Hello friends. I'm Kristy Evans. Welcome to Decrypting Genius, the inaugural podcast episode. I am a human behavior researcher, career innovation strategist, and writer who's obsessed with studying how people can gain agency over their work and their lives by unlocking their genius. And today in this episode, I'm going to talk about why it's So hard for people to identify what I call Genius.
How I Became interested in Genius after field studies in 35+ Countries
I will also define what genius is to me. I came to this definition after 15 years of studying people through ethnography studies in over 35 countries. And for those who don't know, or have never heard the word ethnography, it means that I study people by immersing myself in their environment, observing their behavior over time and learning who they are by doing in depth interviews while I'm in their homes or communities.
Over those 15 years of doing those studies, I always noticed people everywhere seemed to struggle to articulate their unique strengths and capabilities. And it's not because they thought they didn't have any. It was very much the opposite. People generally believed they had potential and unique abilities, but they really struggled to identify and articulate what they were.
There was sort of always this class of people that knew exactly what they were good at and what they wanted to do since they were age 12, and those people always tend to be performers or artists. But that is really, really not the case with the general public, and I always, always noticed this was quite a sticking point for people everywhere I went that they knew they had something, but they couldn't quite say what it was.
And while I was roaming around the world doing my studies, I used to ask people how they would define or describe what makes them unique. And I always heard the same five types of responses. So, think about it for yourself for a minute. Just think about whether you can answer this question. Maybe even pause this for a moment and see what comes to you when I ask the question, how would you describe what makes you unique?
Just notice if it's easy or hard to come up with an answer and notice if something comes immediately. Or if there's a bit of a pause and confusion and a bit of a push and pull of like, Oh yeah, I'm kind of this, but is that my thing? Is that not my thing? That's typically what I would see people do when I would ask this question.
I would get more and more curious about this question because. It didn't really matter which country I was in, people really, really struggled with this.
And most common responses I always heard were things like, math was always easy for me, or I'm really good at organization and project management, or I'm warm and compassionate. or I'm a good writer or coder, or I was the lead salesperson in my region.
What I found when I asked people to define their Genius
And what I noticed is that most people's perception of what makes them unique falls into five categories. It's either their academic strengths, the skills they apply in their professional life, their standout personality traits or characteristics, their current job title, or their most impressive results.
And while those things are all very important to know about ourselves, They don't come even close to expressing what makes up our genius. And I would often push people further and ask them to get to what's truly ownable for them, meaning it's so unique, it can't be replicated.
And this is where people really, really get confused. They will start trying to define their superpower, their genius zone, or we'll get into a debate about what a genius zone even is, or they'll get lost in a debate about the difference between purpose and passion.
It really goes off the rails when you drill down into know what makes you specifically unique. And the truth is I really, understood why people got confused. And part of the reason I'm so interested in asking this question in the first place, right, is because I was in the exact same boat when I tried to figure this out for myself.
I thought:
Well, I'm sort of good at a handful of things, but I'm not really amazing at any of them. And I was always really confused about the fact that the things that I was good at definitely were not specific to me. And in fact, many people in my industry were better than me at the things that I was good at.
So I would always try to get a little bit more specific. And then I would think about the hyper specific skills I was using that I might be good at. So I would think, well, I'm really good at saying patterns and data. Or I can build rapport with people quickly in my ethnography studies, or, you know, when I present my research, I can influence people and get them on board with my ideas.
But the truth is, I couldn't really articulate my uniqueness beyond the skills that I used in my job. That was sort of the closest I could get to what I thought represented my genius or what made me unique. But like I said, I wasn't even better at those things than the people I worked with. So it was very, very confusing.
How I am going to help myself and others define their Genius
And that's why I started this podcast and the accompanying newsletter, Decrypting Genius, because I really wanted to help people, but especially myself, understand and articulate what our greatest source of internal power is. Or what I call genius.
And to me, our genius is much, much more than a set of skills, talents, or gifts. It is within us and lives at the intersection of our temperament, intelligences, creativity, and intellectual property. And there are of course many sub layers within those, which we'll explore in detail over podcast, but none of that even matters because there's one huge problem with our genius.
