Enabling Genius

The way we have it at the moment is almost like genius is a bar. Some people are geniuses and the rest of us just aren't. And it's difficult to know who sets that bar and why, and it's difficult, who gets over it, who doesn't, arbitrary. Which leads you to a question, which maybe we'll get to later, which is why would we have a conception of genius that essentially limits in the sense that most people would acknowledge that people, humans, have potential, but they'll tell you that it's capped just short of genius. That's kind of an interesting idea that your potential might be capped, and what and whom does that serve.

So what I'm arguing for is a different conception of genius and I'm not sure that I dare define it myself. So the first thing I'm saying is it's not a bar and then, if I was pushed, I would say a number of things, one of which is that fundamentally genius is an intent and it's an intent to make the best possible use of the instrument, the body, that I've been given. To develop my capacities as far as I possibly can. And that's one way I might define it. Another way I might define it is to say that it's uninhibited self-expression.

Rachel Salaman: So it might not be of any quality then?

Myles Downey: No, and there are some propositions. One, that each person can identify and develop a unique individual genius, but that actually, in all kinds of ways, things happen that are genius. Somebody tells a joke or reflects on something that's just apposite to that person or that minute or that situation, and we can say, "That's genius!" Yeah, uninhibited self-expression – somebody just gets something just right.

Rachel Salaman: So it can be fleeting?

Myles Downey: It can be fleeting. It can be fleeting.

Rachel Salaman: And in the book you make the point that it used to be thought of as something external and now we tend to think of it as internal. How useful is it to see it like that?

Myles Downey: One, that was part of telling the story about how we see genius and how it has changed. And if it's changed over time, well then we have the right to change it too. But I think there's a certain, and I'm going to say "humility" to having something that is external. So the Romans at one point saw it as, if you were a powerful or competent person, it simply meant that you were powerful or competent – genius, genii, an external spirit – and it's only later on that we see genius as being something internal.

So, one, having an external thing leaves you with a little bit of humility. You know, it's something that you didn't create, or it wasn't a God-given gift, and you're a wonderful person and overly proud. But on the other hand, if you see it as being something that's internal, you own it and you are in some sense in control. And by control, I mean you can develop it.

Rachel Salaman: So tell us about the Enabling Genius Project. What's its scope and what has it achieved so far?

Myles Downey: There were two things that were happening, one of which was that part of my working life is as an executive coach and I was bumping into people who had really extraordinary challenges in front of them. So I was faced with a question – when those people really wanted to explore the limits of their potential, how could I help them? So I needed a framework to allow me to support those people. That was one thought.

Another thought was that, as you step into a bookshop, you'll just see many hundreds of books on talent, performance, excellence, I mean, I could go on, creativity – all of that stuff – all written from thousands of different perspectives – psychology, neurosciences, space cadets, I mean, everything's in there – and very little of it refers to anything else. So you get people who are genius about talking about an aspect of it, like flow, the mental state called flow, and they don't refer to anybody else. It's all about their research. So that's not helpful for somebody who's deeply practical and who wants to make a difference to other people. So the second thing was how could you play out all of that information and begin to find the common bits? So that was another starting point.

The other was just a group of people who I was in touch with as I began to explore some of the thinking, who kind of coalesced and agreed to sign up, and the kind of rallying cry was, "We're writing a book." I'm not sure we all thought that was going to happen but it did. Yes, so having that number of people meant there were different voices, different perspectives, in a sense replicating the disparate nature of the science and the published research and all of the good stuff. And that meant that, if I tried to do it on my own, it would have taken years and years and years and years and would have been less rich, but we could do it much more quickly as a collective.

Rachel Salaman: And your book is packed with data from studies looking at performance excellence. They don't all agree, do they, especially around the nurture/nature debate. And some research suggests that high performers are born with an innate ability, and others indicate that high performance is much more likely to come from thousands of hours of deliberate practice. How do we navigate those contradictions, or are they even contradictions?

