Questions to Ask Yourself

Finding Your Zone Part 2

We talked yesterday about “The zone” and the importance of finding yours. If you missed it, you can catch up here:

So, what if you don't know what your “zone” activity is?

Uncover Your Passions

Well, here are some questions you can ask yourself to at least point you in the right direction.

• If you had unlimited funds in the bank, and didn't have to work ever again for money, what would you do tomorrow?

• Once you'd done all the usual stuff, like a blowout holiday, new home, and furnishings, and bought a whole new wardrobe and car. What would you do then?

• If money were no object, how would you pass your time?

Chances are there's something you would gravitate towards, whether it's something you already do but on a “held back” basis, such a weekend golf or fishing, or something you have always fancied “having a go at,” whether that's potholing or scuba diving or whatever.

• If you were to take an evening class, what would it be in? Flower arranging? Cake Decoration? Brick Laying? Welding?

• What subjects did you like at school? Art? Drama? Geography? History? STEM subjects?

• What were your childhood hobbies? Stamp collecting? Bug collecting? Skateboarding?

• What gets you “on your soap box”? In conversation, what topics get you going? When do you catch yourself debating your opinions? Are you a vegetarian? A conservationist? or just a conversationist? Do you love telling jokes or stories?

The point is, there is something in your life that makes you come alive. If it's not obvious to you, ask your family and friends what subjects you talk about most, and use this as a starting point.

Uncover Your Talents

Of course, wanting to try something and learn about it doesn’t necessarily make it a zone activity for you. Especially in the early days of learning a complex skill, it can take a lot of focus and involve a fair bit of frustration.

Some people take that to mean your zone can only exist where you are already skilled, and so advise finding your talents and focusing on those. In other words, asking questions like

• What are you good at?

• What do people compliment you for?

• What do people come to you for help with?

Which is okay as far as it goes, but you can acquire a significant body of knowledge and skill in an area and not be lit up by it. It confuses the zones of competence with zone activity. The zones of competence being:

• Unconscious incompetence: you don’t know what you don’t know, and so imagine something is easy.

• Conscious incompetence: having started, you hit your first obstacle and realise what you don’t know and that there’s a learning curve ahead.

• Conscious competence: You learn the thing, and can do it, but it takes focus and awareness.

• Unconscious competence: You have fully acquired the skill and can do it “without thinking.”

Gay Hendricks in his book The Big Leap, adds two more zones:

• The excellence zone: You are highly skilled at the thing, having probably completed the 10,000 hours necessary to become an expert, as popularised by Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller Outliers.

• The genius zone: The portion of your Excellence zone that aligns with your passions. The meeting of passion and talent.

The argument being that you can ONLY experience flow in this genius zone. The flaw with this argument is that if you had to practice anything for 10,000 hours and achieve excellence BEFORE experiencing flow, none of us would ever get there.

Yes, I’m aware it might sound like a contradiction. What I’m saying is that neither passion nor talent alone is likely to be enough to sustain you to achieve zone experience with any consistency. You need both, but not at the highest levels, and not equally, or all the time. You just need enough of one or both combined to keep you motivated enough to continue.

Uncover Exhilaration

You can experience flow at every stage of the competence ladder in your genius zone. In fact, I would go as far as to argue that if you don’t experience the zone at every stage, either you haven’t found your genius yet, or the thing is starting to lose its shine for you. The zone is not some magical thing that happens at the pinnacle of any activity. It just looks different at each stage.

• In the unconscious incompetence phase, it might look like fascination and daydreaming.

• In the conscious incompetence phase, it might be getting lost in learning.

• In the conscious competence phase, it might be simply losing track of time as you hone your skills.

• When you reach conscious competence, it’s doing the thing while musing on ways to improve the process or outcome not just for yourself but for others.

• In the excellence zone, it’s making it look easy and having fun while accomplishing the thing others are still fantasizing about.

• In the genius zone, it’s that '“something else” that everyone recognizes as genius.

The zone is all about absorption and being fully immersed in what you are doing, so that the rest of the world falls away. Being naturally gifted isn’t enough. It’s hard to imagine anyone getting to the zone performance of world-class athletes without being in love with their sport at every level along the way.

Performance strategist and TEDx speaker Laura Garnett created “The Genius Habit” framework to help others identify their zone activities. “Your Zone of Genius is comprised of two essential data points: your genius and your purpose,” she says. “Your genius is the thinking or problem solving that you're best at; it's what allows you to be challenged in the best way possible. Your purpose is the impact — on the world or others — that's most meaningful to you.”

Notice Garnet talks about purpose, not passion. Here, we’re moving into the “One thing” territory of City Slickers. Questions Garnet poses to help you uncover your genius zone include:

• When were you last "in the zone" or exhilarated by the thinking you were doing?

• What other occasions can you remember?

• What patterns or common ways of thinking or problem-solving emerge?

We all have these zone experiences tied to our emotional and values, Garnet says, though sometimes we need to dig deep to recognise them. If you struggle to identify them, she says, “Start observing the moments in which you're completely fulfilled by the impact you're having on another person. What is that specific impact?” 

If you can find the overlap between your passions and talents and identify the things you can do for hours on end without ever getting bored, chances are you’ve found your zone activities. Congratulations. That was the easy part.

Next, we’re going to focus on figuring out how to turn that genius zone into a business model.

A shorter version of this post originally appeared on the Paying Hobby blog on October 10, 2009.