We can't easily identify it because it's what I think of as encrypted, or scrambled and hidden under layers of bedrock, which makes it not easily identifiable. It took me years to figure this out about myself, that somebody couldn't just ask me a direct question about what makes me unique and I would be able to answer it.
It's much more complicated in terms of how it's layered and hidden within us. For those of you who don't know anything about how encryption works, myself included, it's not easy to decrypt an encrypted message. It actually requires a code breaker, what's called a cryptographer, which is a person with special skills, unique tools, and a lot of experience on scrambling codes.
And as a quick side note, there are tons of fascinating documentaries and books on the world's most famous cryptographers, if you want to go down a rabbit hole. But my goal with this podcast and this newsletter is to make you a cryptographer of your genius, to give you the tools to be able to break the code that's encrypting your genius and hiding it within you.
And that means that the whole code already exists within you. You are simply breaking the layers of bedrock or encryption that have been hiding it, so it's free to emerge. And to be clear that definitely does not mean that I'm going to provide you with personality typing systems or quizzes that generate answers and labels, although there's always, of course, a place for those things.
Instead, I'm going to give you the skills and tools and insights required to become the cryptographer.
I believe this is important for all of us because being able to articulate what we have to offer the world empowers us to see more opportunities, to dream bigger and to feel safe and confident in our personhood. And when people feel safe, they lean towards hope and resourcefulness and away from protective strategies like division, tribalism and domination. And I think we're at a point where we all need to be leaning more towards hope and resourcefulness.
How did our Genius become hidden
So let's dive in by first just trying to understand how the heck did our genius become encrypted and hidden from us in the first place?
It does seem like we should just be able to understand who we are and what we're good at, particularly as we move through our careers and as we're a bit older and further on in life. It seems like this is just something that should be clear to us.
So why is it not clear? That is the main topic we're going to cover today because who cares what it is and how it works if we can't see it in the first place.
And what I'm going to take you through are what I call the three primary blockers that keep us from seeing our genius and create a restricted view of who we are. And you can think of these blockers almost like blinders.
They're there in a way where we can't get the full picture of our true capabilities, which is a tragedy because it's very hard to expand into work that lights us up when we can't access our full potential.
Genius Blocker #1: Cultural Conditioning
We're going to go through each of these one at a time and we'll start with the first one: cultural conditioning or who we had to become and what we had to hide to belong.
So, very early in our life, we're incentivized to minimize or amplify the aspects of ourselves that gain acceptance and generate belonging. And the result of that is that it's hard to determine which aspects of ourselves are part of our authentic nature and which are minimized or amplified out of the need to gain connection and love.
When I was doing field studies in different cultures around the world, it became so clear to me how much our cultures shape us, mostly without our awareness.
It is literally almost impossible to see ourselves from within our culture. And I always noticed that it wasn't the humans who were dramatically different. It was the cultures they were immersed in that molded their behaviors and perspectives that created the big differences between people. Of course our culture can unconsciously influence so many things we do, depending on what's valued and to what degree, but it especially can play a role in how we think, behave, and what we cultivate within ourselves. For instance, we could be incentivized to cultivate either cognitive intelligence or kinesthetic intelligence, depending on what our culture values more, or the way we think could be influenced because some cultures highly value linear thinking, while others highly value relational or holistic thinking.
And of course, how we express ourselves can be influenced because some cultures highly value emotional expression while others don't value it all, and some highly value compliance, where others highly value self-reliance.
As a researcher, I had the advantage of always being able to compare how different cultural values shaped people, but from within our own culture, it's practically impossible to see how we might be amplifying or minimizing who we are to adapt to cultural values.
Culture on a collective level isn't the only influence we can't see. Our family also over values aspects of who we are and under values other, which comes with grave consequences when it comes to seeing and understanding ourselves.
Example Blocker #1
Here's a quick example: Some children are highly sensitive, meaning they feel experiences deeply and that can sometimes result in unpredictable behavior. So imagine they grow up in a family and a culture that highly values compliance. This aspect of their authentic nature, their sensitivity, It will likely be misunderstood or rejected or trained out of them. And that might be helpful in the short term for their behavior, but in the long term, they will also lose access to a very valuable intelligence that's connected to sensitivity.