Myles Downey: It's kind of interesting that that debate is so entrenched. So the first question is, "Why is that debate so entrenched?" And there's a part of me that remembers those people who wore blazers that had gold or brass buttons on them and ran the local athletics club or whatever else, and the authority that it gave them. If you look at the way sport organizes itself, the people in blazers, it's all about those people retaining authority and giving license to others to be a coach at this level, that level, or the other level. And the power is somehow retained by those people and they're the people who typically subscribe to the idea that some people are gifted, that it came down through the genes and that not everybody can be, because it maintains their position of power.

You get to a bigger scale, and I would argue that over the last few hundred years, where we need people to be shot at in the trenches and where we need people to be effectively shot at as they work in factories – so cannon fodder and factory fodder – we don't want people, well ‘we', what wouldn't have been helpful to the establishment was that those people would see themselves as geniuses or having much choice because they would cease to work in factories and cease to be shot at or sign up to be shot at. So there's a whole cultural thing, which is about, you know, Francis Galton's book in 1850 was called "Hereditary Genius." It was about maintaining the view that those people of eminence were eminent as a function of their closeness to other people of eminence, so it was perpetuating an established view of genius.

So one, that debate is interesting because I think it shows up something that's slightly perverse and very, very limiting. But the debate has gone beyond that and the view, as I understand it and as it's expressed in the book, is that, actually, it's not so much about one or the other – and I think even a six-year-old could have told you that – but it's actually how those two things combine, how nature and nurture work off each other.

So yes, you are given some, if you like, gifts, but the question is, right from the moment of inception, some of those are put in an environment in which they're expressed, or not, and that's the key. Of all the things you've been given, what is it that gets expressed? And if you can start to understand that then you can look at what you have been given as an individual and notice what is being expressed there, and then you can start working on that and developing those traits and those abilities and those gifts.

So it's how nature and nurture interact to create the person that you are. The best study we could find, and it wasn't very satisfactory, suggests that it's just about 50/50. So what you become is about 50 percent of what you're born with and 50 percent of what you or others make of that.

Rachel Salaman: So I suppose if you're born with less of, let's say, talent, just for want of a better word, but you put in the extra deliberate practice, you can even things up a bit?

Myles Downey: Yes, exactly, that idea of deliberate practice. Deliberate practice came out of music tuition, where it was very expensive to have a teacher, hours with a teacher, so what they created was deliberate practice, which was when the teacher wasn't there you were doing exercises that the teacher or others had designed. So it meant that you could up the hours of very intentional practice to learn very specific things, so your rate of improvement.

What they found, of course, was that there's a huge correlation between the amount of practice, about 10,000 hours over 10 years, which leads to excellence. Now that's such a generalized statement but there's a truth in it, and if you look at the people who are... my favorite sport and my kind of discipline is tennis, and if you look at Federer, Djokovic, these very top guys, what's fascinating about them is they never stop learning. Federer very recently said that he wished that he had spent less time playing tournaments and more time practicing, meaning more time learning. What an extraordinary thing to say. Not that he regretted his success, he made it clear, but the sense there is of what he could have been and maybe still could be, who knows.

So that deliberate practice and that learning is the heart of genius in one way.

Rachel Salaman: Now, you've developed a framework called the Pillars of Enabling Genius. And it's represented by three interlocking circles. "Identity" is one, "mindset" is another, and "desire" is the third. And where they overlap in the center is learning. So let's talk about those a bit more, starting with identity. What role does that play in enabling genius?

Myles Downey: So the purpose in creating those pillars was to allow a person who wants to give themselves a kick-start and move forward, or a coach, to begin to create a path. And one part of that path, then, would be to understand something of one's identity. So identity means everything from, "I'm Irish by background. It infects a lot of the way I think about myself and therefore what gets expressed. So when I write, if I write well, that kind of lyrical thing begins to appear in what I write and sometimes in how I speak."

