Transcripts for Episode 153

These transcripts were generated by robots, not writers.

Betsy: Just like going to the doctor. We don’t need to be getting up every day, dragging, feeling like, you know, I hate my job or I hate my life or what’s missing? I’ve got this nagging problem. Career wellness is about being satisfied in your career. It is about being energized by your career, but also understanding. Having a full life is more than your career. And so, again, back to not putting your career or your job on the witness stand. When you feel unhappy, it’s asking yourself, all right, these forces in me, these aptitudes, are they being met at work? Is there something I should talk to my team about? Where I could be shifting sort of the focus of my work over to more writing for the newsletter for the team, or leading the team in a different way, or managing projects?

Betsy: What would it be? And your app sheets will give you clues to this. When you take the assessment, you’ll hear all this, but being well in your career is thriving and being satisfied in your daily work, but also having a life outside of that work that meets those unmet aptitudes that no one job can do.

Stacy: Welcome. I’m really excited to get to speak with this week’s guest. I’m going to tell you a little bit about her in a moment, but the topic that we are going to discuss today, I think is absolutely vital, critical for anybody at any stage of their life or career. We’re going to be talking about aptitudes, it’s probably not what you think an aptitude is. So we’ll dig into that. But also, this is going to be a really important episode for you if you are at a point in your life or your career where maybe you’ve kind of reached, where you shot for, you had a goal and you’ve hit that goal or you’ve hit a certain milestone and you feel this sense of what else is out there, what more is out there.

Stacy: We’re going to be digging into that question of how do you uncover that? How do you step into that? And we’re also going to be looking at the science behind it as well. So not just a conversation about how to think about this, but actually, how do you measure this and how do you take steps to really step into your full purpose? So let me introduce you to this week’s guest. Betsy Wills is co founder of you Science, a national online based education and career platform headquartered in American Fork, Utah. She’s a regular guest lecturer at Vanderbilt University and New York University Stern School of Business and has been a featured speaker for TEDx women. It’s a great talk, by the way, and she lives in Nashville, Tennessee. And, Betsy, welcome.

Betsy: Thank you. It’s great to see you.

Stacy: I would love to start out with your story. One of the things that first just caught my attention when I met you many years ago is your personal story around how you discovered the science of aptitudes. You had a moment, you were in your early thirties, and you really came to this kind of questioning of what was next for you. Can you bring us into that moment, tell us what happened? And then where’d you go after that?
Betsy: Well, I was born and raised in Nashville. I’ve lived here my entire life. So I would say I’m the most provincial person you’ll ever meet. Not by design, but I am. You’re living all over the world. It just so happened I went to Vanderbilt and got married quickly after I was 23. I’m now 57. Just so everyone knows that, I’m sure. That’s obviously. But by the time I was 32, I had two children. I was fortunate enough back in those days to stay home with my children, but I had, I see, four great grandmothers living between my husband and I. And so they were all nanogenarians, I guess is the right word. And I thought to myself, oh, my gosh, all these things are really behind me already. I’ve had children. I’ve been married. I’m only 32.

Betsy: And I looked in the mirror and I thought, oh, my gosh, this can’t be it. And a lot of things were perfect in my life, so it seemed a little selfish to ask that question, but I did. And a friend of mine suggested I go to Johnson O’Connor in Atlanta and have my aptitudes assessed, which was basically a career, you know, counseling place, nonprofit, very expensive to do it. It was maybe $1,000. It was fantastic. Changed my life. And I came back and immediately re enrolled into Vanderbilt for a graduate program on the weekends. And from there, I decided to write a curriculum called the brain spa because I thought, oh, I’m going to help all these women coming back into the workforce who have these gold plated educations and don’t know how to do it. And so I did that.

Betsy: But it ended up to my surprise that the most frequent caller for my services were actually 40 year old male lawyers. And that’s when the light bulb went off for me that, you know, everyone at some point is going to go through this nagging sense that maybe they’re not fulfilling their potential or are in the wrong job for some reason, or just they’re in some kind of crisis. And so that’s really how this whole thing got started.

