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Hello everyone, welcome back to the Conscious Success podcast. So we are now a few episodes into the podcast being released and out there in the world. And I've just been reflecting on so many of the conversations that I've been having with guests so far and the themes that are really coming front and center. And I think one of the clearest to me of all these women who have created
different but consciously successful versions of their careers and define what success really means to them is that they've all oriented towards what feels good, what feels fun, what feels energizing, even when it didn't make logical sense, even when it wasn't the most strategic career step. But by doing that, they have created careers that feel...
deeply fulfilling and energizing while imperfect, they are motivated, they are able to stay in the game, they feel happy with their choices and their trade-offs because it is being fueled by this love and energy for what they actually do. And so often in conversations that I have with prospective clients or new clients,
One of the themes that comes up so often is that people are feeling burnt out. They're feeling bored out. They're feeling like they are stuck. They don't actually like what they're doing. Yes, they might be highly compensated for it and they should quote unquote, you know, be grateful, but they're not actually enjoying the day to day of their jobs, of their...
of what that requires of them. And so I really just wanted to take this episode to talk about what is necessary. How do we identify? What gives us energy? What we are actually put on this earth to do that allows us to feel truly successful, that allows our careers to actually feel good. And so this is something that I dive really deep into with almost every client I work with.
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who's trying to recover from burnout or redesign their career and really get clarity on what needs to shift is really identifying what motivates them and what their zone of genius is and aligning their career to what gives them energy. And so that's what we're gonna dive into in this podcast episode today to help you to be able to identify this for yourself.
and identify where tweaks or changes or even overhauls are required within your own career so that it can feel good, so that it can feel energizing and consciously successful. So I wanna start by talking about what motivates us as humans. What gives us energy? What gives us fuel? And there's really two different types of motivation. And you might have heard of this before, but there is extrinsic motivation and there's intrinsic motivation. So,
Extrinsic motivation is things that we receive such as money, praise, awards, recognition, social status, those things that if I do this, then I get that. And it's kind of like this dangling carrot. I work hard so that I get money. I work hard so that I get promoted. I work hard so that people view me as successful.
Also extrinsic motivation is also things that we want to avoid that were motivated to not have happen, such as punishment or failure. So I talked about this in my career episode, but for so much of my life, I was motivated by a fear of failure, a fear of not being smart enough. So I was extrinsically motivated to avoid failing. So that's the extrinsic form of motivation that can give us energy, but that's really more of a
push motivation. Now the other form of motivation is intrinsic. Now intrinsic motivation is based on things that we naturally enjoy that grow us, that give us energy. So intrinsic motivation is about that felt experience. It's actually how we feel while we work. And it is motivated by things like passion, interest, curiosity.
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enjoyment, growth, connection, fun. And so with intrinsic motivation, we do these things because we enjoy them in and of themselves, not for any external reward that we might get at some point. We do it because we love it, right? And ultimately, look, we want both to have career success. Yes, money is important. Like,
We need to be able to pay our bills and provide for our families and live lives. But if we are just chasing and making career decisions to always optimize for the extrinsic motivation without really valuing and taking in the intrinsic motivation and treating that as equally, if not more important, we end up in a really tricky situation where we're at an energy deficit. And
When this happens, it's really hard to motivate ourselves just to show up for the work, just to show up to the job. And in order to have long-term lasting career success over the duration of an entire career, we really must begin to focus and optimize for that intrinsic motivation. Because intrinsic motivation is what actually gives us energy. It's like fuel in a gas tank, right?
think about driving your car across the country. Like in order to be able to drive the distance you need to reach your long-term goals over the duration of your career, you need to consistently fuel up, to put fuel into your tank so that you have enough gas to keep going. If you don't have sufficient fuel or sufficient energy, you're not going to be able to go very far. You're gonna break down by the side of the road. And equally,
you need to get your car serviced, you need to change the oil, you need to fix anything that's not working properly in the car, otherwise it becomes faulty, it becomes fuel inefficient, and ultimately it will break down and you cannot get where you're looking to go. And so looking at our career and the work that we're doing through this lens of what gives us energy and what drains our energy is such a helpful way.
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to identify the work that we feel intrinsically motivated by and that will ultimately lead to long-term success. And so what I want to provide and to discuss today is a framework for thinking about how do I start to understand what is fuel in my tank, what gives me energy, and what are the things that drain my energy or cause fuel inefficiency or leakage or breakdown so that I can avoid those things.
So we're gonna talk about this through the four different potential zones of energy that any task, anything you do, anything that you spend your time on could be in, okay? So the first is your zone of incompetence. Now, your zone of incompetence, these are things that you neither do well nor give you energy. They are not.
extrinsically or intrinsically motivating, right? You don't get any external reward for doing them and you don't feel good while you do them. You hate doing them and you're not good at them. So time spent in your zone of incompetence is a problem. It's a big problem. This is leaking gas from your tank. It's like watching an old, you know, beat up car just like pouring gas on the road in front of you. And so you want to exit this zone as quickly as possible.
