The Modern LeadHer Way

[088] Escaping the "I'll Be Happy When" Trap

• Emma Clayton • Season 4 • Episode 87

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From the archives: In this episode re-run, we explore the trap of future-focused happiness and how to break free by accessing your zone of genius for true fulfilment now. Discovering where you uniquely thrive is the key to experiencing both success and happiness simultaneously.

We cover: 
• Breaking the cycle of "I'll be happy when I achieve X" by practicing gratitude in the present moment
• Using conscious breathing to counter negative thought patterns that sabotage success
• Understanding the four zones we operate in: incompetence, competence, excellence, and genius
• Identifying your unique zone of genius where work feels effortless and time flows naturally
• Recognizing childhood coping mechanisms as potential clues to your unique genius
• Creating more time and space to operate in your zone of genius through delegation

If you'd like help working out what your zone of genius is, book your Game Plan Strategy Session with me here: https://www.emmaclaytonxo.com/courses/game-plan


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Speaker 1:

This is the Modern Leader Way the podcast for corporate career women who want to feel good on their way to the top. I'm Emma Clayton, and I'll be sharing with you tangible advice to help you stop sacrificing your soul in the name of success and experience more balance, confidence and fulfilment, both in and out of work. We're back. I hope you're well. I hope you're well. I have ran two focus groups in the last um six weeks or so, and one was with a group of women who were looking to build their leadership confidence in 2025. The other group of women have just, uh, been made redundant from their roles and are at that, in between that, they're transitioning into what next, and one of the conversations that we've been having in both of those groups actually is around really taking this opportunity, before you move forward, to look at what it is that you really want to be creating in life. Moving forward, and one of the ways that you can actually create not just that success, but also the happiness in the process, is by really tapping into something that's referred to as your zone of genius. So this isn't just what you're good at, this is actually where you thrive, and so I wanted to bring this back and give it some new life. So I'm sharing it with you here today. I hope you listen to it with fresh ears If you're new around here anyway, you won't have heard it before and I would love to hear what you thought of it after you've given it a listen. So let's get straight into it.

Speaker 1:

So there are a couple of things I want to explore with you here today. The first one is this idea and be honest with yourself if you've ever said this, this idea that you'll be happy one day when, sometime out in the future, I'll be happy when I get the dream body, I'll be happy when I get the dream man, I'll be happy when I finally hit a director level or managing director level. I'd be happy when I get to X amount salary or this performance rating, whatever that'll be. If you've ever said that, be honest, put your hand up. I've got mine raised already. You won't be the only one, trust me. And here's the problem with this is that if we're always waiting for one day when we're missing opportunities to be happy, to feel good now, and the problem going on from that is, it's a perpetual cycle, right, because you get the thing, you get to the director level, let's say, and you're happy for a moment, but it passes quite quickly and then you're on to the next thing. It's fleeting. Then you're on to the next big dream. So I'll be happy when I get to that managing director level role. Now, after a couple of years, you're on to the next big thing.

Speaker 1:

We don't stop here. We're human beings. We're always constantly looking to grow and evolve. Otherwise we stay the same, which suits no one right. So we get to the dream and then we dream bigger. It's like you get to the mountain peak that you can see from where you're starting, and it's not until you get up to the top of the peak that you see there's another peak that you get to climb now. So you want that next peak and the next peak. You're seeking the next dream and the next dream. That's beautiful to some extent, and if we're always waiting until we get there, until we're happy, we can't experience happiness now.

Speaker 1:

So the way to experience success and happiness and feel good on the way is to slow down for a minute. Let's just stop what you're doing, put the thing down that you've got, that you're multitasking with, and just look around you. Where are you in your life and what have you created? Can you just take a moment to take it all in and go? I did that. Even if you're not where you ideally want to be, can you look around you and go? That's mine. I'm here, I did that and I'm grateful and just feel into the gratitude of that right now. That is how you experience happiness. Now. That's how you expedite happiness and experience more and more of those moments where you're just grateful to be alive, where you're just grateful for all that hard work that you've put in to allow you to live in the house that you do, to have the relationships that you do, to own the things that you do, to have the experiences that you have to just take it all in, to take stock, take a minute to put a smile on your face and pat yourself on the back and say I did that. Those increased moments of gratitude that you do throughout the day will increase your happiness in the now. And the more you stop to allow yourself that space to do this, to practice this, the easier it becomes. And it might be that you need a little bit of help, some reminders, to do this. I remember having little reminders come up on my phone at like two o'clock in the afternoon and I had various post-it notes around my desk and I had a gratitude journal by my bed that I wrote in either in the morning or in the evening.

Speaker 1:

Just got into a habit and you just notice that it's the small things, it's the smallest of things that actually start to invoke that feeling from the inside out. And this is the key here is that it doesn't come from outside of you, it doesn't come from achieving those things out in the future. It comes from within and it comes from the smallest of things Listening to a bird cheeping and singing in the distance, or just feeling the sun on your skin, or just noticing a photo that's on the wall and smiling with a memory of that moment that was captured in time. This is how we practice being happy now and with anything. The more you do this, the more easy it is to access that kind of state, that feeling state that feels more good than not.