So when adults are highly sensitive, they can more easily access the somatic and emotional intelligences, which can be connected to being highly perceptive, creative, or attuned to people. So when aspects of our nature are repressed or rejected, we often lose access. to the strengths that are attached to them, not permanently, but often for years as we're wandering around, wondering what the heck we're good at.
In summary, we all have aspects of our authentic nature that weren't accepted, understood or valued regardless of who raised us or what culture we grew up in. And we all had to amplify or minimize to gain acceptance, which has left many of our strengths and authentic aspects of our nature Invisible. We literally can't see what's actually there, or at least not the full picture, which is why we rely on what's visible, like our skills, our job description, our personality characteristics or any of those other things I mentioned when we're trying to define what makes us unique.
To get in there and see what actually makes up our genius, we have to get in there and unblock some of those repressed aspects of ourselves that are connected to some of our deepest strengths.
Genius Blocker #2: Standardized Schooling
And that's only the first factor that creates our blinders. As we move through childhood, the next blinder is already starting to take shape Number two is what I call standardized schooling or how we had to narrow our intelligence to succeed. As we progress through school, especially from middle school on, we're incentivized to pursue what can be taught tested and measured, which results in a very one dimensional view of our intelligence.
Our intelligence is actually very nuanced and multidimensional, but within school, especially those that rely on the Western system, we're only taught to explore and master verbal and logical intelligence. The arts and anything else that can't be tested is basically considered a side hobby or something that's for uniquely talented artistic people. And sometimes all of those people go to one specific school that focuses on the arts and the rest of us never see any of that stuff.
It's not hard to figure out why this is the case.
Verbal and logical intelligence are simply more scalable. So developing and implementing curricula at scale that encourage children to explore their multidimensional abilities is very, very hard, and testing mastery in areas beyond verbal and logical skills at scale is even more difficult.
This is where standardized tests come in. They offer a scalable way to measure these specific types of intelligence, and it creates a universal metric that everybody understands and everybody can find and form hierarchy within.
And the benefit of that, is it makes it very easy to have a metric that we can judge people on that makes schooling and education very scalable.
But ,the more we buy into these tests as the best way to assess human value and intelligence, the greater the risk of neglecting or suppressing the diverse dimensions of our intelligence that fall outside the scope of these testing systems.
When I was conducting studies in different cultures, I would often use techniques that encourage participants to express themselves in different ways.
And over time, I noticed that the way people process and express information wasn't confined to the mind or the cognitive channel around the world. I saw that in addition to the cognitive channel, people used emotional and kinesthetic channels to process information.
I started thinking of intelligence as the three primary channels we use to process information, rather than how we might score on an IQ test.
And I define the channels as:
Cognitive, being how we cognitively process information with the mind.
Kinesthetic, being how we somatically process information with the body.
And emotional being how we intuitively process information through emotions.
When I started working with people in my programs, which was separate from my research, I started taking people through a journey to uncover how they utilize their cognitive, emotional, and kinesthetic channels.
And I found that most people use the channels in a very balanced way in childhood before 12, meaning they really tapped into and accessed each of them. But, in adulthood, especially within their professional environments, they tended to have a disproportionate reliance on one channel, often at the expense of the other two, which would become repressed and underdeveloped.
The shift to me was just not coincidental because at around age 12, our focus tends to shift to standardized testing, which prompts kids to channel their energies into their cognitive channel and away from their emotional and kinesthetic channels.
This is a tragedy because it causes us to lose out on accessing untapped resources that exist within us. As we move towards one and we stop balancing them out in terms of how we use them, we become over reliant on one, which makes what we're good at more one dimensional.
I could do 10 more podcasts on this topic alone, so I'm not going to go into full detail right now. But for those of you who are members of the newsletter, you'll have access to a chart showing the three channels and each of the intelligences that fall under each, which are partly from multiple intelligence theory and partly from my own data.
And I'll link that in the notes. And we will talk much more about this in the future. But what's crucial to understand at this point is that while we all have the potential to tap into a variety of intelligences within each channel, many of us predominantly utilize just one channel, often neglecting the other two. And to unlock your genius, it's imperative to cultivate and revive the other two channels.