So if something that you're doing in your career is not actually moving the needle meaningfully in terms of those external extrinsic results and you don't enjoy doing it, it is time to take a step back and figure out how can you exit this zone? How can you delete? How can you delegate? How can you do things differently? And it might be that you need to make some really big shifts or it might mean you need to make some tweaks in terms of.
where your time and energy is going to be able to exit this zone. Now, I work with a lot of really high achieving successful women. Most of the time, we already don't spend a lot of time in our zone of incompetence, right? So this is probably not something that is a huge problem, but it is something to be aware of if you are spending any time here, stop immediately. The next zone is your zone of competence. So these are things that...
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don't drain your energy, but they don't give you energy either. So they don't feel intrinsically motivated, motivating. They don't feel intrinsically motivating, but they're also not extrinsically rewarded either. And so things in this zone, the zone of competence, are like time vampires. They often take a lot of your time, but they have a really poor ROI. Like you can spend a lot of time in your zone of competence without ever really moving the needle.
And this is where so many people get stuck and they find themselves really busy and working hard, but not having anything to show for it. You know, at the end of the day, you're like, what did I even do today? Or at the end of the quarter, when you're trying to like make a promotion case, you didn't actually make headway towards your biggest goals. So you will never stand out. You will never get promoted for working in your zone of competence. And while you feel competent at these things,
and they may be things you default to when you feel scared of new things or challenging things that would require you to lean into your growth edge, the things in your zone of competence do not move the needle and they are ultimately a waste of your time. So for things in your zone of competence, you really want to think about how could a more junior person do this? How could I build a system to do this? How could AI do this better, faster, cheaper, or with more enjoyment?
because time spent here is not ultimately getting you to how you want to feel or the results that you want to drive. Okay, so the next zone is the zone of excellence. Now, the zone of excellence is all about that extrinsic motivation, but really no intrinsic motivation. So while working in this zone may earn you promotions and compensation and praise, or it might make you feel safe or worthy,
the work you do itself is draining. It still drains your energy. So this zone is ego validated, but it is not soul aligned. And that's really why this zone is such a shiny trap. And where so many of my high achieving good girl clients get stuck and where they start reaching out to work with me. Because while the things in this zone may feed our ego or fill our bank account, because they deplete our energy, unless we are
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really sufficiently counterbalancing these things that are draining our energy with a really full and fulfilling life outside of work, it's only a matter of time before you hit an energy deficit, right? Where you just struggle to find that energy and find that motivation and find that focus and consistency required to do your best work. And this ends up feeling like burnout, where you're just fighting with yourself to show up and work is feeling purposeful, purposeless and
meaningless and you are just feeling really stuck and really trapped. But the reason why we find ourselves in the zone of excellence so often is because it oftentimes is what has paid or the highest paying jobs or what gets us that kind of status or what our parents expected of us or what is the safe or secure job. And so we optimize for those things. And it's also where
very often in our culture, we associate working hard at something as being more valuable, more worthy. If something comes naturally to us, we very often will treat it as less valuable or as less important. And so we tend to double down on valuing the things that we had to work really hard at. You know, it's like, okay, I got an A in calculus and I worked so hard to get that A.
getting an A in calculus, that's really important, right? Versus like, I got an A in art, like art was like fun. That doesn't even count, right? We just discount the things that are fun. And very often we double down on and go towards the things that take effort, but get us that extrinsic motivation and rewards. But spending too much time here leads to an energy deficit, which brings us to our final zone, which is the zone of genius.
So your zone of genius are your energetic tank fillers. This is when you put gas in your tank. These are the things that you are intrinsically motivated by and naturally well-suited to do. So this is the kind of work when you do it, time flies. Like you're in a flow state and you really enjoy doing the work, like so much so that you'd probably do it for free. And the work that we love gives us energy for a reason, because it is that internal indicator, that feeling, that
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points us in the direction of our purpose, of our alignment, of the work that we're meant to do in this world, to bring our potential fully online and share our magic and our gifts with the world. And I think that's what so many of the guests so far and certainly to come continue to highlight is that they are focused on and building careers around leading into their zone of genius. And when you do this,
it creates what I call the virtuous cycle of conscious success. So when you prioritize and you go after what feels intrinsically motivating, that gives you energy, right? We've discussed that. Well, when you get energy from doing something, you don't have to fight yourself just to show up. You're gonna do it consistently, right? And when you do something consistently, over time, you're going to build mastery. And once you've built mastery,
you create differentiation, not everyone has mastery. And so when we really build a skillset and experience that's deeper than others, then this inevitably leads to extrinsic results like higher earning potential and promotions and recognition and rewards. But it comes as a byproduct of centering and pursuing what intrinsically motivates us. And that extrinsic reward comes as a result of that.
However, if we choose instead to chase the extrinsic motivation at the start, we often don't have enough energy to stay consistent long enough to develop mastery and to develop differentiation, and then it all breaks down. And while we might be really successful for a chapter, we'll hit burnout, we'll hit bore out, we'll want to blow up our whole careers, we'll want to start again. And ultimately, over time, it's not a winning strategy.