So identity, your identity, shows up and you can forge your identity. It isn't a given thing; again it's a construct. The view that some of us have is that identity is something fixed. It comes from the Latin word idem, which means the same, that which stays the same. There's another view which is called the "bundle view of identity," which says that actually it's not one thing. There isn't a bit in me like a stick of rock that's solid all the way through that said "Myles" and that's me, but rather my identity is a collection of the fact that I'm Irish and I value that, because I could not value that, that I studied architecture at one point, that I like playing tennis. Then out of all of those things, I choose the bundle that then is me. And that being so, when I get to being... You know, at one part of my life I saw myself as kind of the managing director of a small business that was involved in training and a lot of what I did was work as a trainer. In another part of my life, a lot of what I did was as an executive coach. And I'm now moving into a phase where I'm becoming more of an author, somebody who creates and puts stuff out in the world. And all of those things are choices, and the more accurately I can fashion how I am uniquely as an author – my identity as an author – and develop that, then the more successful I'll be and the more joy I'll have in doing it.

So identity is the foundation, it's what you start with. So, as a tennis player, I'm very clear what my identity is. And it took me 56 years to work that out, but we have an expression with my coach and it's, "Big, Zen, cat." I hit the ball very deep into the court, very hard, with a lot of spin – that's "big." "Zen" is that I manage my mental state, and I try and get into flow. And "cat" is that it's hugely aggressive, it's an attacking game. Once I've clarified that identity, Craig, my coach, and I know what we need to work on in order that I can improve. Without it, I'm just doing general faffing around.

Rachel Salaman: You don't see that as limiting at all, then, to give yourself those three keys to your identity?

Myles Downey: No, not least because I could change it. If I go out and then, in the heat of combat, find that it doesn't work, I could say, "Hmm, maybe I got that bit of my identity wrong, maybe it needs to be…" And I can find something, then, in myself that I might then choose to express.

Rachel Salaman: In the book, you also talk about authenticity and how it relates to identity. So what are your views on that?

Myles Downey: That gets complex because of what I've just said. So one, you need to do sufficient work, to choose, as I said earlier, nature versus nurture. It's half and half, so I need to understand what my gifts are. So if my gifts don't allow me to be "big, Zen, cat," and that's what I choose, then I'm going to find that mismatch very uncomfortable. So I've got to start with, "What are my gifts?" What I'm interested in, what I'm genuinely interested in, not what I'm interested in because my parents said I should be, and start working with those things.

So the authenticity comes out of doing the best research of yourself. Become your own scientist of your own self, and that's as far as I can get, but then, if there's a break there, if it's incongruous, it shows up very quickly.

Rachel Salaman: The second pillar in your Pillars of Enabling Genius is "mindset," and in the book you talk about the difference between mental state and mindset. So what is that difference?

Myles Downey: So I've kind of got a distinction here which says a surface-level thing and a deep-level thing. It's easier to talk about the deep-level thing. The deep-level things are your beliefs and attitudes, things that you've probably grown up with without much consciousness and haven't put much attention on but still you can change. But they're in your wiring, they're part of the way you think about the world.

Surface-level is more about the interaction between you and the world. So it's about if I'm engaging in some activity and I am there in a state of doubt and fearfulness – that's the mental state in that moment – that's not going to be very helpful. As opposed to a mental state of clarity and joy, say, that's going to be much more helpful if I was speaking at a conference, for instance.

There's a lot of research done around "flow" by a guy called Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who coined that term, and flow is a mental state in which there are no distractions, no fear, no doubt, and a sense of being slightly stretched but not stretched to the point where you break. And in that state, that mental state, human beings perform to their best. So one of the things that's critical is to be in flow as often as you can be. And, whereas there's a lot of science that describes the state, there's not much in the world of sports coaching or coaching that's about how to help people get there.

Rachel Salaman: So how do you help people achieve flow?

Myles Downey: There are a number of ways into flow. One of the guys who was the closest to being practical about it was a guy called Tim Gallwey, who wrote a book called "The Inner Game of Tennis" and then many other books that followed on from that. And he and I became quite good friends at a certain point. I remember him saying to me, he said, "Myles, the quickest way into" what he called flow was "self to." The quickest way into self to is through enjoyment.

So I was hitting tennis balls with him and he simply got me to notice my level of enjoyment as we were playing tennis. And it started at about two, because I hadn't played for a long time. And, with each passing rally that we had, he just got me to rate my level of enjoyment. And it went from two and, over the space of about five minutes, up to seven and eight. And, at that point, I had forgotten about all my concerns about how to play tennis and the fact that I was with the guru, Tim. All of those things just went away and I became more and more focused.

