213: Balance inside your zone of genius

I talk a lot about the zone of genius and about it being a place where your passions and your skill set collide! In this episode we discuss balancing your passion with your skill set so that you can spend more time in your zone of genius being productive. Before we get there, I want to make sure that you know that you are in the right place. This podcast is for private music educators who are looking to expand online. You are looking to create group programming, membership sites, courses, collaborations, workshops, things that are delivered in the online space in a one to many capacity, meaning it's you as the teacher providing your knowledge and your teaching to a larger audience at one time. It can be asynchronous (meaning on their own time) or it can be live on camera in real time. Either way, this podcast is here to help you maximize your teaching potential through online means. Why do I do this? Because I love technology and I love everything that it allows my clients, music teachers just like you, to provide to people interested in exploring and expanding their own musical knowledge and acumen. I am passionate about this because I know that the idea of expanding online is exciting but the technology can make it a little bit daunting! My entire reason for being is to take away those tech obstacles, those tech insecurities, the tech roadblocks so that you can truly deliver what you are meant to deliver. If you are interested in working with me or you know, another music teacher who is looking to expand online, send them my way. Just go to https://callwithjaime.com and book a call. It's that easy. Now, let's talk about passion and skill set and all this fun stuff inside the zone of genius. Skill Set This is what you are truly gifted and good at doing. It can be breaking down difficult concepts for beginner intermediate students, it can be explaining creativity, it can be teaching history or anything. Where are you just so talented? It could be at building a curriculum or at teaching a lesson or at the physical “doing.” This is your skill set, this is your toolbox and it's really important for us to understand what's in our toolbox (and also what is not in our toolbox.) What skills might you just not possess even though you are running an online business? I’d recommend making a list which might include things like: video editing creating a social media calendar uploading videos to vimeo or to Youtube or to Thinkific or to wherever you are uploading videos nurturing and writing emails and social media the accounting side and reminding yourself to invoice clients figuring out if a student is the right student for you! Your skill set is yours. All these other things that you have to do in order to run a successful business, don't have to be in your skill set. You may have to work through them and do them but ultimately, we actually want to make sure that they are built in a way that they don't take over all of your creative energy! The things that aren't in your zone of genius or in your skill set are actually things that we want to streamline and create systems and processes around so that they take up less time, which will allow us to spend more time with our skills with the things that we are really good at and then pairing that with what we are so so passionate about, which ultimately has us spending more time in our zone of genius. Passion So what is our passion? What drives us, what fuels us? What gets us excited to wake up in the morning? What is it that you could do, whether you were paid a penny, nothing or thousands of dollars to do? What is it that is so intrinsically bound to your joy and enthusiasm? That’s passion! Balance And now we want to balance passion with our skill set inside of our zone of genius so that we are productive and can continue to create new products and opportunities for our students. If we spend too much time in our passion, we can start a lot of projects, but they never see the light of day. If we spend so much time working through our skills, we can have the most robust, but sometimes dry curriculum and content to share. How do we create balance inside of our zone of genius? I do it in three parts (all time blocked.) Passion Block Give myself time blocks for sitting in my passion for coming up with all the ideas; for mulling over something or just getting caught up in the music or just getting caught up in the experience. Essentially just getting caught up in the joy and the opportunity. Skill Set Block Then we take another time block where we look at everything that we came up with when we were just thinking in our passion and feeling and moving and experiencing joy and asking myself what can I execute? What do I already know? Sometimes we want to learn things, we want to do more, we want to increase our skills and there's a time for that for sure, and we'll get to that in a moment. But first we want to take what we can already do, what we already know how to do, how we can translate that and work through translating to create something out of that passion with the skills we already know. Growth Block And then the third part of creating this balance is investing time and energy, maybe money or resources to increase your skill set so that you can do more things. We also want to explore some of those things that we think we might be passionate about, things that have piqued our curiosity allowing us to go deeper. We want to spend time exploring what else we can be passionate about and exploring how else we can increase our skill set. It's kind of a cyclical thing… If we spend too much time in our passion, coming up with thousands of ideas, but not enough time making sure that we are actually doing it with the skills that we already have, then we can feel like work has become out of reach because we're not balanced in our zone of genius. If we are spending so much time creating things from our skill set, things that we know how to do that we can just rattle off but not spending time making sure that we are still passionate about what we are creating, we end up imbalanced. Nobody wants to be imbalanced, we want to be rising, we want our zone of genius to be an expansive space. When we work inside of our zone of genius, we always create new opportunities. We are not constrained by our passion, we are not constrained by our skill set, we are not constrained inside of our zone of genius. We just have to make sure that when we do spend time in there that we are doing it in a way that it creates opportunity for us to expand for us to hone our skills for us to become more passionate so that we can then translate that outward into everything that we do in life and in business. Balance doesn't mean 50-50 always and forever. It means ebb and flow and come back to neutral. It's not like you're going to stay static, you are growing, you are creating an opportunity for more! Sometimes we forget. Sometimes we go so far one way or the other that we lose sight of our  why. We lose sight of what brings us joy and we lose sight of what is easy. If we can do more that is easy and more that brings us joy, then we are winning every single day! Connect with me: https://callwithjaime.com or Instagram or Facebook It's time! Round 3 of the Online Music Course Accelerator is open for application. Click here for details.