Did Life Get in the Way… Again?

Did life get in the way– AGAIN? We all have a spark within us. It may sit dormant for many years but it’s never too late and you’re never too old to awaken it and share it with the world and more importantly with YOU!

Your brilliance will delight the world and delight you in all the joy and fulfillment it brings to you. When you’re in “The Zone” – your Brilliance, your Genius Zone, you absolutely know it. It’s a state of pure and utter joy–no ego, no worries, no fears, no competition.

For over 50 years I was keeping myself safe and quiet. As Gay Hendricks describes in his book The Big Leap, I was keeping myself in my Zones of...

Incompetence (what you’re not good at but do anyway)

Competence (what you’re good at and so are a lot of other people), and

Excellence (what you excel at and do for the accolades, money, and ego - not because your passionate it about it)

I was resisting breaking through my glass ceiling and elevating to my Genius Zone - the zone of creativity, joy, pure fulfillment, and happiness. But why?

Each day I found myself deeper in the "Hamster Wheel of Life"– super busy and financially successful but unfulfilled and frustrated. It’s safe to play small. It’s safe to place others ahead of you. It’s safe to not give yourself a voice. And it’s safe to play the victim and make excuses that your life is the result of what others have done to you. But we are all solely responsible for our own happiness.

It took me 50+ years to break into my Genius Zone, place myself first, and live in my Brilliance. Oh, I would dabble in it occasionally, but would sink back down into the safe zones to be “safe” and stroke my ego.

Yet, I had always felt that there was something bigger for me to do, a bigger contribution to make, and I knew the only way to get there was to be in my Genius Zone for extended periods of time.

So, I decided to put myself first and it was hard! As a woman and mother of 4 grown kids and 4 grandkids putting myself first was not what I was taught. It took conscious practice and daily commitment to make the shift.

I started small, making myself the priority first thing in the morning for just one hour rather than attending to others “nigglies” as I call them – all those little nudging requests by clients and family, which you rationalize as being quick and easy to cross off the list but end up consuming your time and sucking you down into the rabbit hole.

Now, I’m “unavailable” until at least 1pm 6 days a week and entirely the 7th day of the week – working and living in my Brilliance, which for me is creating, designing, writing, and painting. My year end goal is to expand that to all of Friday through Monday, and half of Tuesday through Thursday. Think I can do it?

How much time do you spend in your Brilliant or Genius Zone?

Are ready to get out of your Incompetent and Competent Zones altogether?

Are you ready to stop playing safe and small?

Are you ready to give yourself a voice?

Are you ready to bring that spark to life once again and keep it lit for extended periods of time?

Don’t let other peoples lives get in the way of yours anymore.

This is your life - LIVE IT!

Live Your Light!

Where Are You Fishing? In a Blue Ocean or a Red One?

Do you know your competition? How they're marketing? Who their target market is? How they sell?

Good. You should. But that’s not where your focus, time, or energies should be invested.

What if your business could be in a league of its own instead of competing with others in your industry? What if you were setting the pace, creating unique products and living a “Blue Ocean Strategy”?

The term is derived from the book "Blue Ocean Strategy" (Harvard Business Review Press, expanded edition, 2015), by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne. It describes how companies traditionally work in "red ocean"conditions, where businesses viciously fight against each other for a share of the marketplace. Instead, according to the blue ocean strategy, organizations should find a way to work in a marketplace that is free of competitors.

I know it’s been said that there is no reason to recreate the wheel but we can always make a better wheel! Seriously, look at how many versions of the actual wheel have been created since its inception in the late Neolithic age (9500–6500 BCE). Endless.

I believe the concept of Blue Ocean Strategy begins with an inward perspective - an initial perspective, which many times gets lost. Often businesses begin because they feel they can be better than their competition, and in fact they can. They go into business with all the grandest intentions of changing the norm in their industry, but all too often they fall into… well… the business of being in business. Their grand intentions are forgotten and they slip into “competing” rather than “innovating”.

The logic behind Blue Ocean strategy is innovation, focusing less on competition and more on alternatives. Being creative versus copycat. While we can learn boatloads from past entrepreneurs, business successes and failures, it’s our individual brilliance and creativity we must tap into, hold sacred, and shine for the world to see.

To tap into your potential blue ocean, Kim and Mauborgne argue that businesses and entrepreneurs should consider their "Four Actions Framework." The framework poses four key questions:

Raise: What factors should be raised well above the industry's standard?

Eliminate: Which factors that the industry has long competed on should be eliminated?

Reduce: Which factors should be reduced well below the industry's standard?

Create: Which factors should be created that the industry has never offered?

Kim and Mauborgne said that this exercise forces companies to scrutinize every factor of competition, helping leaders discover the range of assumptions they unconsciously make while competing.

Examples of Blue Ocean Strategy

One popular example of blue ocean strategy is Cirque du Soleil, which achieved revenues that took Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey more than a century to attain.

"Cirque did not make its money by competing within the confines of the existing industry or by stealing customers from Ringling and the others," Kim and Mauborgne wrote in the Harvard Business Review magazine. "Instead, it created uncontested market space that made the competition irrelevant. It pulled in a whole new group of customers who were traditionally noncustomers of the industry — adults and corporate clients who had turned to theater, opera or ballet and were, therefore, prepared to pay several times more than the price of a conventional circus ticket for an unprecedented entertainment experience."

Southwest Airlines is another example. Southwest tapped into a customer base who preferred driving to air travel due to the lower cost. Instead of competing with other airlines, Southwest positioned itself as an alternative to cars and offered reduced prices, improved check-in times and increased flight frequency.

"This new combination created an offering that enabled the customer to benefit from the high traveling speeds of an airplane at low prices combined with the flexibility of traveling by car," Blue Ocean Strategy Partners writes on its website.

So, where are you currently fishing? In a blue ocean or a red one? Are you focused on the competition or on you and your uniqueness? It’s easy to end up in the red ocean, most businesses do. The red ocean is survival and its bloody. The blue ocean is where you’ll THRIVE!