end of that show and it's blown my mind how much I'm discovering about myself and how others experience me. I'd love to hear if you try that exercise and what you find out about yourself.   So in this show, we explored 'zones of excellence' which are the ways that we've created to enable us to operate in the world whilst we're not able to fully be and express our unique essence. This was another episode that was full of laughter and insight - I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed making it! What you'll learn from this episode:

• Adam described our zones of excellence as the strategies we've constructed to either hide or improve on our essence. We typically create our entire lives and especially our careers on our Zones of Excellence. We typically have a lot riding on our Zones of Excellence which makes it particularly challenging for us to identify and to grow out of them.
• We create these Zones of Excellence usually based on events that we experienced as children when it was shown to us that our Zones of Genius or our unique essence weren't fully acceptable or desirable and therefore weren't safe to be.
• We avoid the break-through because we don't want the break-down. We don't want to give up 7/10 in case we never get it or better again. But the capacity is there for all of us to discover and to be our true selves, to be 10/10.