REVIEW: The Genius Habit: Break Free from Burnout, Reduce Career Anxiety and Double Your Productivity by Leveraging the Power of Being Who You Are at Work by Laura Garnett (3-stars)

 One of the recommendations throughout all leadership, management and career self-help books is to get to know yourself better.  Really be open-minded to hearing feedback and paying attention to what you do best, what you enjoy most and what kind of impact you have on those around you as a means of measuring your effectiveness.

Along that same line, author and career coach Laura Garnett has provided a very positive, peppy and supportive book to help other people better understand their strengths and what they are most comfortable doing.  The book is a strange mix of primary experience and observations with some very thoughtfully considered processes with probably a bit too much padding from secondary and tertiary sources.  In some cases, it feels like she’s chosen the references to build or support her claims.

The strongest parts of the book are where she talks passionately about improving self awareness of one’s strengths and impact by creating a process to measure one’s own subjective experiences using performance tracker she has designed.  You can download this with an e-mail sign-up http://www.lauragarnett.com/geniushabittracker

The author offers many groups of questions for self-reflection and for requesting feedback from colleagues to help build a stronger sense of confidence in one’s particular “Genius Zone” skillset.

As with many contemporary folks in the leadership and coaching field, she’s a strong believer in personality typing – but rather than using a system that exists and has been tested, she offers her own list of types which loosely resembles Meyers-Briggs, In these six groupings.  

Process Creation—Making Everything Work Better 

• Chaos-to-Order Problem-Solver
• Improvement Strategist 
• Needle Finder
• Process Architect
• Good-to-Great Strategist 

Visionary—Redefining the World 

• Barrier-Breaking Visionary 
• Opportunity Excavator 
• Innovative Idea Strategist 
• Possibility Architect
• Vision Strategist
• Strategic Visionary
• Visionary Change Maker 

Strategist—Creating the Path 

• Analytical Solution Strategist
• Efficiency Strategist
• People Strategist 
• Possibility Strategist 
• Results Strategist 
• Training Results Strategist 
• Solutions Excavator 

Synthesizing—Bringing People and Ideas Together 

• Collaboration Strategist 
• Diagnostic Problem-Solver 
• Discerning Ideator
• Synthesis Expert 

Catalyzing—Igniting Opportunity 

• Connection Catalyst
• Holistic Crisis Problem-Solver
• Social Advocate 
• Team Maximizer 

Builders—Ideas and Structures 

• Creative Results Architect
• Deal Conductor 
• Design Strategist 
• Experience Producer 
• Innovative Rebuilder 
• Language and Idea Architect 
• New Business Growth Strategist

This could be a much stronger book if she focused much more on how to map the results of the Performance Tracker to the personality/genius types that she’s describing.  

The “Genius Habit” is an ambitious term and perhaps a bit confusing – to many.  Even in the book, she describes providing clients with examples of their “Genius Zone” to share in job interviews but says “don’t use the term since people aren’t familiar with it.” 

While she provides a ton of great examples from clients and her own experience – but she can be quite repetitive throughout the book.  The book is written in first person – this makes it very accessible but dilutes the strength of her key offerings when combined with the fluff -- repeated references to her own experience and use of the full names of authors and books throughout.   There’s also something about the editorial style – I noticed that there was inconsistency in references to other researchers – for example, there are six mentions of “Carol Dweck” for example but “Carl Jung” is mentioned once and all following references are just “Jung.”  

The massive variety of case studies is super interesting but sometimes a bit distracting – it would be great to have greater distinction about why a specific case study is being called out and perhaps moving some case studies to an appendix.  The author makes a cursory nod toward meditation, exercise and other things – almost as if leaving those things out would be remiss.  I recommend leaving those things out and focusing more on the process of developing greater self-awareness with use of the performance tracker and identifying one’s Genius Zone via her typology (or even another established typology).

“The Genius Habit” is a strong introduction to the way that our author thinks about work and how to help people shape their careers – I look forward to a greater exploration and strengthening of her concepts and tools in her future works.

REVIEW: The Genius Habit: Break Free from Burnout, Reduce Career Anxiety and Double Your Productivity by Leveraging the Power of Being Who You Are at Work  by Laura Garnett

RATING: 3-stars

© Jennifer R Clark. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You may share and adapt this content with proper attribution.