Example Blocker #2
I want to give you a quick example of someone who did that. I had a client who was a government contractor with a very highly developed cognitive channel where she had gained mastery in the reasoning, critical thinking intelligence and verbal linguistic intelligence, through many years of working and consulting within the government sector.
When she hit a point within that work and within that role where she was no longer fulfilled and she didn't feel she could take it any further, but didn't know which direction to move in next, she dug deeper. She found that she had a highly developed intuitive intelligence, which is part of the somatic channel and a highly developed naturalistic intelligence, which is part of the emotional channel.
Both of these, she had really, really repressed over those years. She'd used them a lot in childhood, but she hadn't cultivated them, she hadn't refined them, and she hadn't really accessed them in many years, and she certainly hadn't combined them together with her cognitive channel.
And so her true genius started to expand when she activated those channels and integrated them with her cognitive channel, which was already highly developed from working in the government sector. And now she's running a business in clinical herbalism rather than trying to move around the government sector into new roles. She opened herself up to entirely new opportunities based on strengths she already had access to. She just hadn't brought them out, she hadn't refined them, and she hadn't combined them with what she'd already been using in her professional role.
So in summary, our educational system's emphasis on standardizing and scaling by focusing on the forms of intelligence that are most testable and quantifiable, leads us to adopt a very one dimensional rather than multi dimensional perspective of our intelligence.
We literally have gold within us, but it's gone dormant while we tried to pass tests and get good grades.
Importantly, those aspects of ourselves haven't gone anywhere. They're just dormant. They're just there waiting for us to rediscover them, access them and bring them out into the world because getting to the more multidimensional expression of our intelligence is essential to access our full genius.
Genius Blocker #3: Market Metrics
But again, that's only the second blinder. There is a third one. By the time we get to the end of high school, that next blinder is starting to take shape.
Number three is what I call market metrics or how we had to package ourselves to become employable and feel safe.
As we move out of school and into the workforce, we're incentivized to start looking outside of ourselves and towards the market. And that's when we begin to morph ourselves into what's valuable, marketable and transactional instead of cultivating what makes us original.
Now this isn't necessarily wrong. We all have to develop skills and become more valuable within the market for a period of time. Right? But over time, we lose a sense of what makes us original in pursuit of what makes us marketable. We sort of forget our inherent value as we constantly morph into what the market demands.
We eventually just see ourselves only in terms of what makes us choosable or employable.
This always comes back to bite us, right? Because as the market needs evolve, we are often going to find ourselves becoming less and less relevant, especially if we become reliant on a one dimensional set of strengths.
Or we might find ourselves trapped in roles that are overly dependent on our external value or what I would define as credentials, results, roles, responsibilities, and recognition. The problem is, it's our internal value that allows us to expand in new ways and transcend the market, because unlike our external value, which is generic and replicable, our internal value is unique.
Our internal value includes our nuanced experiences and wisdom, or what I think of as proprietary intellectual property that cannot be duplicated by others. So while millions share the exact same list of resume bullet points as us. No one else possesses our specific blend of experiences and insight.
The problem is most of us overlook our internal value because it's very, very difficult to measure by market standards. As a result, our proprietary intellectual property often remains underdeveloped and underutilized.
Again, it's like undiscovered gold inside us.
In my studies, I used to extensively explore people's stories and experiences and I noticed that people very much are not aware that they have IP embedded in their story.
To uncover the IP, they have to be deliberately guided through a reflective journey, which examines how they became who they are, how they developed the beliefs and values they hold and why they hold those specific values.
Through this process, they can start seeing that they have very specific insights and knowledge that others don't share.
Example Blocker #3
Here's a quick example, not of how I did that process, but of how somebody found and used IP within their story to expand it in a new direction in their career.
I worked with someone who was a marketing executive in the tech industry and she was seeking a more meaningful career path. Like many, she'd kind of hit a wall in terms of where she was going and how she might expand. So initially, she could only envision her growth within the confines of similar roles in competing companies, which felt very unfulfilling because she knew that it would be the same wherever else she went and she was really hitting a wall with that.
When we did the analysis of her life story, we uncovered these pivotal experiences from her upbringing in an immigrant family, which had instilled in her a deep understanding of the importance of mental health services for children By integrating insights from her upbringing with her marketing skills, she was able to transition into a role as a director at a company focused on providing mental health resources for children.
