Ever feel like your work doesn't quite tap into your natural strengths? Does your work exhaust you by the end of the week? Could it be that your work is out of alignment with your genius? Did you even know that you ARE a genius? Come join me in my conversation with Sheryl Davis, from Wellness in a Chaotic World, as we discuss Pat Lencioni’s Working Genius, a game changing model of self awareness, not only for personal growth but for the health and dynamics of an entire team.
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Ever feel like your work doesn't quite tap into your natural strengths? Does your work exhaust you by the end of the week? Could it be that your work is out of alignment with your genius? Did you even know that you ARE a genius? Come join me in my conversation with Sheryl Davis, from Wellness in a Chaotic World, as we discuss Pat Lencioni’s Working Genius, a game changing model of self awareness, not only for personal growth but for the health and dynamics of an entire team.
Main points:
Links
Let's connect.
I am cheering for you!
I am a certified Enneagram coach, and a certified Working Genius facilitator.
Kelly Tibbitts:I had discovered Pat Lencioni when I first became a leader. He speaks at conferences. He's written a lot of great books. One of his big ideas is that when you work with people, you want to work with people who are hungry, humble and smart. And it doesn't mean like book smart, it means smart in whatever you're doing. So when I was a teacher, of course I want to work with people who are humble, who are hungry, they want what's best for the students and they're smart. They're constantly learning new things about being a great educator. I had been following him for years and he discovered that work needs six steps in order to be successful. And because he had access to thousands of leaders, he was able to take his idea and bring it to people and they had so many great aha moments that he's now moved it from just the workplace into homes and he's seeing, you know, marriages and families where people are feeling heard and seen and honored. And so the six steps if you think of an airplane that's on the ground, going up into whatever you know number of miles, the airplane is flying up there. You don't want the airplane going up and dropping in and then going back. You want the airplane to have a nice smooth, you know launch and landing. So it's six steps to getting work done, and all work needs six steps.
Kelly Tibbitts:As humans, there's one to two areas that you're a genius. When you're doing this work, it fills you with life. There are a few areas that we'll talk about where you are highly competent and you can do them, but because it's not your genius, the more you do it, the more energy you give out. And then there's a few areas that are frustrating. They drain your energy quickly, and if you can't find people to partner with and you have to bear that burden, you're going to be exhausted. And his heart behind all the work he does is his.
Kelly Tibbitts:Dad was a great man, but he was in the wrong role and he wanted to do something different for the world and help people enjoy work and do work. Because he felt like and I feel exactly the same way people were created for work, like purpose and dreams matter, and so we were just briefly talking about it. You had a little bit of an aha moment, and so I would love to help people notice. There's six steps. Try to notice what doesn't feel true. That's always the best place to start and then it takes a little bit of self-awareness to notice which one or two might be your genius and try to do more of that. Try to fill yourself up.
Sheryl Davis:Please walk us through the six. What the acronym is essentially? Widget.
Kelly Tibbitts:It is widget, so the T actually ended up being T because they came up with widget by mistake, if you think of like a little tool, a widget. So the first letter of widget is W and that is wonder, and people who are gifted in wonder know how to ask good questions. So before work begins, there should be questions. What are you doing, simon Sinek? Start with why? Why are you doing it? How should we do it when? Why are we even changing what we're doing to do something new? If the house is already painted white, why are we going to paint the walls?
Kelly Tibbitts:The problem with being excellent at W and not being at least competent in I is you can really judge yourself, because many times you would have brought really good questions to the table but not had any answers because the next step wasn't your genius. And so I've worked with quite a few people at this point who had so many ahas about being strong in questioning but not necessarily strong at ideating, and that was sort of an aha moment you had about wondering. It probably makes you a really good podcast host. You probably have great questions.
Sheryl Davis:Well, yeah, I mean, I remember when you, when you brought this up, I remembered in my, my last. I worked there for 10 years, but I would get very frustrated because they would constantly be saying to me how can you be more innovative?
Kelly Tibbitts:that's, that's your weakness. What's let's be?