Speaker 1:

And what's really interesting is when you start to use your awareness to notice how, soon after you feeling good, how soon after you having these thoughts of what you're grateful for, do you start to notice other thoughts creep in that are perhaps more habitual, perhaps more your normal state of mind. Maybe they're worry thoughts or comparison or fear or just negative kind of spirals that you may actually recognize as quite normal because they take up a lot of your usual headspace and this happens. This is very natural because our brain likes to do things on autopilot, because it has so much to think about and do to get us through a day right. It just prefers the familiar. So when we're trying something new, when we're trying to replace, like, a negative thought pattern with something like gratitude, something more positive it's, it takes effort. It actually takes a little bit of conscious effort for that to become the norm, simply because we're up against the brain's mechanism that keeps us in these autopilot kind of thought loops. So with that in mind, it's also really good to notice, when you start practicing this, dropping into that grateful state and just like really being present in this moment and starting to feel good now is to notice what thoughts then come in that knock you out of that state, because this is where we tend to sabotage ourselves.

Speaker 1:

And actually there's a book called the Big Leap. It's by a writer called Gay Hendricks and he describes this invisible barrier to next level success in work, relationships and love as the upper limit problem. It's almost like we start to feel successful, we start to feel happy, and that's unfamiliar, and therefore we've kind of feel like we've hit this ceiling and we sabotage with negative thought patterns and we find ourselves back where we were before, and we see this time and time again. Right, I'm sure if you're like me and most of the female population, you've at some point been unhappy with your body, with your weight, with your size. You've gone on a diet, you've started to see progress and you've started to feel good and you've started to get comments from people outside of you and then, for some reason really frustrating you've kind of unwound that good work and you've ended up back at the weight you were, or, if you're like me, you found yourself at even a heavier weight than you were to start with. So this is the upper limit problem in action. And Gay Hendricks actually uses the example of Bill Clinton who, as a child, visited the White House and claimed that one day he was going to live there, and of course he went on to become the president. Yet soon after, in office, he actually sabotaged that by having extramarital affairs with his PA, and we all know how that ended. So Bill Clinton reached his upper limit and sabotaged his success in that moment. And this is the very real risk that we run if we don't address that problem.

Speaker 1:

So in this book, the Big Leap, gay Hendricks actually talks about studying your thoughts, studying those negative thoughts that knock us out of that feel-good state, and you will notice over time. If you study them, if you write them down in a journal, if you capture them in notes in your phone and actually compare them, you'll realise that very few of them have anything to do with reality. They're all if, buts and maybes A lot of the time they're the worst case scenario and they're just not substantiated in any fact. And this is good, because from that place we get to discredit them right, we get to challenge those thoughts and we get to give them a nod and say, oh hi, thoughts, I see you're there, but actually not buy into the drama a lot of the time that they bring.

Speaker 1:

And I find that the simplest way I can get myself out of those negative thought loops when I notice them occurring, and can discredit them because there's no truth in the matter is to use the breath. It's the most underrated yet cheapest. You know it's free to use our breath. We do it all the time. We just don't consciously use it and this is because fear is just excitement without the breath. So if you are excited and then you stop breathing, you become fearful. It's that simple. And we breathe all the time, yet we don't do it consciously. It's something our brain operates on autopilot. We know we can thank our brain, we can give a little nod to our brain for that. But when we do drop in and consciously take some big, deep breaths, like really breathe, suck in the air, expand our lungs, like send it down to our belly and give a big exhale, and we do that a few times, that just conscious breath, it's like literally letting out a sigh of relief and we can go about our day. We can get back to gratitude or we can go about our day.

Speaker 1:

So that's the first thing I wanted to cover off, which was this idea that we'll be successful and happy one day when we've achieved X, y, z someday out in the future. And actually flipping that on its head and going, no, I get to, I get to feel successful and happy now, and that actually doesn't come from something outside of me, actually doesn't come from something outside of me. It comes from within and it comes from taking those real conscious moments to just be grateful for what we have around us, to just notice what we notice, and then practicing that and also noticing when those negative thought loops come in and just seeing it for what it is just a negative, negative thought loop, nothing that we have to actually attach to. Then the next thing that I wanted to bring in is also another concept that Gay Hendricks covers off in his book, which I highly recommend actually, it's one of the very first books that I read off the personal development shelf the Big Leap and he talks about where are we operating? The majority of our time is in one of these four zones that he talks about. There's a zone of incompetence, the zone of competence, the zone of excellence and then our zone of genius. And only when we're operating in our zone of genius can we truly experience this feel good and success simultaneously and effortlessly. So let me just explain what those zones are.

Speaker 1:

So a zone of incompetence is it is what it says on the tin right, we're not good at it. We probably don't like doing it. It bores us. That might be why we don't. We're not good at it. We probably don't like doing it. It bores us. That might be why we don't. We're not good at it.