She immediately became much more original and adaptable by building out her own IP, which was rooted in a few very specific insights related to how kids struggle in childhood. And importantly, her insights had nothing to do with her marketing skills. And prior to the exercise, she would have said she didn't have any IP or anything useful in her story, which is what almost everyone tells me when they come to meet me and I ask them to do this exercise.
And the thing is, I really get that because uncovering our insight and ownable IP is very difficult because it can't be accessed through direct questions.
I can't just ask you, what's your IP or what insights shaped you or what insights in your story are unique and ownable to you? If any of us could answer those questions easily, none of us would have any problem articulating what makes us unique. That's why in both my studies and my programs, I primarily use what are called projective techniques, which allow people to access their subconscious and reveal deeper truths about themselves.
Again, there will be entire episodes on this topic. I will share many examples of this. I will start to share some of the techniques, but just know for now to really understand and decrypt your genius, we will have to use unique and fun ways to see what you can't see on the surface. Much of what exists within you is not visible on the surface.
And trust me, you will enjoy exploring yourself. I used to get so confused by the enthusiasm participants showed in my studies because I assumed they would find the process very tedious and boring, but to my surprise, people often asked me to come back for follow up sessions. I finally figured out that most of us just don't have the right tools or opportunities to explore ourselves in a way that reveals new insight.
In modern culture, if you think about it, self exploration is often very limited to therapy, which has a core focus on healing. It's not a tool and practice for discovering ourselves. Or we rely on informal chats with family and friends that are not self focused conversations, and they certainly are not guided and do not typically help us uncover the parts of ourselves that we can't see.
There are just very few ways to look back in on ourselves without an outside analyzer and the projectives really allow us to do that. So stay tuned to learn more about how to use those yourselves to dig into your story.
In summary, the need to become marketable and valuable based on market metrics leads us to become overly reliant on our external value or our credentials, skills, roles, etc. and in that process, our internal value or our IP can go dormant or undiscovered.
And our internal value is just sitting there waiting for us to discover it, access it, bring it out, and to refine it and connect it with all of the other pieces that make up our genius.
How we’re going to overcome the Blockers and Decrypt our Genius together
The three blinders that truly keep us from seeing our internal power are cultural conditioning, standardized schooling, and market metrics.
When these three blinders are at play, three major tragedies happen:
One, we suppress aspects of our authentic nature and lose access to the strengths that are inherent or connected to those aspects of our authentic nature.
Two, we develop a limited or one dimensional understanding of our intelligence, overlooking the vast multi-dimensional spectrum that is actually within us.
And three we conform to the market's demands instead of nurturing the unique internal value that makes us original.
In reality, we are very nuanced, multi dimensional beings with an innate essence that has been trying to emerge and express itself from a young age. But over time, this essence gets more and more encrypted, making it challenging to recognize and articulate.
The world is filled with strategies and tactics telling us what to do, but none of them are relevant when we don't know who we are at the core and what we have to offer.
And that's what we're going to do here on the podcast and within the newsletter:
We are going to share with you tools that offer indirect ways to explore who you are and what makes up your genius, such as the projectives I just mentioned, and many more as well.
We're going to share career playbooks that highlight how the world's most well-known career icons, navigated career transitions and expansions, which they've all had to do. And spoiler, there's a pattern and specific set of cycles they all had to move through and they happen to be the same set of cycles we all have to move through. So you will really want to learn from their stories.
And finally, I will share insight and wisdom from not only my 15 years of field studies on humans around the world, but also from my own journey to use this process and these tools on myself as I made a multi-year career transition into a teacher and creator.
I hope to see you here again soon as we all start to unlock our genius and I encourage you to subscribe to the newsletter because that's where you can comment on this podcast, ask questions, and get specific tools and case studies in your inbox every week.
It's also where I answer questions and host. live chats. So if you want to connect and communicate, come find me there. Thank you again so much.
How we can help:
Free Masterclass Liberate Your Genius:
FREE community + classroom. All Free Ask Kristy questions here + All the Free tools live here.
To inquire about 1:1 sessions to help you through this process, go here.
Come say hi on Insta@sillysapiens