Sheryl Davis:more innovative, and yet I was still asking tons of questions of them and I had no answers right, and so how frustrating to expect every human to be an innovator.
Kelly Tibbitts:It's not every human's genius. So here they had such a gift at the table. Let me ask you all the questions, and then you go off and innovate. So innovate, ideate is the second step, and that is you're the person when there's a whiteboard in the room. You can't wait to dream a million possibilities. It does not mean you know which ones will work and why they'll work. You just love dreaming Not a genius of mine. So it made being an entrepreneur a little hard. I can't just ideate. And then the next step is discerning. I like this step If there's a bunch of different ideas in front of me. I like noticing the pros and cons, I like putting different ideas together. So that's the first step.
Kelly Tibbitts:So say, you're at a work meeting and you're like you know what we need to do something different. So I used to be a pastor and we would put on an event every year, and I would think a really good way to move this event into a better event is to let the person with the W come up with all the questions why did we start at this time? What if we did that instead? And they don't have any answers, they're just W-ing, they're just questions, and the ideator is like we could have it in Costa Rica and there's no limits, like just brainstorm and ideate. But the discerner needs to come in and say, well, the budget's $500 and we need to feed a thousand people, so we probably have to do ABC. What's hard is if you're not self-aware, and one of these areas is your frustrating area. You don't want to do that work. So I worked with so many people who were so great at ideating, but they didn't really have any discerning in them and so they'd get really bored. As we were trying to take their ideas and make them practical and to energize themselves, they would come up with a new idea.
Kelly Tibbitts:And the person who invented this platform, Pat Lencioni that's what he noticed is, when he needed more energy, he went back to ideating and his partner, who he respected at work and she was a female said to him why do you do that? And he said I don't know. And then he went to discover it. And I think that's the most amazing healthy leader to not be defensive but to go discover why do I do this? And it turned out he got energy from ideating and he got bored as the process went along and so now he knows to sort of step back and let other people do the next three steps.
Kelly Tibbitts:So widget starts with W wonder. I- ideate. D-discern. Then you need a galvanizer. The galvanizer first has to galvanize themselves and then galvanize other people to go do something that's been decided to do. So the discerner said okay, we're going to have the event the second Saturday of September. We have $500. We need to feed a thousand people. Half of it's going to be provided through potluck, half of it's going to be this way.
Kelly Tibbitts:The galvanizer then has to convince everybody. We want you to go home and make something and bring it with you. We want you to invite a friend. Some people love being able to be that person. Some people get completely exhausted there. After the galvanizer is like let's go, we're going to go do this amazing event.
Kelly Tibbitts:The E, the enablement, which is my number one strength, would go to different people and say I think you'd be so great at moving picnic tables. Would you mind doing that? And if you can get the right person in charge of picnic tables, they love it. But if you get the wrong person doing picnic tables, they're frustrated and they might not even end up where they're supposed to be because they didn't really want to do it, but they didn't know how to say no. So that was my sweet spot of leadership, and I didn't even know it. I wasn't self-aware.
Kelly Tibbitts:So the E is like equipping, enabling, encouraging people to do the tasks that allow us to do whatever we decided to do. The galvanizer is like let's go, but they're not necessarily equipping and encouraging the people who are going to go do it. They're just selling the vision, they're the energy. And then, finally, we need the T. The T of widget is tenacity, but it's really like finishing. It's the person who wants the files to actually go back into the file cabinet when they're done. It's the person who says we said we were going to do this, let's finish it before we move on. And so there are six different ways of getting work from before it's even begun to finished. And nobody has all six, and everybody gets tired at some point and needs some encouragement or someone else to just partner with them. And it doesn't help anybody if we jump around to where our genius is and try to put all the energy there.
