Tweet: Most tout their past with banal résumé bullets that make them look mediocre. Try this new approach to see how it transforms your self-view! It is well known that most employees are barely engaged in their jobs and some are actively disengaged. Gallop pols over the years show that, depending on which country and culture you dig into, nearly 80% of the employees are disengaged in their jobs. Of these about 30% or so can be Actively Disengaged. What this means that is that nearly 80% of the employees do not care what they do in their jobs as long as they do not get caught. Even when they do, systems prevent them from anything really bad happening to them, as a result, so they continue their approach to doing their job the way they always have, wallowing in mediocrity or even in disengagement. Of these the Actively Disengaged can, not only harm the job they are doing, but also those who are affected by their active indifference. Imagine a disengaged airline pilot, a surgeon, or an emergency responder! In the US alone there are nearly 100,000 deaths in hospitals and medical facilities, not related to the illness for which patients are being treated—entirely preventable iatrogenic deaths! After working in my current career for the past 15 years as a career coach and having worked with nearly 6,000+ clients globally I have come to the conclusion that most professionals do not know that they can engage in their job more effectively; get more out of that engagement; provide more value from their work in how it affects those who rely on it; and, most of all, get much deeper satisfaction from what they do for themselves. It is not just a theory, hypothesis, or a conjecture, but is derived from my own experience with many of my clients, who come to me unknowingly, wearing a badge of mediocrity! “There is nothing special about me” is often their refrain. Indeed, indeed, and I contend that they are ALL wrong! How do I know this? One of the first tasks I ask my clients to do is to redo their résumé in a story-telling narrative. Most come to me—all the way up to CEOs—with their résumé bullets highlighting their activities, not accomplishments. A laundry list of activities reads like a job description in the past tense. So, for someone, who is in sales, one of the bullets may read: As a Regional Sales Manager provided weekly activity reports to management. Yet, another may read: Always met quota set by management. These banal statements of their everyday activities utterly fail to distinguish them from their myriad competitors since their résumés also have near identical bullets. Instead, imagine the same bullet if it read: “Upon taking charge as RSM quickly discovered that the traditional quotas allocated were based on old market research and looking at the entire market as monolithic. Conducted market research that revealed much greater potential and careful segmentation showed that the company could capture a market 3X as large. Exceeded even the new quota.” During our first meeting I usually ask them to re-write their résumé in a story-telling format to showcase their leadership. I have a structured way of doing this and a fairly cut-and-dried recipe that has evolved over the 15 years I have been career coaching. During the layout of the process I emphasize to them that their next résumé message will now be based on their genius. I firmly believe that whenever anyone engages their genius in any activity it creates an Aha! (the very definition of genius). A common reaction to this request is that most clients recoil in disbelief wondering if they have any worthwhile Aha! stories to tell about their past accomplishments. Some go away resigned to the fact that this would be a wasted effort since they have never created an Aha! in anything that they did. Yet, when I see their first sample story they send for me to review I often find in them the gems of their creativity and the spark of their genius. I then take their rough-hewn story and bring it to life by repackaging and editing it to make it soulful. When they see the improved version of their transformed story a light-bulb goes on in their head and they start thinking of many such stories that they could now write to showcase their genius and their creative spark. It was there all along, but the way they engaged themselves it did not bring out their best work; more importantly they did not see the value of their own work. They did what they had to do by engaging their genius in a casual way, without giving it much thought. And, when they did make a difference in how they produced an outcome, some conniving colleague—sometimes, even their boss—hijacked the credit for it to their own benefit! Such lassitude often results in creating the perception of a mediocre job performance, producing the familiar statistics that we witness in our everyday surveys about employee engagement. So, what I have found in my own practice is that unless you force yourself to re-visit your own past work and re-interpret it by looking at what you did, not just as mere activities, but as impactful accomplishments based on your inner genius, you are further consigned to future mediocrity in what you do. Armed with this knowledge you must now lift yourself with your own bootstraps to operate at a higher level, engaging your genius in all that you do to transform your future and how you engage in your next job or assignment. So, how does this process of re-writing your everyday résumé from a mundane, task- focused laundry list to a genius-based leadership narrative that defines who you really are allows you to translate your mediocre job engagement into a rock-star performance? Well, it is founded on your ability to give a renewed meaning to many of your “activities” through a transformation process to now make them your “accomplishments.” In each such accomplishment now recast as your leadership narrative you have the seed of your genius that pops out to a reader and you can further accentuate these accomplishments by verbalizing each with a specific genius phrase (as your signature skill). The real power of this process is not just in how your résumé now shines and stands out from everyone else’s, but more importantly, how you engage in your next job. What this experience provides them is a framework for anyone who has gone through this process to look at any assignment as something that requires them to engage their genius, so that they can verbalize their accomplishments in a compelling way. So, this process also creates job engagement previously missing for most clients; it excites them to engage in their next undertaking very differently. So, if you are feeling mediocre lately, embark on the process of delving into your accomplishments. Take the trouble to dig into your leadership stories of how you engaged your genius in your tasks, verbalize them as accomplishments, and see how different your résumé now looks, and, more importantly, how differently you feel about what you can do next! Back in the ‘70s I remember seeing a billboard on the Silicon Valley’s main freeway. It simply had three lines: Some make it happen; some watch it happen; and some wonder what happened! Then there was the company’s name for you to call, saying “Come, join us, and Make it Happen! Now, Go, make it happen! Good luck!