REVIEW: What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape by Sohaila Abdulali (5-stars)

 Powerfully written testimonial of the attitudes and experiences of women (mostly) of rape across cultures and time.  The author provides her own experience with rape -- and with writing about rape -- as a backdrop for first-person accounts of the impacts of rape, getting on with life after and the changes in attitude around the world toward rape (though mostly in India, Europe and the US).   This book is incredibly well written and personal - highly recommended for everyone.

REVIEW: What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape by Sohaila Abdulali 

RATING: 5-stars

© Jennifer R Clark. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You may share and adapt this content with proper attribution.

REVIEW: The Nature Instinct: Relearning Our Lost Intuition for the Inner Workings of the Natural World (Natural Navigation) by Tristan Gooley (4-stars)

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” – W.B. Yeats

I remember the first time I went mushroom hunting, nearly 15 years ago, and the moment when it was like a light switched “on” and, all of a sudden, I could see the chanterelles everywhere, peeping out from under the duff.  More than an “instinct” – it’s having a patient teacher to explain what to look for and spending time looking and absorbing one’s surroundings until it feels like an instinct.

Tristan Gooley is a gifted writer -- sharing his stories of his observations of signs of plants and animals and diving into details of scientific findings.  His writing is so detailed – I wonder if he just spends time writing after he gets back home or if he jots down notes while he is afield. 

While his writing is not as wild and captivating as some of John Muir’s stories – Gooley is providing a level of detail and making connections in a way that weave a story of the cloth of existence and how all creatures are connected.  I never knew, for example, that robins could hear earthworms popping up out of the ground.  While I have always known that cats, dogs and other animals have mood and character – I enjoyed the story about how dogs “play” humans with the head tilt and science confirming that many animals possess an awareness of mind and think about what other animals may be thinking/doing in the future.

I enjoyed reading about the differences in the way animals (prey/predator) see things – and have long ago learned the value of sidelong glances toward shy feral cats and other wild things.  I love the term “jink” and have noticed this behavior in animals when hiking on trails but didn’t know it had a name.  The story about raptors hunting away from their nests – and songbirds nesting near raptor nests – was brilliant.

My favorite story was about how the author went hiking in a new area, drumlins covered with zones of bracken and heather – and found himself compelled to walk in one area and return via the other, realizing later that he’d instinctively chosen the routes based on maintaining comfortable body temperature (without a jacket, on the return, the higher bracken provided a break from the wind).  I also learned a lot about hedges – which we don’t have here in the US.

Gooley is a huge fan of the slow/fast thinking and references Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow” several times (it’s on my pile to read, right after this one!).

It’s interesting that many people consider knowledge of the plants, animals and environment around the to be inaccessible.  I remember asking a Spanish friend who lives on a small island called Mallorca, in a quaint small town of Palma, about some flowers.  She insists that she is a “city girl” and really doesn’t know much about farming and plants.  Even identifying the orchards on the side of the road as we whizzed by was outside her realm of knowledge.  When showing a friend who lives in a gated-community in Colorado my 6 different types of basil, he commented “You’re the only botanist I know” (though I imagine as a fly fishing aficionado, he could tell me much about fish behavior).  Another friend recently revealed to me that he hates the outdoors and avoids nature as much as possible. 

There is much to see an analyze in modern urban, “civilized” life – as demonstrated from the breadth of effort expended on mindfulness, meditation, understanding human motivation and behavior (even the Kahneman book) – that one might make the argument that most humans have had to make the choice of paying attention to select things in their immediate environment that yield the most reward or benefit for the lifestyle to which they aspire.

Perhaps, what Gooley is implying, is that we need to step outside of our own minds and away from human society to pay attention to the greater web of plants, animals and environment around us to preserve those things we most value.  There’s so much to learn  -- and humans so easily get trapped into thinking they are the most important and interesting thing around.  Maybe cats do, too. 

I would have liked to have seen the author dive into more parallels between the human thought and observation process of the natural environment with the human and human-constructed environment, and perhaps a greater focus on the potential impact of our disconnect with the rest of the non-human world around us. Or, at least, the richness and reward of greater connection.  Overall – quite an enjoyable book – my takeaways include a renewed commitment to memorizing constellations, “vegetalistas” of the Amazon, the “gokotta” – Swedish practice of rising early to experience people-free environments,  “ikus” and “allelomimesis.”  Zig-zagging off to read my next book… 

REVIEW: The Nature Instinct: Relearning Our Lost Intuition for the Inner Workings of the Natural World (Natural Navigation) by Tristan Gooley 

RATING: 4-stars

© Jennifer R Clark. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You may share and adapt this content with proper attribution.