They say that it takes 20,000 hours to build mastery in something. So that typically takes over a decade to do. But if you don't enjoy what you're doing, you are not going to stick with it long enough to get to those 20,000 hours and to get to mastery. You're likely to start and stop or switch roles or disengage. And this will keep you from reaching your full potential and creating that long-term success. And it will create, it will keep success from ever actually feeling good. So.
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I cannot emphasize this enough how important it is to understand what sits in your zone of genius and to begin to make intentional choices, both big and small, to optimize for it. So I wanna give you an exercise to how to begin to think about and uncover what might sit in each of your four zones, including, most importantly, your zone of genius. So I want you to look at your digital calendar for the last two weeks.
and go back and color code everything on there in one of three colors. If it gave you energy, put it in green. If it didn't affect your energy either way, make it yellow. And if it depleted your energy, make it red. Alternatively, you could write down a list of everything that you spent 15 or 30 minutes of your time or more doing in the last week and then draw an up arrow if it gave you energy, a sideways arrow if it was flat.
or a down arrow if it decreased your energy. And now for either of these approaches, I want you to then star or circle any things that are extrinsically motivated and rewarded. And then look at, okay, are these stars or these things that you circled, are these aligned with your up arrows or your down arrows? Your greens or your reds? So you might circle something that is extrinsically rewarded.
but it's something you hate doing. And you're gonna see, ugh, everything that's extrinsically rewarded here is in my reds instead of my greens. Or my up arrows instead of my down arrows would mean, great, I'm actually already in that virtuous cycle of conscious success. I am getting extrinsic rewards for doing things that give me energy. And what we really want to see here is an overlap where the things that give us energy are also ultimately the things that get us rewarded.
So when you've done this exercise, you're gonna start to see how much green is in your week. How much red is there? Just there having a visual representation and being able to see like, my gosh, like green is only 10 % of my week where red is like 80. This is a problem. That is going to give you so much critical information and so much awareness about what you need to change. Awareness precedes choice. I say it.
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again and again to my clients and I'm sure on this podcast, but we can't change what we cannot see. So being able to do this exercise and to bring your conscious awareness to what zones are you spending your time in is the first step. Now next I want you to look for themes across what gives you energy and what depletes it. So for me, if I were to do this, any non-creative detail oriented type of work drains my energy so fast like,
Taxes are not my jam. I outsource that to my husband, to an accountant, like that's not for me. Whereas anything where I am creating something for the first time and solving a problem and using systems thinking, like this is stuff that energizes me to no end. And this creates kind of these like themes and understanding of, okay, wow, I need to lean more into this type of work and I really need to avoid this type of work.
And when you can start to see that, rather than just push for the next promotion, you can start to make more conscious decisions to say, like, hey, maybe I take on this new role that would allow me to do more of the things that are giving me energy. And as you do that in time again, that virtuous cycle of conscious success starts to spin. Now you might be saying to yourself, okay, well,
Work is work. Like there's gonna be some stuff that I just don't enjoy doing and that's the reality of work. And yes, you are right. But while you're not going to love every second of every day in any job or any business, if you're spending less than 50 % of your time in your zone of genius, you have an issue. You're going to have an energy problem. If you don't already, it is coming. So while we're never gonna spend 100 % of our time there, you really wanna aim for 80 % or more of your time in your zone of genius.
And this might take time to be able to transition into this, but again, that awareness precedes choice. And if you use that filter and that intrinsic motivation as a guide, you will be able to shift more and more into it over time. And truly a career that feels energizing and intrinsically motivating and extrinsically rewarded and allows us to feel like we're on purpose and making an impact and energizing our gifts in order to have that.
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we must optimize for our zone of genius. It is just non-negotiable. If you are not optimizing for your zone of genius, ultimately you're never going to reach conscious success. So if you're not feeling motivated and happy in your career right now, this is really where I would start. This is some of the most important work that I do with every client. And if you'd like some external support to really dive deeper and to really clarify,
not only what sits in your zone of genius, but how to actually apply that and to design or redesign your career in order to be able to drive this virtuous cycle of conscious success. And I invite you to reach out and book a call with me. You can find that link in the show notes and we can dive into this more together. But I really hope that this serves you because I think that this is just one of the most critical lenses to view your career from. And if you can identify and make the shifts necessary to
prioritize your zone of genius front and center. And I promise you, everyone listening, you have a zone of genius. Sometimes it can feel far away. Sometimes you've overridden that inner voice that's trying to point you towards your alignment and what it is, but it is there. And it is so, so empowering and powerful and energizing when you find it, when you start to lean into it. And that's when you start to feel your career flow and take off and really.
lead you to where you wanna go and how you wanna feel. So I hope that this episode served you. I would love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to reach out to me directly on Instagram, at Conscious Success Co. I always love to connect with you. And see you in the next episode.
