Taking the Leap with Tarot
If you’ve ever made a big, terrifying career leap, this is the post for you.
In entrepreneurial circles, I hear a lot about Gay Hendricks’ book, The Big Leap. People are quick to connect with the idea that we all have different gifts and skillsets, areas in which we flounder or thrive. He divides these areas into four zones: incompetence, competence, excellence and genius.
This is where I will give the full disclosure that I have not read the book personally. I learned about these four zones through my membership with the Hello 7’s We Should All Be Millionaires The Club. From my limited understanding of the concept, however, I have come to give context to my own experiences in the professional world. This is what I want to share with you today.
To get us on the same page, here’s the quick and dirty recap of the four zones, which is the content from the book that matters for this post: Your Zone of Incompetence includes the things you’re not good at. For me, this would include tasks like coding, setting up website systems, doing my extremely complicated taxes. Your Zone of Competence includes things you can do but are not great at. For me, these are things like graphic design, photography, creating an effective social media strategy.
The two zones that are easiest to conflate are the Zone of Excellence and the Zone of Genius. Your Zone of Excellence is something you do extremely well. You likely make money doing it, and it is something people know you for being great at and seek out your talents. You truly have a gift for it. It comes easily and naturally to you. Importantly, you’re also not keen to give up doing it because it is profitable. My Zone of Excellence is writing.
Your Zone of Genius, however, is where the magic lies. This is the thing that sets your soul on fire. You love doing this thing, and when you get into it, you hit your flow state. Time seems to speed up. You dive directly into a black hole of focused effort and when you emerge, you realize hours have gone by in what feels like minutes. Your Zone of Genius is the great work of your life.
Through Cup of Sugar, I am in the tedious process of transitioning from a full-time freelance copywriter to a tarot reader and entertainment provider. So, why would someone who is an excellent writer, one set to make a six-figure salary in 2021, take this journey into the murky unknown? It’s weird, right? A little inexplicable even. You’d be right to wonder. I certainly do in my weaker moments of surrendering to these crippling, oversized feelings of self-doubt.
The honesty is this: Making the jump from working writer to mostly unemployed tarot reader has often felt less like a leap of faith and more like hurdling off a building in an unhinged act of premeditated career suicide. Very dramatic indeed.
But anyone who has ever reached the peak of their zone of excellence is likely to understand where I’m coming from. All of a sudden things no longer flow. You’re unmotivated, stressed, overwhelmed. It feels like your talent is less of a gift and more of a massive burden you have to do continuously for the rest of your life. That’s right around the time when you burn out hard.
Because your Zone of Excellence is not (and will never be) your Zone of Genius. You are doing great work, but you are not doing the great work of your life. This small distinction makes a world of difference. Your life’s work energizes you; it keeps you going even when things feel massively fucked. When you can build a business that centers the great work of your life, that’s when you begin to experience real-world career magic. Now, doesn’t that sound amazing? I don’t know about you, but I’m sure willing to take the leap to find out.