Free Practical Genius by Gina Amaro Rudan, Kevin Carroll

participating in meetings at work. I learned through my own experience that performing arts really help you become more aware of yourself and help your confidence and ability to work with other people. My understanding of the intricacies of technology helped me create and enhance the music I was making, quite literally. By incorporating a few laptops, which play samples as background, and creating a sequence, which takes signals from my guitar, the result is an amazing new sound.”
Summing Up
    The road to practical genius begins with the extraction of six key ingredients that contribute to who you are and the embrace and acceptance of all sides of yourself. The war between your identities will come to a halt right inside your genius zone.
    Practical genius is the intersection between what you love and what you do best. This sweet spot is where the professional and the personal joyfully mesh and is the essence of your practical genius.

Identify the foundation of your practical genius, which is your hard assets—your skills, strengths, and expertise.

Identify your soft personal assets—your passions, creative abilities, and values.

Identify the sweet spot where the hard and soft assets meet.

    Now you’re at that special place where the cultivation of your personal power begins. It’s not enough to know where your other G-spot lives; you have to get out there and do something with it. We start by giving your genius a voice and a story. Keep reading.

FRANCESCA PRADO



EXPRESS YOUR GENIUS
It’s Time to Tell Your Story
    One of the great benefits of being a human being (as opposed to being an emu, for instance) is the endless ways we have to express ourselves. Lucky us. Language, music, art, dance—we don’t have to say a thing, but we can give expression to a whole wide world of truth, experience, and feelings. The more evolved the species, the more sophisticated the means of expression—or so the story goes.
    In fact, whereas animals use every expressive tool in their toolbox (screeches and howls, glances and gestures, touch and chase) for practical reasons of survival, we human beings are notorious for ignoring most of our expressive capabilities, choosing instead to use a few of the simplest tools (or blunt objects) even at the risk of spending a lifetime being misunderstood or unappreciated.
    Let me be clear: this is not an option for the practical genius.
    Living as a practical genius requires that you use all the tools at your disposal—every letter of the alphabet, every color, every note,every shape and texture of the human experience—to give expression to your genius. If you can’t express it, it might as well not be there.
    I think that generally folks believe that if they are reasonably communicative and attempt to make themselves clear, they’re doing a good job of expressing themselves to others. But I’m here to tell you that what you’re doing now isn’t enough. The good news: I can teach you another way to express yourself, and I can show you how to turn your self-expression into a genius asset of tremendous proportions.
    To begin with, what comes out of your mouth is only a small fraction of what you communicate to others. The expression on your face, what you’re wearing, the way you carry your body, even which seat you choose at a conference table tells people something about you. You actually express yourself all day long, although I’d guess you rarely do it with a particular purpose, and you certainly don’t tell the whole story.
    That’s what it is, you know—a story. There’s a story you’re telling about yourself as you move through the world. It may not be the story you mean to tell. And even if it’s the story you’d choose for yourself, I guarantee you’re not telling it as well as you should.
    I have a friend who goes to parties and always says to people she’s just met, “Nice to meet you. So what’s your story?” She says people almost never know where to start