Kelly Tibbitts:So, as an unaware leader, every single meeting I was jumping to the D of discernment or the E of enablement, and it wasn't taking the time to W and wonder what we need to do and when we need to do it, but without knowing better. I did partner with somebody on purpose who did do that. Well, my struggle was being an ideator is so hard for me that I didn't want to spend any time doing it, and I had a whole bunch of ideators on my team who loved to think of new ideas but didn't necessarily want to finish the project once we made a decision to do it. So, as I was just briefly overviewing them, anything you noticed about you and what's easy for you to do at work and what's kind of frustrating or exhausting- and I can tell you right off the bat that galvanizing would I mean, even if I tried to do that, I would be completely tapped out.
Sheryl Davis:No energy there.
Kelly Tibbitts:And so what's interesting is you and I are both trying to create things and bring them to the world, and that involves galvanizing. It involves telling other people about us and how great our program is, and both of us noticed that's exhausting.
Sheryl Davis:That's exhausting. Yeah, the other thing I noticed that there's like I can tell almost right off the bat from just listening to you that, like one of my geniuses is probably the wisdom and you know, my bottom is the galvanizing but, it's the stuff in the middle that gets a little murky.
Kelly Tibbitts:Yeah, nuance is hard to notice, isn't it? So the first step of wondering if you were thinking, today I want to create a podcast, and someone said, would you have some good questions? It would be very easy for you to say. I wonder which platform I should host it on. I wonder how long they should be, I wonder, I wonder. I wonder that would be easy for you to do.
Sheryl Davis:Yes, very easy.
Kelly Tibbitts:Then going into a community like you and I are part of an online community and saying, come, join me, friends, and having to go live every day and share it would exhaust you.
Sheryl Davis:Yeah, absolutely. I mean it would take hours for me to just get up. I guess I'll call it courage. Maybe it is just the energy and courage to put something out there like that Right, Say, I'm doing this.
Kelly Tibbitts:Yes, and yet because we're in a community that's pretty large. If you went on today, you'd notice the people for whom that's quite easy, the getting out there and telling people about things, so they're probably high in galvanizing.
Kelly Tibbitts:The other things are like most of us. Those are your competencies and we can always grow in our competency. It might be something even galvanizing for you. Galvanizing for me, ideating for me the more you do something, the more competent you get. But what he really wanted people to learn from this tool is burnout often happens when we're in our competent or frustrated roles more than the roles that energize us.
Kelly Tibbitts:And I do think it all comes down to energy, like what things bring you into that abundant, aligned energy and what things move you out of it. And as an adult, you have to do all six steps of work right. I used to be in ministry and nobody really wanted to like change garbage bags out. No one felt like that was their ministry. Lots of people wanted to sing in the front, like all things have to happen in order for something to work right. In a family, somebody does have to actually buy the groceries.
Kelly Tibbitts:And galvanizing is interesting because galvanizing starts with you. So you might even notice it's hard to make yourself move and do things, let alone inspire everybody else to join you. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion. That's why James Clear's Atomic Habits is so helpful. What kind of steps move you towards movement? Right is always good for you to know. So the other things are your competencies, and there's a nuance to them. There are some that you can do depending on the energy of the day, and it's fine, you don't feel depleted at the end of the day. It also, a lot of it, comes down to the people that we're in community with, and how do they, either, you know, speak to that core motivation that you have, or they, you know, push against you with an energy that's not affirming.
Kelly Tibbitts:But in order for your podcast to happen, in order for all of the things that we do to happen, the first thing is some great questions. So if you're going to have a guest on, it's probably easy for you to come up with 10 good questions to ask them Then. So if you're gonna have a guest on, it's probably easy for you to come up with 10 good questions to ask them. Then you have to ideate. Well, do I want to do it this way or that way? If you have to constantly ideate, you know if, if, all of a sudden, people don't want to listen to podcasts anymore, they want to do something new and different. That might not be super fun for you and it might be really fun for somebody else. The discerning of should the podcast be 20 minutes, should I cut this part? Easier or harder than ideating?
Sheryl Davis:Easier.
Kelly Tibbitts:Yeah, and that's what we just really want to notice the nuance. I can do a little bit more discerning, but the ideating of changing the podcast cover and putting out on YouTube and I'm going to get really tired doing that and I don't have enough energy for that, so I'll save that for Saturday and but I can discern, today I have enough energy to do that. Then the galvanizing of being the one out there that's promoting yourself, that's telling everybody this would really serve. You should come listen to it. Easier, harder than discerning.
