I recently saw a post on LI by Matt Schnuck about how “the most sought-after exec coach in Silicon Valley” and how he has helped leaders find their “Zone of Genius”. The slide deck he shared in his post (by the way, I love slide decks in LI posts, they let me easily digest the content!) is excellent on operating in your zone of genius. What leapt out for me, though, was this comment about that exec coach:
You can’t actually hire him as a coach. He is “post-economic.” He only works for the people he chooses.
Love it, particularly as that is where I am and have been with my work with clients for some years now. You can’t hire me (my client book is currently and usually full) and I only work with clients I choose.
With that context, I encourage you to think about who you choose to work with and to do that using my home page at tommccallum.com as a reference tool to link to how I choose clients. That home page says three things:
- Massive Impact – this is for those reading the site to “self-select”, to determine if they are a brave leader ready for massive change
- Authentic Insights – this is what I offer through being by their side on that journey
- Elevating Leadership – this is what I do for and with you, to support you and your business transition from great (you left “good” behind years ago) to elite
These elements, together, will have many people say “That’s not for me”, and a few say “I’d like to talk to Tom”. My homepage then, provides clear positioning that helps both the reader (and then me, when we talk) choose if there is a match for a relationship moving forwards. In practice, I talk to many new people every year in different contexts and always look to listen and then add value in some way to every conversation. On occasion, people I talk to may match and become clients (for a further filter, I prefer to work with CEOs and C-suite leaders of large, complex organisations that are already of scale), and some people may become mentees (I love mentoring!). All of this is my choice, I can’t simply be hired.
I hope using myself as a case study may help you to consider whether you are economic (you can hire me to do a job if you pay me), or this term (which I understand first came from Tim Ferris) “post-economic” which, to me, means that I only do the work I choose to, and yes I go charge for my services, but that is not my driver, simply the outcome of providing value in the world and, specifically, to the small group of clients I work with at any time.
To use an example, this week I reconnected with someone I had sparked with at an event a few years ago but had not spoken with for quite some time. They have recently gone out on their own after some decades of working for one of the most respected brands globally. As this is all quite new to them, they have lots of ideas of what they could do, including incorporating some of their passions into their work. After listening for some time to their thoughts, I then had a few insights for them to “cogitate” on (as they put it) after the call. One of those was that their amazing experience and skillsets at a senior level with a massive global corporation were very rare and valuable. I encouraged them to consider the phrase “only do what only you can do” whilst also looking at how that can sit in the four circles (see image above) of their own Ikigai (similar to “Zone of Genius”).
I saw that this leader has the potential to make a Massive Impact, I then gave them my Authentic Insights in support of them Elevating their Leadership. They are now “cogitating” on what that all means for them. As for me, I am simply happy and contented fo be contributing.
In closing, I looked up one of my earlier articles on Ikigai and was reminded of this thought by my dear friend Ian Armiger (see his #WhatComesNextLive podcast with me here):
Not sure why the aim is an overlapping of circles….
Surely, just one circle encompassing every component..
“Do what you love. Love what you do. And give more than’s expected’
The High Performance Environment of sport, business, the arts…usually has people operating in one large circle.
To Ian, you see, he simply doesn’t understand why the Ikigai diagramme above only has that relatively small area of overlap in the middle. Surely, in Ian’s view, we can just have one circle encompassing every component.