[00:00:00] Today we're going to start with a confession, because I think the most useful way I can teach this particular concept is to show you what it has looked like in my own life before I give you the framing. A little bit over a year ago, I left full-time employment with an organization I've been part of for many years. I'd been working for them full time for about three years. I'd built programs, trained coaches, shaped curriculum, done work I was genuinely proud of even when it was hard, and I feel like I was good at it. I feel like I left things better than I found them. When I left, I knew what I was walking toward. I had been building the Resident Thought Leader system very quietly for a while at that point. I'd been testing it with people who were raising their hand and volunteering to go through it with me. I'd been reverse engineering thought leader platforms, working toward the archetype framework, seeing what happened when people got clarity about their own wiring and the impact they wanted to make and [00:01:00] started building from that place instead of copying and pasting someone else's playbook. I felt certain enough that it was real and important that I was willing to take a bet on it and step away. Almost immediately, invitations started arriving. People I had worked with and respected and had real history with, they wanted me to come back, not to my old role, but to new ones, bigger visibility, more impact, more reach. New people were showing up to have me do things I had done for some of those other clients. These were not bad opportunities, and some of them were genuinely extraordinary on paper, and they were all in some way asking me to do the thing I was already known for being good at. And I had to sit with that for a while, because the competent thing to do, the safe thing to do, the thing I already had proof I could do, the thing people were confirming I was good at by inviting me to come work with them was right there. And what I hadn't built yet, what I was walking toward with this resident thought leader archetype, wasn't [00:02:00] fully formed. I didn't have an assessment yet with 900 people who have taken it. I didn't have the conservatory that I'm launching next month. I didn't have my one-on-one clients who are excelling. I didn't have even the language for the full framework yet. And so I had to ask myself a very honest question: Is what I am creating important enough for me to give it the time and the oxygen it needs to grow, or am I going to keep doing what I'm competent at and pour my best energy into someone else's platform because I'm good at it and it's available and it feels responsible? Ultimately, it was one big opportunity in particular. I decided I couldn't live with myself unless I gave this resonant thought leader framework a real shot, and I'm grateful, genuinely, deeply grateful that I made that choice. Because what has happened since has shown me what becomes possible when you stop letting your competence be a distraction from your calling. Here's what I want you to notice about that story. [00:03:00] The invitations I was receiving weren't bad. They weren't traps set by people who were trying to derail me. They were real opportunities extended by real people who I value my relationship with and who valued what I could do. The trap wasn't the invitation. The trap is in how easy it would've been to say yes, because yes felt responsible, and it felt like evidence that I had value, and it felt safe in a way that building something new and something unproven doesn't feel, especially at the beginning, and that's the competence trap. And I think it's one of the most under-diagnosed problems in building a thought leadership business, an authority-based business, something where you are the face of what you're building Let me say this in a different way because I think when you hear it this way and when I say it to myself this way, it's a little bit more convicting. The competence trap is what happens when your competence masquerades as your calling. It's [00:04:00] not failing loudly. It doesn't announce itself as a crisis. It drains you very quietly, very slowly over months and sometimes years of doing work that you're genuinely good at, work that other people value, work that pays you well, work that generates real results, but something deeper in you goes unfed. This name comes from your competencies in Working Genius. If you've taken that assessment, the yellow letters in the middle, those are the ones that drain you because you're good at those things. They just aren't the things that light you up and give you joy and satisfaction There's a difference between your geniuses, the activities that give you energy and, and where you do your best work, and your competencies, the things that you've learned to do well, often because you've been rewarded for doing them, but they don't give you the same energy. Competency activities don't crush you. Like frustrations, that's the third category in working genius, those really actively drain your energy, your frustrations. Competencies don't. You can do them, [00:05:00] and you might do them well, but if you spend too much of your time there and not enough time in your zones of genius, you'll burn out. Not dramatically, just a slow, sustained drain that eventually becomes very hard to explain to yourself or anyone else because the evidence around you says you should be fine. So the competence trap, the way I'm naming it, is when competency work becomes so available, so validated, and so rewarded that it crowds out the genius work entirely And the danger is precisely that it doesn't fail. It keeps working well enough to justify continuing. You can be in that competence trap for years and never have a crisis that forces a reckoning. The bill just arrives slowly in the form of a life that feels smaller than you thought it would be by now. So what does that actually look like? Let me give you a few patterns that I see consistently. The first is what I experienced, the invitation that looks like a great opportunity. Someone offers you something that draws on what you're already known for, and you say yes, because you're [00:06:00] available, you're qualified, and it would be strange to say no to something that's reasonable. And so you do it, and it goes well. And then another invitation arrives, and over time you look up and realize you've built a body of work entirely out of what you were already good at, and the thing you actually wanted to do and wanted to build is still waiting The second pattern is the offer you keep saying yes to because it converts easily. You have something you can sell without very much friction. Clients come easily for this. Revenue is reliable, and you keep selling it even though delivering it doesn't light you up the way it used to, or maybe the way it never quite did. The ease of the sale becomes the reason you keep going because it's comfortable rather than the alignment of the work. The third pattern I think is the hardest to see, and it's where competence is also so attached to your identity that it's hard to disentangle. When you've been excellent at something for so long, it starts to feel like it's who you are, and the idea of stepping back or deprioritizing it ... It feels like you're giving something up instead of making [00:07:00] room for something better. The competence has become so bound up in your sense of self that genius work, the thing that would deeply energize you, the thing that would send a clearer signal out into the world, almost feels like a risk, like you might not be good at it, like you have to start over. And the last one I think is worth sitting with because sometimes the competence trap isn't about external pressure at all. It's self-imposed. It's that familiar feeling of safe, and the new thing feels uncertain, and choosing the familiar even when you know, somewhere you know that the new thing you want to do is actually the real thing you should be doing. Now, here's what I've noticed in working with people who are in the competence trap, and that includes me. The signal they're trying to send is muffled. It's not absent. They're still showing up. They're producing. They're getting results. But there's a quality to the signal when someone is operating from deep genius that is fundamentally different than when they're operating from competence. Your audience can feel it even when they can't name it.