So focus is key. Daniel Goleman's last book was called "Focus." So it's a brilliant book, and that's the truth. So when I'm, for instance, on a tennis court, I get really clear about what I'm focused on. And one of the things I'm doing at the moment is, after the ball bounces, I'm looking to see if I can notice when it reaches the top of its bounce. So it distracts me from my distractions about where I should put the ball and whether I'm playing well or not, and I'm just present with where the ball is in its flight.

In a working environment, I will plan critical activities. So I'll ask myself questions like, "What's my intent in doing this piece of work or my purpose? What am I trying to achieve? What's the audience? How do I want them to think or feel or what do I want them to do at the end?" And then it's about turning off mobile phones and emails.

So really practical things. So you can set up an event so that you're more likely to get into flow. Actually, I increasingly spend time doing that and it's a massive key to productivity.

Rachel Salaman: The third circle in your framework is "desire," which you say in the book that you changed from "drive" in an earlier version. We have to want to perform well or we won't perform well. What are your main points about desire enabling genius?

Myles Downey: I think in our culture we've got an interesting relationship with will and drive. And it's a very masculine notion and it's about blinkered focus very often. And I think people do themselves an awful lot of damage, work incredibly long hours, to the point where they become unproductive. And then the collateral damage to relationships, whatever else, health, diminishes.

So I think we've got a slightly perverse notion around that, as I said. This very, very masculine notion. I think that it can be hugely damaging when it is expressed by a parent towards a child, kind of over-encouraging them to work hard in school or whatever it is. And it has the effect, often, of robbing that child of the opportunity to take responsibility for themselves if daddy or mommy says, "Do this." I don't have to think about it, I just do it – so they don't take responsibility.

So I think there's huge problems with the idea of "drive" in that masculine sense. So desire for me is more benign. There's something about the nurturing of real genius that requires attention but not throttling. "Will" seems to me to be very often about success in the world in a very materialistic sense. "Purpose," on the other hand, which is a closer word to "desire," is much more about an inner sense of doing what's right for oneself. I think if you work with purpose, it doesn't mean you can't have external goals, it's more fruitful, it's less damaging, and it allows for the fact that not only does the world change but I change. So, with a sense of purpose, the focus, the outcome, can shift slightly and you can still be on purpose.

It's more difficult if you've only got external goals that are unshifting. There's a huge amount of research that says that, actually, setting goals limits creativity, because you don't see things that are outside of the paradigm prescribed by the limiting goals.

Rachel Salaman: Which, I suppose, is why you have to always revisit your goals with new information.

Myles Downey: Yes, exactly. Exactly.

Rachel Salaman: So we talked about how these three circles (desire, mindset and identity) intersect at learning, and you say, you've said just now, that there can be no genius without learning. How does learning relate to deliberate practice? You talked about Federer earlier.

Myles Downey: Yeah, and it's wrong to conflate them, I've discovered in trying to be a better tennis player. So learning is either something that I know nothing about and I'm trying to acquire a certain set of skills or some knowledge, or when I'm trying to change something. Deliberate practice is moving whatever it is that I am learning into a point where I'm no longer thinking about it. So they call it "unconscious competence," and deliberate practice gets me to the point where I don't have to think about that skill set.

So, in my journey as a tennis player, I learned to play tennis on grass courts in South County, Dublin. The ball didn't bounce. We were using wooden tennis rackets, so you had to push the thing around. Today we've got rackets that are completely different in their technology. You can swing much bigger swings, much harder. The ball bounces consistently so you can afford to take a bigger... it's all changed, so I had to completely relearn everything. So there was that awful process of the old form disappearing and the new form emerging, but still being very conscious of it.

So, with the tennis coach, we'd spend time doing that, and then either with my tennis coach or with a friend, or with somebody else, then I'd go away between lessons and I'd do exercises to move whatever I'd been learning to the place where I was no longer thinking about it. Because if I'm going out to play a tennis match and I'm worried about my forehand grip, I'm not paying attention to what's happening in front of me. I'm not going to be in flow and I'm not going to have much fun. Once you get to the point where you're not thinking about it any more, your attention can shift to kind of a higher level. You can notice what your opponent is doing and adapt your tactics to suit, for instance.

