Live In Your Genius, Not Your Frustration

My team and I have created a team map. It lists out each team member, their Working Genius, their Working Competency, and their Working Frustration. My team has grown since I made this chart but looking below, you can see that we’ve created a good balance of people whose Geniuses balance out other people’s Frustrations in a way that maximizes our gifts.

This process has allowed us to begin creating a new culture, a new language, and a new way to communicate with one another. Brene Brown talks about how we need to learn to be vulnerable with the people in our lives, and be able to say, “I’m out of energy today,” so that they can be there to support us. That’s really great advice, but wouldn’t it be amazing if you weren’t out of energy at the end of each day?

One reason we’re out of energy is from living in our working frustration all day. On a day where I’ve had to work in my frustration for most of my day, I’m poured out. I had to do that recently, and Lora said, “Ok, let me know if you want to talk.” Now that Lora and I have learned about each of our working frustrations, and understand why we’re out of energy, we can share that with each other. We can give each other grace for the days we’re not at our best, especially for the one(s) we live to be our best for.

It’s a perfect example of what was happening during the opening of my first book, Refined by Failure, where I broke down with Lora in Italy. I was so distant from her that she worried I’d been having an affair, when the reality was that I’d been living in my frustration every day. I had been taken out of my role of being the visionary, problem-solving galvanizing person, into having to constantly worry about the details behind keeping the company from a financial crisis.

Because I didn’t know about my working genius and frustration, I didn’t have the ability to communicate  how absolutely empty I’d become. I didn’t even know WHY I had become so absolutely empty. That’s where I was when I was asked to step down. I firmly believe that was God telling me, “You don’t need to be in the season of tenacity, helping this company survive, going through layoffs, being in the trenches every day, I’ll let you go learn.” What felt at the time like a huge failure has turned out to be the greatest gift I could have been given. I was given the gift of time to reflect and heal, and ultimately understand the purpose for my life (my WHY).

Now that I’m in a CEO position again, the hardest thing has been having to slow down and say, time out. We’re not doing what we did last time. I have had to consistently repeat, we’re not doing the same thing again.

This time, we’re doing it differently; we’re smaller, and we don’t want to go back to that same place. Now that I understand who I am, I have the conviction and belief to be able to say no to other people’s expectations of what they think I’m supposed to be doing right now. When I was living life as a people pleaser, I said yes to things I wasn’t supposed to, putting myself in my working frustration all the time.

In fact, I don’t even define CEO the way I did before. At Refined Completions, CEO doesn’t mean chief executive officer, it means chief education officer. My job is to consistently teach our WHY to every team member using the EDGE method, as well as our rules for how we treat each other and our stakeholders.

Something I’ve learned in doing this is that not everyone learns and understands things the same way, and so I’m having to expand my teaching methods and my ability to communicate effectively, in order to meet the specific needs of each person and how they learn. I can still do this within the EDGE method, it just looks different for different people.

I discarded the title of “chief executive officer” because that’s not me. The role of chief executive officer—executive being the primary term—relates to being tenacious, and we already know that Tenacity is my working frustration. Many of the failures I’ve experienced happened because I was trying to avoid being frustrated by having to hold people accountable to their promises, and ultimately dealing with the consequences of failure.

Now, because I’ve learned that I’m an Evangelizing Innovator, I know that my role is to take failure and learn from it, then help others learn from it, and to see where the gift of failure creates our next success.