Why am I doing this
The darker we know the darkness, the brighter the light can shine
In the aftermath of exiting my venture backed company, I initiated a process of deconstructing who I have been into Who I Am – I worked with Aaron Stein, a dear friend, and my executive coach for years through my Silicon Valley founder era, on uncovering my zone of genius. The premise is that you spend your life going between different zones; incompetence, competence, excellence and genius. Hendricks suggests that we gain more fulfillment and happiness when we spend more time on activities in our zone of genius. While this might sound quite obvious, the process of defining this for myself actually took me several months, and the experience of doing the work was deep, soulful, and often painful.
As part of that process, I created a survey and opened it up to anyone who wanted to participate in giving me feedback on how they experience me, as a leader, a friend, in business, in relationships, in life. This is a pretty terrifying thing to do actually, and once I committed to doing it, many weeks were needed to process the vulnerability I was exposing myself to. The day that I hit “send” on the announcement and invitation to take the survey, I was sweating through my shirt and my heart was racing. People from all different facets of my life took the survey over a few weeks time, and as the data came in, I sat over it, trying to pull the threads together that would weave a picture of how I am seen, known, and experienced by those around me. One thing I did was use AI to analyze the data and find the most repeated words and turn it into a word cloud.
One of the most surprising insights was that the word “listening” showed up in literally almost every single person’s answers one way or another. The size of this word over any other was profound to me; I had no idea that people would choose to use this word when describing me in various ways, nor how consistently it would be used. About 90% of my respondents used “listening” in at least one of their responses to my survey. The insight that has been drawn from this is that I am gifted with being capable of deep multi-dimensional listening to fully embody the spectrum of truth for ultimate reflection. I have learned through the feedback shared in my survey, that there is something about being in conversation with me that makes people feel that I am very present with them, and that it leaves them feeling seen in a different way, and I understand that I don’t really feel alive, unless I am doing this. At the point I came to understand this about myself, I didn’t yet know about the work that I was going to do next. And now, my work is centered in deep listening, holding space, and creating a collective voice from the fragmentation through a prism of truth.
After a few weeks of working with all the inputs from my zone of genius survey, self-questionnaire and reflections, I sat down with the task to define my zones of genius and the thesis of my life. The truth is, this will always going to be a WIP (work in progress), but the threads seem to be very consistent, as the elemental pieces of Who I Am have always been within me, and I pursue integrating them more fully into the expression of my actual life moment to moment.
In the working document with Aaron, I defined the thesis of my life:
I am driven to bring the light.
The light illuminating that which the individual and collective soul is here to do.
Because it matters. It is the answer for everything.
When I wrote this, I didn’t yet know that I was going to embark on The Conversations There Are Not Words For. I didn’t know I was going to put myself squarely in the middle of what goes unsaid, because it is so difficult to face. I did not yet know that I was going to be inspired to take a seat in the fire of patriarchy and look for the seed of hope. I didn’t know that deep listening was going to take me into the darkness, in search of the light. Yet, in that moment, Aaron’s comment gave me more to ponder, with respect to the fact that it is only in the darkness that we can know the light. How fortunate am I to have a friend and coach who could reveal myself to me.
my reaction to this is: yes, and you are also here to bring the darkness or the tempest. maybe it's not just light you're meant to bring.
And this still feels exceedingly true.
I am not meant to bring the light, but to bring the tempest, the controversy, the precursor to the revolution. All great change comes from a platform that serves the collective to question itself, and see a new way, together. Polarization is a part of this process. The dark must separate itself to know itself from the light. The darker we know the darkness, the brighter the light can shine.
I am here to hold space for the conversations there aren’t words for, and I intend to listen deeply for the language we can use to find a way forward.
~and onward
If you want to learn a little more about Zone of Genius - this is a good primer.
Dive deeper with any of these books -
The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership: A New Paradigm for Sustainable Success