Sheryl Davis:Oh, very much harder.
Kelly Tibbitts:So what kind of energy do you need for galvanizing? You often need a lot of emotional energy and so we don't generally as a society have great tools for emotional energy depletion. Like when you get physically tired, people say take a vitamin, go take a nap, go sit in the sunshine. What do you need when you get emotionally depleted? I think back when my girls had concussions mental depletion you can use concussion protocol, don't use your phone, don't try to solve any hard problems.
Kelly Tibbitts:But emotionally it's kind of different, because some people are more introverted and they need more time alone and some people are more extroverted and they need time with people who fill them. So there's a nuance there. So if you're going to go galvanize and you use up all your energy, how are you going to refill yourself? That would be great for you to discover. And then enablement, like helping your guests succeed, helping the people who are listening to your podcast find it easier and get the notes they need compared to galvanizing easier or harder, but still something that will take away your emotional energy and doesn't necessarily fill you up as much. And then the tenacity making sure the notes are right and the podcast is where it's supposed to be and everything that needed to be done is done. Do you get a little energy when that's?
Sheryl Davis:Yeah, I do, yeah, yeah.
Kelly Tibbitts:And that's an interesting thing to know, because not everybody does so. What's interesting? When things are a genius? We just take it for granted. That's not a genius and everybody can do it, but now that your eyes are open to it, you might discover a whole bunch of people.
Kelly Tibbitts:I think just to the community we're in. The people that I think of that are like amazing galvanizers, high energy. I don't think they like finishing things, and then what happens? When you don't really enjoy the teamwork or it's depleting, you tend to just pivot and start something new instead of finishing the thing that you began, and so it might be a genius that you haven't even been aware of that. If you say you're going to do something, you finish it, and for other people it's so frustrating and exhausting. They don't and you might again have an aha, oh. That's why that relationship was a little bit difficult. The part that was easy for you was the beginning and the end, and someone that you worked with it might have been the middle, and if you knew that and everyone's self aware, what a great team. When we're not self aware, we're just sort of judging each other and frustrated by the other.
Sheryl Davis:Yeah, that was one of the more interesting things when I started listening to Pat's podcast about this model was that when teams have this language around it, they can move past that judgment and also the guilt that people were feeling about it.
Kelly Tibbitts:Right. That is why I want to be a life coach for the rest of my life. I feel like the gift I gave my three daughters who are like living really vibrant lives is they're much less unkind to themselves in their twenties than I was because I wasn't self-aware, I was judging myself against all kinds of different people and holding myself to a standard that now that I'm self-aware, I just say oh, of course, how human of me. Of course that part would have been hard for me and it doesn't mean it's an excuse and I don't want to grow. But for you to take the little bit of energy you have and put it into an area that's going to give you more energy is such a gift to you in the world.
Kelly Tibbitts:And taking that little bit of energy that's not even enough to do something that is exhausting and frustrating to you is just going to deplete you more. You get to be intentional. Oh, if I could do this one thing sit with somebody and let me ask them great questions and then send them the notes on it. That would just give me that spark and then I can go do the next thing. That would be so much better than. Okay, I'm going to open up IG live and try to galvanize people, and I don't have any energy and now I just want to take a nap and close my company Right, like that's the gift that self-awareness can give us is maybe just need a partner who loves to talk and you can help them ask good questions.
Sheryl Davis:Yeah, like the, the message is really that we need each other a hundred percent, which for someone who is a solopreneur can be a tough thing to take in and just admit.