Speaker 1:

If I think of things like housework, I'm not particularly good at it because it bores the hell out of me and surprisingly, we do tend to spend a lot of time hanging out here in our zone of incompetence, when, if you think about it, these are just the things that we get to outsource, we get to delegate, we get to find solutions for my tax returns, for example not something I'm good at, not something I'm interested in learning about, so I would always outsource it, just like I will always have a cleaner. Then there's those tasks, those activities, there's the time spent in our zone of competence. So this is something that we're very good at, but you know, others can do it just as well, and it's not necessarily something that brings us that feeling of fulfillment. It doesn't really add anything to our day. So this could be something like cooking. So for me, I'm a good cook, but actually I don't enjoy it that much, and my partner's just as good a cook as I am, and so I get to share that with him, because it's not something that brings me fulfilment. I know in the big grand vision I have for my life, I will have a living chef for sure, or at least have those meal boxes delivered where I don't have to worry about spending time cooking, because it's just not something I enjoy.

Speaker 1:

So the zone of competence you'll find lots of things in here that you or someone else can do just as well, just do good at it, but it's like me. And then there's a zone of excellence. So this is things you do really, really well. But it's a seductive and dangerous trap and we can get addicted to hanging out here. So when I think about how I used to spend a lot of my time in the corporate world, it was being like I'm really excellent at being organized, at being on top of things, at planning, at like mapping out what needs to be done, at getting people engaged and keeping people accountable to what they said they were going to deliver. I'm very, very good at that. Like that was what I was sought after. To like play that project management role in a lot of the areas that I ended up working in because I was really, really good at it.

Speaker 1:

But there is a danger that it becomes a comfort zone thing, and it's a danger that you don't actually thrive here, because where you're meant to thrive is in your zone of genius, and this is where only you can do what you do in the way that you do it. It's not replicable by anyone else out there. It is completely unique to you and who you be. It's what you do when time doesn't fly, but it flows. There's an effortlessness to it and you can't explain it either, and the chances are you can't even see it now. If I asked you to put a finger on it, you wouldn't be able to.

Speaker 1:

And gay hendrix goes on to say that liberating this, liberating your zone of genius, is your ultimate path to fulfillment and potential. So you might be wondering well, gee, great, what is my genius if I can't see it? Well, it's the thing that comes most naturally to you. So you need to wonder and this is just a contemplative question or two what do you most love to do? And sometimes it helps to look back to when you were a child and you were just like lost in your own little world, because you were just full to the brim with doing what you love the best. It's likely that it does not feel like work to you and it's going to be whatever produces the highest ratio of abundance and satisfaction to the amount of time that you're spending on it.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so you get to ask what is your unique ability? And it's usually like a skill within a skill within a skill, a bit like russian dolls. If you were to take the large russian doll head off, you'd find another skill in there, and then, if you look inside that one, there's another skill, and the idea is that you just get to get to the bottom of it and there is in lies your genius, your unique ability and, interestingly, another way to look at this, which is a lot of the work that I do with my clients, actually, when we work one-to-one together to work out what it is that is their genius is what did they learn and develop as a child? To cope with difficult situations, because therein lies a little clue as to what your genius might be. So I'll give you an example from my own childhood.

Speaker 1:

I became super vigilant around people and their moods. I would be able to detect if someone was gonna lose their shit at any time and that I was gonna need to adapt how I showed up in the room at that time to kind of for damage limitation, if you like. So, without being too cryptic, I'm talking about my parents being quite volatile in terms of their moods and actually just being able to read the room and know when I could either appease the situation or actually remove myself from the situation. And this served me back then because it meant that I wasn't so affected by the volatility of the mood in the room and actually I went on to play in that kind of facilitation role within my friend groups, within my relationships and within my teams at work. And what I realised was actually I wasn't necessarily harnessing this unique ability in the best way, because I was still keeping it to myself for one. I was still keeping it to myself for one, whereas actually, when I started to call out what I was sensing some of the elephants in the room I'm sensing that there's not a unanimous agreement on this discussion point.

Speaker 1:

And can we explore that? Can we dig into that further? When I started to say I hear what you're saying, but I also hear what you're not saying, and it's this that is part of my genius. That is now what I take into my work with my one-on-one coaches, coachees, in my one-on-one coaching, and that is where I help people move through their own stuff in a quicker timeline with bigger, the biggest possible transformation in that moment. It really has turned out to be one of my skills.

Speaker 1:

So was there something you developed as a child really cleverly developed as a child, to cope with a difficult situation? That actually is something that you can really harness today, because therein lies your zone of genius. And, like I said, when we can spend more of our time operating in that zone and less time in the other zones, certainly delegating some of the stuff that's in our zone of incompetence and even our competence to free up time, space, energy to focus in our zone of genius, then that is where true satisfaction, that real feel good, comes from. If you'd like help to work out what your zone of genius is, then book your game plan strategy session with me. It's 90 minutes, unadulterated. You and me. We get to talk all about you, what it is that makes you a genius and how you get to tap into more of that in your life and work now. So hit me up for that. You'll find the link in the show notes and I will see you next time, take care.

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Emma Clayton

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