Stacy: It’s such a, I think, a story that nearly anybody could hear and feel a connection to, whether you’re a stay at home parent or you are in a really high level leadership role at a company, and you kind of get to this spot and you realize there’s nowhere to go from here, career wise. Or maybe you ended up down a field attorney, I think is a great example. I’ve also worked with a lot of attorneys who are in transition from this intense area of study that they devoted so much time, energy, money, heart, life to, and then get into it and realize that it’s actually not a good fit for them. So there’s so much that makes so much sense to so many people. I’m sure many listeners are like, oh, okay, I’m listening.

Betsy: Well. And, you know, the fact of the matter is, when they would call me, I was not. I was. The first thing I said is, please don’t quit your job, because what people want to do is put their job on the witness stand immediately as the problem. But the problem can be many things. Most often, I mean, it certainly can be the people you’re working with or a bad boss or something like that, but also could be the area that you’re working in, even in the same company, you could pivot out of, but most often, what I know today because of the work I do with aptitudes, is it’s unused aptitudes that are sitting, lying dormant that start to sort of rear their head and they need exercise.

Betsy: You may be not conscious of it, but usually it’s an avocation or something you need to add versus something you need to take away and quit your job, because that’s a big decision, and that isn’t at all necessarily the right way to go. I mean, that’s sort of where they say, out of the fire into the frying pan, or out of the frying pan into the fire. Jumping is not the first thing to consider. So we talk about that a lot in the book, and you’ll see.

Stacy: I would love to talk about aptitudes, and I’ll tee up the conversation a little bit. I mentioned at the beginning of this podcast that people probably don’t actually, they think they know what aptitudes are, but they don’t really know. I think probably 99% of people don’t really truly understand what an aptitude is. So I want to get that definition from you, but I’d like to give, I’d like to tee it up a little from my own experience with you taking the youth science aptitude assessment many years ago. And I think I don’t want to dive too deep, because I want you to give the definition. We can unpack it a little bit. One of the things that I learned about myself from that assessment is that I have a really great spatial awareness.

Stacy: I need to use my hands more in the physical world than I do in my job. That gave me information to be able to think about ways that I could integrate that into my life. But it also helps me think about my writing and how I can build worlds in my head and use that as well. So maybe you could use that as an example, as we talk about the definition of aptitudes and how we think about that, and then how that can help us improve our lives even if our careers stay the same. But we can find other outlets.

Betsy: Yes. So we need to dispel this right away, because whenever I bring up this subject to people, they immediately jump to, oh, I’ve taken an aptitude assessment. I took Myers Briggs or enneagram or strengths finder, and the definition has been sort of hijacked in a certain way. Aptitudes have nothing to do with self reporting your answer, and I think if you understand, you’ve taken those many assessments, and I love assessments, but anytime they’re asking you a question and you self report on a scale of one to five. I’m this, and they ask it a million different ways. And these are, you know, fun tests, they’re personality tests, they are your interest tests, but they have nothing to do with aptitudes. Aptitudes are the things that we’re born with. And in the world of psychometricians, they’ve identified over 52 aptitudes that you can measure.

Betsy: These range from something as silly as glare factor is. One glare factor is literally how bothered you are by glare. Okay, so they can measure that on a continuum. So this matters if you’re going to be driving a truck or flying an airplane, but it doesn’t really apply to most jobs or careers or advocations. So obviously, you know, we could spend all day measuring all the aptitudes. That wouldn’t be the first one I would pick. But there are aptitudes that are incredibly important to your life and your work and your daily enjoyment and satisfaction of things. For instance, your spatial ability, which is your ability to see things in 3d. There’s a big continuum there of some people just see it and some people don’t. They think in space.

