Tag Archive for 'self-awareness'

Awaken Your Genius: Sunday 16 August

Published on 10 August, 2009 in event. Closed Tags: , , , .

Daniel Smith presents Awaken Your Genius - What if you could enjoy being at your best more?

I’m fascinated by genius. These people who do things that are so amazing that they leave most of the rest of us asking, “How did they do that??”

If you had looked for an answer, you would know that genius takes effort. You need to focus on getting really good at what you’re doing. Hours of disciplined, focused, deliberate practice. In some ways, it’s easier if you are a child – you just get in the habit of practising before you’re old enough to bother to ask, “Why?”

But you’re not really a child, are you?

How much time do you focus on getting really good at what you’re doing? No just doing your job or playing your sport or being in your relationship, but deliberately working at getting even better… and you know by now that’s the only way.

After all, if a child can do it, surely you can too. For you to unlock and Awaken Your Genius, it would really help if you could feel like you are doing great – that state of mind when you are at your best.

We all enjoy times when we are doing well.

We also endure times when we’re not. Times when you are just not performing at the level that you know that you are capable of… when you can be thinking to yourself, “I’m better than this.”

And you can be.

This Sunday, I would like to invite you to join a small group as we explore how to let go of what has been holding you back, connect with what is most important to you, and create powerful triggers to help you be at your best when you need it most, so that you can walk away spending more time at your best, in “the zone”.

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What drives you?

Published on 16 January, 2009 in Personal Growth. Closed Tags: , , .

A few minutes ago, I was asked to attend an induction ceremony. As I perused the agenda for the early morning meeting (my unborn own child would be considerate enough to wait until after 8:45am on a Saturday morning to be born!!!) outlined eight outcomes… of which at most one were relevant to me. For me, that’s the sort of meeting that I try fervently to avoid, so I phoned the person who called the meeting to confirm whether I needed to attend… and the response that I got astounded me: “it’s procedure”.

“it’s procedure”!!!!!

Maybe wasting your time is “procedure” for some, but I like to not be one of those people… but it got me thinking about motivations. I realised – as I was speaking with the MBA-educated meeting convener – that she was motivated by fulfilling the criteria (going through the motions or just doing stuff), rather than actually achieving outcomes.

It really got me annoyed for a few minutes… until I got curious.

I noticed that some people sincerely believe that life is accomplished by going through the motions… it’s more than the difference between being efficient and being effective – I’m really talking about alignment. I’m talking about the importance of getting your actions and outcomes aligned with your overall direction or vision, and consistent with your values.

So where are you at? What are your values? How aligned are you? How aligned is your organisation?

There are now more than a hundred billionaires in China – and the youngest was born in the 1980s! And you can bet that they are lean, focused and disciplined to get profit… and profit is where you are better aligned to deliver value than your competitors. Fundamentally, that’s why capitalism can work so well… it rewards and challenges us to create ever-greater value.

In a world of hypercompetition, free design (as it is once you get to scale) and a boundary-less world alignment is everything… to deliver alignment you have to design it, necessitating self-awareness and the determination to understand your underlying values.

Because if you don’t, you can be sure that someone else will.

Daniel Smith

Visionaries shut up and listen… and not to focus groups

Published on 1 November, 2008 in Change, Innovation and Personal Growth. Closed Tags: , , .

Really cool stuff doesn’t follow trends.

Kinda cool stuff does – but not really cool stuff.

Google didn’t follow the trends set by the (then!) giants like Microsoft and Yahoo!… and the Pure Digital’s Flip didn’t either – even though they sold 1,000,000 basic camcorders last year, they radically diverge from the path charted by Sony and the rest of the industry. It wasn’t that their CEO had focus groups and steadily developed a novel product – “He paid attention, and created a product for them without hiring focus groups. ”

Isn’t that where the really great ideas come from?

Business schools have been popularising the “Blue Ocean” – but great minds have been thinking this way for thousands of years. In order to get ahead of the pack, you have to either be a born freak or you have to chart a different route. And born freaks chart a different route intuitively.

We make it hard for those that want to march to their own tune. Radicals are punished – and that it is a good thing in a sense… it is in the nature of the ’system’ to challenge those who work to undermine the Nash Equilibrium presently being enjoyed so as to ensure that the proposed change overcomes the switching cost. It’s not personal – it’s just evolutionary.

To stand out can be frightening and lonely. Yet if you don’t be true to yourself – or a company is not true to itself – what do you really have left?

Great minds listen to their inner voice. In the modern world, it is often drowned out by the clattering of empty vessels, but if you can stop and listen to the voice within, you can start to explore what makes you great. What makes you unique? What are you better at – or could you be better at – than anybody else? What are you passionate about? If you could stop and listen to that voice from within, what would you do? It’s like we have an internal radio tuner that we seldom tune – and we get confused that all the white noise means that there’s nothing really there.

It is still your song to sing… if you dare.

Daniel Smith

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