[00:08:00] When you're working from your genius, from your true essence, from the thing that genuinely energizes you, there's a specificity to how you talk about it. There's a texture. There's something in how you hold the material that tells people, "This is a person that lives inside of this," and that quality is magnetic in a way that competence, no matter how polished, is not able to replicate. I have watched people build their entire offer around their archetype and their essence and have their conversion rates go up while they were working less, not because they were better at sales, but because the signal got clearer and the right people recognized something and they moved. That's what happens when the source and the signal are that strong. Competence does produce a solid signal, but genius in combination with your archetype produces a deeply resonant one, and resonance travels in ways that solid [00:09:00] competence signals just don't. So if you're hearing this and you're like, "I don't know what to do with this," if something is landing right now, if some part of you is recognizing yourself in one of those patterns, I wanna give you something practical to hold onto. First, the way through this is not dramatic. You don't have to burn everything down. You don't have to fire your clients. You don't have to abandon everything you've built and make some sweeping declaration. The competence trap is usually exited incrementally, not all at once. I think it starts by naming the thing you really desire to do that's aligned with your geniuses. What is the thing, even if it's still forming, even if you don't have the language yet, that you would do even if it was harder? What's the work that feels like you're operating at your most native level that you would do for free? What would you build if the competent thing wasn't so available and rewarding? And then ask yourself, what would it take to give that thing just a little more time, a little more oxygen? Not all the time, not immediately, just a little bit [00:10:00] more. What's one thing you could start saying no to to give some space and create some room for that oxygen and time to, to build up your genius And it can happen slowly, sort of like turning a big cruise ship around. It doesn't have to happen right away. We don't have to blow everything up, but we can start to move, and when we start to move, things start to happen. I was listening to a conversation between Myron Golden and Dr. Benjamin Hardy. If you don't know their work, I'll link this video in the show notes. I think it's genuinely - worth your time. And Dr. Ben said something about what happens when you make the decision to give your genius a little bit more room, or what he calls raising your floor, committing to the new thing. He said, "The moment you set that new floor, you will immediately be tested. Compelling opportunities will appear that are just below it, things that would've been easy yeses before, things that feel responsible, things that are hard to say no to precisely because they're not obviously wrong." And he said, "Holding that floor through that test [00:11:00] is the actual work." That is exactly what happened to me 'cause I heard that and thought, "Yeah, that's what happens." And that's what that competence trap looks like in the moment of decision, because naming the genius work is the first move. Identifying it is the first move, but it's not the hard part. The hard part is what happens in the days and weeks after you decide, and you start to work more in your genius. The invitation for competence arrives. The easy client that just needs you to do a couple things comes back. The familiar thing resurfaces, and it's available, and it's validated, and it would help you so much right now, and you would feel so safe. And then you have to decide again whether you're going to hold the floor that you set to work in your zone of genius. I said no to those invitations after I left that safe full-time role, not because they weren't real opportunities, but I'd already decided to step away from something full-time and was building something that I felt like was worth protecting, like a tiny little flame I was trying to protect from the wind. And every time I held that floor, something shifted [00:12:00] in me and eventually in the work itself. My signal got clearer because I stopped splitting my energy between what I was capable of and what I was actually called to be doing. And I feel like that's the real exit from the competence trap. It's not a single dramatic decision. It's a decision and then a series of smaller decisions to keep honoring it. Because at the end of the day, nature abhors a vacuum. And so if you raise your floor and you make space for what's possible, and you can hold that space with some discipline, the right things will flow your way. They always do. I've never seen it not happen. So one more thing before I close. I've been thinking about the real transformations I see in this resonant thought leader work, the moments when someone names the genius they've been wanting to develop, the thing they've been wanting to build, raising their floor, holding it, watching the signal that they're sending out come alive. And I've realized that the most powerful way I can share those stories isn't me telling them secondhand. It's [00:13:00] you hearing them directly. So I'm gonna start inviting some of the people I work with to come on the podcast and share what they're building, live in conversation, so you can hear not just the outcome, but the thinking that got them there. Not polished case studies, real conversations about real work in progress. That is coming soon, and I genuinely can't wait. In the meantime, if you want to start figuring out where your genius lives, the archetype assessment is a great place to start. It's the fastest path to that data. More than nine hundred people have taken it, and the results will give you a clear picture of how you're naturally wired to create transformation. So take it and ask yourself, "Is what I'm building built for my genius? Or have I been staying too closely linked to the things I'm good at, but that don't give me joy and satisfaction, my competence?" Your ideas matter. You have an impact to make, and your expertise has deep value, and there is specific work that only you are [00:14:00] wired to do for the people that you're meant to serve, and that is what they're actually waiting for. Not more safe competence, but more uniquely genius you.