Betsy: So knowing that actually has a lot to do with sort of sorting out what activities you’re going to enjoy or not. The opposite end of being very spatial, for instance, is abstract. So in order to measure that, for example, they give you a paper folding assessment, and for some people, they want to throw the computer out the window because it’s so difficult. And other people are like, now, that wasn’t hard, and it just is this inborn ability to see it. So the interesting thing about aptitudes are that they don’t change after we’ve completed puberty, they don’t change. So you can take an assessment for that spatial ability at 1737, 107, and the people who see it, still see it, and the people who don’t, still don’t. You can’t learn it better to do better on the assessment.

Betsy: So the way I describe an aptitude, it’s really the seeds of your skills, not the skills themselves. So think of them as innate abilities that need nurture through learning. And when you have an aptitude for something, your learning rate along that aptitude is going to be faster than someone who maybe doesn’t have as strong of an aptitude in that area. Now, they’re not judgmental either, so it’s neither good or bad to have one. It’s how you use it. And this gets into really optimizing how you are going to be on a team, what you contribute to a team. So understanding what you’re ahead, a complete set of aptitudes are and aren’t help you choose activities that feel like falling off a log versus an uphill battle.

Stacy: It’s interesting because it got me this conversation and discussion of how it stays consistent over time, and this idea that when you have the aptitude and now you move into the skill development, you’re just going to move on that continuum faster. Right?

Betsy: Faster. Right.

Stacy: Yeah. I have a friend who I think in her thirties, she moved from a totally different career into jewelry. She’d never had any experience in this field before she took a class. She liked it. And now she’s like a big french jewelry influencer. And she has all these classes. In fact, I made some gold earrings at her shop and she taught me how to do all the stuff for them. And I mean, of course I don’t know what her aptitude score is or how that worked, but I imagine she might be an example of somebody who, in their thirties or beyond, could click into something that they never thought was a possibility before and really flourish. Do you see that happen a lot?

Betsy: Yeah, that’s the whole idea. It unlocks ideas. It’s not a dream killer to know that you do or don’t have an aptitude. It’s actually, oh, my gosh, all these possibilities are sitting there for me. Let’s explore. But let me say one more thing about sort of that aptitudes are neither good or bad. To have one of the aptitudes. I know you also have Stacy, and I do as well. And a lot of writers, actually, journalists, marketers, is something called idea rate, and some people call it idea phoria, actually. And it’s literally a measurement of the rate at which ideas come to you. And some people, it is an unending stream. You can kind of spot them a mile away. And then for some people it’s a really slow drip, if that makes sense. We call those people concentrated focusers.

Betsy: They tend to have one idea at a time. They really think one through. And then there are people who are brainstormers who are be like you or me, where there’s tons and tons of ideas. Now, not one of our ideas may be any good. Okay. It’s important to know that simply a simple, and I know a lot of those that are no good. But when you have this, you do enjoy activities like public speaking, and taking a public speaking class will be a lot of fun because you’ll love the Q and A. Being able to think quickly on your feet and generate ways to answer a question in a different way so that you reach people. But you would not want your surgeon or your pilot to have this. And that’s what I mean by it not being good or bad.

Betsy: Those are fabulous jobs. But so being, you know, strong in a certain aptitude can actually be a hindrance in some careers. And being not as strong and in aptitude can actually unlock options in many careers. So that’s what’s hard for people to get their arm around because we think about assessing as, I have to be good at all these things. And that’s actually the opposite when it comes to aptitudes, we want a combination. And once you know what that combination of things are, you can really gear your choices towards using those in unique ways and being much more satisfied in your daily job and applications.

Stacy: One of the things that I like about aptitudes, as you know, as I’ve had the opportunity to be exposed to them for so long, having known you for a while, is that I, I think that there’s a real opportunity with aptitudes to unlock possibility for people who maybe didn’t have exposure earlier in life. So let’s say you’re in your thirties, forties, fifties maybe you were in a community culture that didn’t have a lot of access, you didn’t have as many mentorship opportunities, or you didn’t have the school system that enabled you to get into places that would enable you to move into the right fit career. I think that there’s a lot of hope that aptitudes offer because it’s not just about, as you said, that self reporting of your interests, which require exposure to have interest in something. It’s a totally different thing.