Kelly Tibbitts:Well, I think that's why you and I might have been drawn to the same community. Is, you know, when Cathy Heller said here's a quilt, that was what drew me in. I want to be with other people because I can't do this alone. And when I can be in the energy of other people who are passionate about what I'm passionate about and can spur me on, you know, it was why I was a pastor for a long time. It's why I was an educator. I think communities exist so that people can support each other. Nobody has all six geniuses, and that's so freeing. If you knew that now could go back to that meeting where they're like you need to ideate more, you could have stood in your own wisdom and said actually, it's not a genius of mine, and nobody has all six geniuses. And you don't even need to say it out loud to just know it in your soul. And then you don't receive from broken people things that just aren't serving you to take in.
Sheryl Davis:Right and I wouldn't have beaten myself up for you know, a year or two at least for that right. You know someone telling me something that they they might have needed something from me, but it wasn't something that I could give them.
Kelly Tibbitts:Right and you probably would have served that community best if they kept you in your spot of genius and allowed the ideators who probably weren't struggling with ideating they're probably struggling with discerning the next step. I've met many ideators who lose their energy in the discerning process and then they don't want to continue on, so they just go ideate something new. And that doesn't serve most people because we should start things and then finish them and then judge it and say what worked, what didn't and what can we do better. But it often helps us to actually complete projects that we begin before we start new things.
Sheryl Davis:Yeah, definitely. So there's one other level to this model that I found interesting, which is that if you kind of draw a line down horizontally across it, there's like the top is receiving.
Kelly Tibbitts:Yes.
Sheryl Davis:And what is the bottom again?
Kelly Tibbitts:So they're responsive and disruptive energies. So the W is at the top, the I is on the bottom, the D is at the top, the G is on the bottom. The D is at the top, the G is on the bottom, the E is at the top, the T is on the bottom. So think of inventors and imagine a person standing still. The inventor is going to lean forward with their energy and be like what if we create this, can you picture that? They're just like leaning forward? The galvanizer is going to lean forward and be like come on, everybody, let's go. And then the T, when it works well, has been given the authority to say okay, team, we said we're going to finish it, let's do it Now. Imagine still standing straight and then leaning back. The W is sort of leaning back Hmm, things don't seem to be working really well right now. I wonder but you need something to respond to. So the W is the D and the E. They're all responding to something that already exists. They're not creating something out of nothing, they're responding to it. So the wonder is like hmm, this just isn't like. Right now, outside my window it's snowing. Someone who wonders would say I wonder how I could move that snow a little bit easier. They might not invent a snow blower, but their question might help somebody invent the snowblower. And the person who invented the snowblower might be like what if we put a fan connected to the shovel? And what if we did this? And what if we did that? And the discerner would say well, now you need an electric source or you need some gasoline or you need this, but what about that? And the problem with the W and the D is it's a responsive energy. They don't have that strong assertive energy. In general, people might not hear them because they're not the loudest in the room. One of the gifts that Pat Lencioni gave me is that you want the humble person at your table, and the humble person might not always yell. You might need to wait and ask them specifically hey, what do you think?
Kelly Tibbitts:So, knowing that that some people have a responsive energy and you might need to ask them, what do you think would make most people a better leader? Don't just listen to the energy of the ideator and the galvanizer. Right, they're going to come in. You're going to know they're in the room. The wonderer, the discernment, the enablement. They might just be leaning back a little bit and if you are wonder and discernment and enablement, maybe this is the podcast that helps you believe you are a genius and they need your words and they need your voice and you can lean in and you can share.
Kelly Tibbitts:So if you could go back in time and that person's like you're not innovating enough and you knew to the core of who you are, I'm actually quite the genius, if you let me, in my role, I'm going to ask good questions and I'm going to lead this team to complete it, but I have to have the authority to do so and if you walked with that confidence, that team would be served. But most of us are not self aware enough to know where our geniuses lie. So, yeah, some of them are responsive and some of them are disruptive. You know they're in the room, they're disrupting everything.
Sheryl Davis:Right, and I remember too in that same career, being criticized for not speaking up. And it's just, it was an unnatural thing for me.
Kelly Tibbitts:Right, you had a response of energy.
Sheryl Davis:I had to have someone ask me a question in order to respond to it or say something.
