UNLOCKING OUR PERSONAL GENIUS

All of us have our own unique brand of personal genius. Unfortunately we all also have our own unique limitations to overcome. By giving yourself time on a daily basis to ‘think genius’, you can unlock your potential in amazing ways.

What is your definition of ‘genius’? I asked this question to a group of 14-year-old boys who are part of a gang I am working with in South London. They replied ‘someone who has the courage to think and act differently’. Pretty amazing huh?

This idea really resonated with me and I started to think about what ‘personal genius’ really is. One of the quotes I came across was by Simone de Beauvoir who said ‘one is not born a genius, one becomes a genius’. If you combine this with the definition given above by the boys then it suggests that if we continuously strive to grow and develop self awareness, confidence and experience, we will ultimately feel more comfortable exploring new ways of thinking and have the courage to express these in lives. Our very own brand of personal genius starts to come through!

So I decided to test this theory and started taking 5 minutes everyday to ‘think genius’. This is a very simple technique of finding a quiet moment over a cup of tea in the morning or my lunch to consider:

‘What am I going to have the courage to think about differently today’?

Sometimes, it was my preconceptions of a person’s attitude or how a particular meeting was going to go. Other days threw up deeper stuff like why I believed that I couldn’t make more than a certain amount of money in my life. Each topic brought something new to me and every-time I followed whatever revelation I had discovered with the second genius question.

‘What am I going to have the courage to do differently next time I encounter this person / situation / belief etc’.

Usually this second step brought out really simple things like ‘think positively about the meeting before I go into it’ or ‘make an effort to do something nice for that person to surprise them’ etc etc etc

My point is none of this is complicated or magical. Becoming a genius simply takes 5 mins a day to think differently about the things in your life. I can guarantee that when Einstein came up with the glimmer of the theory of relativity he was thinking something along the lines of ‘what is missing and how can I think about this differently’?

If you are then willing to act on your realisations then you will start to become one of these people who has the courage to be different.

Has the courage to be a genius.