So the two are close. One is about new stuff and the other is about bringing the new stuff into unconscious competence.

Rachel Salaman: So we've talked about the Four Pillars, and they form a great foundation on which to build a path towards genius. Where does a manager go from there to actually achieve genius in his or her working life?

Myles Downey: You start, I think, with becoming clear about what your identity is. So, as a coach, I've worked with so many people who found themselves in jobs accidentally, and then they got promoted, and then they got promoted again, and 20 years down the line they're kind of asking themselves, "How did I end up here?" And they can't move because their salary is probably quite nice at that point, and they've probably tied into some kind of a pension or bonus scheme, and they're stuck. So you have these people who never made a choice about what they were going to do caught in middle life, and it's kind of tragic. And then to do something different, of course, in our culture requires a degree of bravery.

But where I would start with is try and work out what your gifts are and see where they fit in the world. I started professional life as an architect and it was a good logical fit. My father and my father's father had been engineers, an aunt was an architect, a cousin was an architect, I understood physics, I could just about paint and draw, and, in the social milieu in which I grew up, you had to have a profession, you know.

So what happened? I could have gotten stuck there, but I was fortunate in that my tennis was quite strong and I read a book called "The Inner Game of Tennis" that made me question, "What do you really want?" and there it starts.

So identify what your gifts are, identify what really interests you, and begin to find ways to develop those things and express them. And even if you do find yourself slightly stuck in an organization, it's still possible to identify what you're great at and how to develop it. So I'm working with one guy at the moment who's quite a well-known public figure. And he actually doesn't entirely enjoy where he is, because he's moved up the management chain to the point where he's no longer doing what he started doing. And he's beginning to develop another sense of himself, which will probably emerge as a later career. He's working on a new identity for his late 50s and 60s.

So it's about starting with, "What is my genius?" and, if you can't move into the field of your genius immediately, you say, "So hold on, within my field, so I am an accountant, but, in this domain as an accountant, what is my genius?" And you may find it's more about bringing people together than it is about the numbers, for instance. So find ways of doing more of that.

Rachel Salaman: And what about managers who want to enable genius in the individuals they work with?

Myles Downey: Yeah. A world in which I spent a lot of time is the world of coaching and it's kind of generally accepted now that managers should coach. But if you think about the number of manager-to-managed relationships around the country, around the world, that's an enormous number of relationships. And if those were done effectively, where the manager was genuinely concerned about the wellbeing and performance of those people they manage, the world would change overnight.

So you start as a manager. You start with understanding that the people that you have been blessed to lead aren't just cogs in some awful machine; that, actually, each and every one of them has some innate genius there, has some capacities they could explore, and, if you start looking at them through those eyes, the world changes. That's a big request to make of people but it's an interesting starting point. And I am actually working with one person in a very high pressured job and he sees the absolute heart of his job is to bring the people he manages on. That's what he loves doing and that's what he sees his particular genius as a leader is. And he's hugely fun to work with and his people are thriving.

So one, look at your people through those eyes – through the eyes of genius. It changes things. And the other thing is then learn rudimentary coaching skills. Because if you constantly manage people, constantly work with the constraints, nothing much changes. But if you begin to introduce coaching into that relationship as well, alongside the managing which is required, then that's a big part of how that can change.

And the change is for everybody. People perform to a higher level, so the manager themselves gets the reflected glory in that. People are happier. And, typically, the manager or leader also can stop worrying about the day-to-day and can kind of lift up their head and notice what's going on around, and move to more strategic or more longer term kinds of activities and thinking. That would be wonderful, if people did some of that!

Rachel Salaman: Myles Downey, thanks very much for joining us today.

Myles Downey: Thank you.

Rachel Salaman: Myles Downey talking to me in London. The name of Myles's book again is, "Enabling Genius: A Mindset for Success in the 21st Century," and it's co-authored with the Enabling Genius Project team.

I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.