Kelly Tibbitts:Well, we had a conversation on a previous podcast about you being an Enneagram nine and the gift of the nine is that they can see all the points. And the struggle of being a nine is you can see all the points. So then it's hard to come up with a committed view. So you have to feel incredibly safe in the environment to share, because so many decades of your life you were told like well, that's not really an opinion if you can see everybody's opinion.
Kelly Tibbitts:And so, now that you've grown in self-awareness, if somebody was speaking and you knew what to say and you were like, okay, because I have responsive energy, I'm going to lose a lot of my energy when I lean in and speak right now. Am I going to be heard? Is it safe to do so? Is this worth putting any energy into? That's one of the most important things I taught my children is if you're in a community and the leadership doesn't value, you leave. I wasted so many decades trying to help people see my value who had no desire to see it. So that is the gift that you now give yourself with self-awareness.
Kelly Tibbitts:I am a genius. I bring such value to this table. This current team is not open and receptive to it. I believe there is something out there that will be, and I love that. They have the evidence to prove it. That's what our brains do, right. When our brain has a thought, it's going to find the evidence to prove it. You are the only one that can have your back. I'm the only one that can have your back. I'm the one that can have my back. I'm literally a genius. This is where it is. This is not my genius. It frustrates me. It exhausts me, I'll do it, but my energy is going to be depleted by the end of it. And if I keep putting energy into this specific group of people, is there the potential for it to be invested and grow? Or am I just basically throwing it down a hole and no one's gonna listen to me? Maybe it's time for me to move on.
Sheryl Davis:Yeah, that's a hard lesson to learn too.
Kelly Tibbitts:It is so hard.
Sheryl Davis:I've heard stories where people who get into their competencies they you know they're very good at something, but that doesn't necessarily mean they should continue doing it.
Kelly Tibbitts:Well, if it's not their genius, it probably doesn't energize them, and so when something is your frustration, it draws the energy out of you very, very quickly. And so if they could succeed at their competency, they're going to keep doing it. Well, the problem is they're still losing a little bit of energy every day. It's like Christmas time and everybody putting a little bit extra on the credit card, but there's no quite path to pay it off in January, and then by March it's got that interest due and now you're in a slightly bigger hole. That's what happens with our competencies when we're not self-aware. So of the four, one of them is pretty close to being a frustration for you, and if you have to do that one all the time, you probably will figure it out because you're a highly competent woman. But at the end of every week you go home a little bit more tired, and Sunday night you dread Monday a little bit more. And so that's the struggle, and why so many humans are in burnout is we don't live examined lives.
Kelly Tibbitts:What if I could do more of this? When I talked as a leader once about this, she said before she knew the working genius, she kept taking on roles that were either in her competency or frustration, because it didn't occur to her that anybody else wanted to do them. And once the team became self-aware, the people who loved doing the things that she was frustrated by actually grew in their enjoyment of their own job. But she was doing those roles because she thought nobody else would like them. So we're in this community together.
Kelly Tibbitts:If we could let the galvanizers galvanize and you and I could sit back and do the work we're doing, everybody could be happy. We'd help them complete the things they wanna complete, and someone else could be the one sort of pushing and using that disruptive energy to tell people hey, life coaches are incredibly valuable to have, having somebody by your side who's helping you notice what's important to you, making decisions and then holding you accountable and encouraging you to make those small steps that could really serve you. But again, without self-awareness, we don't notice that and we end up doing the thing that is exhausting on repeat and expecting to somehow still have energy at the end of the week. So anybody who's currently in a job where they're constantly depleted, this might be the tool that helps you understand why.
Sheryl Davis:That is amazing. This is such important work. I think. I'm so glad you could bring that to us today.
Kelly Tibbitts:Thank you for joining the Live a Vibrant Life podcast. I hope our time together encouraged you and will equip you with the tools you need to move into the vibrant life you desire. I'm here to help you live a brave, creative, purpose-filled life, and if you'd like to learn more, you can follow me on Instagram or Facebook, Kelly Tibbitts Life Coach, or visit my website, kellytibbitts. com. I look forward to connecting again soon. Bye.