Cultivating Your Personal Brilliance

Personal Brilliance is the result of mastering the everyday habits that create a lifetime of success. Personal Brilliance is the sum of what you’ve learned, experienced, and practiced. Awareness, curiosity, focus, and initiative are the catalysts that spark innovative thinking and light the way to brilliant thinking and brilliant action. These four catalysts are innate abilities – natural gifts – possessed by each of us and they can be just as useful at home as they are at work.

For instance, one busy mother got tired of juggling work demands with last-minute requests from her kids. She decided to train her children in time management by having a planning-time session on Sunday evenings, at which time all her children had to tell her what activities they had planned for the coming week. Then, if they asked to do something and it wasn't on the weekly schedule, the answer would be "no" unless it was a true "life or death" emergency. Soon, when the children’s "I forgot to tell you" resulted in mom saying, "Next week you'll remember to plan early” instead of hectic last minute changes, sanity returned to her schedule: personal brilliance, in a real life situation.

That Personal Brilliance will benefit you in the business arena almost goes without saying. After a thirty-year banking career, John Huston used his awareness, coupled with his vast experience, to identify the positive economic impact that entrepreneurial businesses have in the creation of jobs in a community. Also applying curiosity, focus, and a great deal of initiative, John has played a huge part in galvanizing the angel investor community in Ohio to support entrepreneurial ventures in the area. He has created angel investor events in which entrepreneurs can make their innovations known and, as a result, is the co-founder of the only angel fund in Columbus, Ohio. John used his experience, as well as his habits of personal brilliance, to create a new career that is tremendously helpful to his community.

The secret to personal brilliance is mastering the everyday habits of the four catalysts: awareness, curiosity, focus and initiative. To find out where you rate on the Personal Brilliance scale, take the 10-minute Personal Brilliance Quotient Assessment at www.MyPersonalBrilliance.com. Your results will let you know which catalysts are strongest and which ones you can enhance with practice.

Awareness involves self-awareness first (the hardest part), then being conscious of your environment. As your awareness of a particular issue or situation grows, so does its influence as you're reading a book or article, watching a pertinent program, or having a conversation. You begin to think about it subconsciously in everything you do.

You develop a curiosity as you think, looking in many different arenas for insights. You pay attention to all aspects of your life with this filter, seeking to solve the problem. You look at the obvious things, but your curiosity helps you go deeper.

While going about your day-to-day life, you are extremely focused on the problem. I’m not talking about a laser beam focus. I’m referring to a 360-degree focus, more like a spotlight with a beam that widens out. You don’t want to limit yourself. Your focused attention should allow you to be open to all possible solutions that are out there.

Awareness, Curiosity, and Focus lead to many new ideas and options. However, without Initiative, ideas never get put into action.

Individually, the four catalysts – awareness, curiosity, focus, and initiative – are invaluable. Combine their forces and you will astound yourself. It’s important to mention that for some reason, coming up with a new idea or solving a problem hardly ever happens by applying these catalysts in a linear order. Although you can be intrigued with an idea, then increase your awareness, become more curious about the topic, focus on it, and finally take action, it’s more likely that two or more of these catalysts will be engaged at the same time. These catalysts tend to work together so seamlessly, that it’s often impossible to determine the order in which they occurred.

When these four catalysts become daily habits, the wheel of innovation spins! By harnessing the power of each of these habits, your level of personal success and fulfillment will soar. n