Stacy: Can you talk about that? The equity component of it? Yeah.

Betsy: Yes. I mean, well, there’s a whole lot of data now. I think you science, you know, they’ve tested millions of people now, mostly high school and college students. But as I said, your aptitudes don’t change. So it’s available to any of your listeners anytime, and I highly recommend it wherever you are in your career. But what they found by doing studies on people’s interests versus their aptitudes is that there are mostly women and often people of color who have been socialized to think that they have limitations based on what they’ve been exposed to, or they’ve been socialized around certain roles in society. And so what happens is, for instance, women, from looking at the data, often report their interest, and those interests generate a suggested list of careers that might be very typical. Female roles, nurturing, caregiver, preschool teacher, nurse. Those are fantastic jobs.

Betsy: But when you look at their aptitude patterns alone, what you see is, wow, they have their strongest aptitudes would indicate jobs in manufacturing, science, technology, stem types of careers. And so it isn’t true that you should only pursue careers that fit your aptitudes, but you should absolutely start looking there first. And so what you do is you start getting exposure to those jobs and that will generate, hopefully, interest and motivate your competence in going after those careers. And so we’re finding that basically, I would say for years, high schools have been unconsciously committing career malpractice by only using interest surveys. Now, why did they do that? It wasn’t a plot. I mean, it wasn’t, you know, some kind of awful thing. What it was is that they didn’t have the ability to test aptitudes on scale.

Betsy: And what technology has allowed is things like you, science, to be able to be online so you could test lots and lots of people, not one to one, in analog situation, like, I took it for very expensive amount of money. So now all high schools, I think we’re in 25% of all us high schools now and growing, and they’re adopting the aptitude assessment plus interest. So you have a much fuller picture for people of what their potential, where their potential lies. And so that’s going to change a lot of people’s view of themselves and what their options are.

Stacy: I love that. I mean, the other layer of that I thought about is just the human fallibility of career advice. And it reminded me of a story I’ve told you personally in the past of a friend of mine who is a really brilliant person. I won’t give too many identifying characteristics because I haven’t gotten his permission to share. But, you know, he was told in high school that he might as well not go to college, that he should be. I think they told him either like, a trash collector or, you know, somebody in that, in that field, which if that fits for you and you like it, awesome. But for him, he had a different pathway that he wanted to follow in his life. Thankfully, he had support from his family and didn’t follow that direction.

Stacy: And he actually is in an amazing leadership political sphere. Like, he’s an incredibly influential leader today. But I think about if he had a different family or been in a different socioeconomic class or been a person of color or all these other layers to it. I just feel that having some of these objective measures are a great equalizer that are giving more kids and that access to these even just simply the exposure to the idea of a different.

Betsy: That’S the thing that you that needs to be planted. I mean, we have films of whole classrooms taking the assessment. And then there’s one moment where the results come up and they’re all in front of their computers and you literally could see people sitting up straighter and going and then looking a little closer, like what I could be what? And that’s what we all need is that motivation and confidence to try something. And because you can’t game an aptitude assessment, you don’t even know what is being tested. When you’re in the middle of it, then your belief system in the results is really high because you didn’t self report those answers again. And so it’s a wonderful way to just level set again of what are my opportunities? And then you can explore them and see if they really fit your interest.

Betsy: And there’s enough presented where it’s not just here be a blank, you know, be one thing. Here’s a collection of things to explore. And they, that’s what’s really the magic of it. This fallacy that I’m going to be an ex when I grow up or what are you going to be when you grow up? Well, you’re going to be a lot of things. That’s the truth. And so understanding where your potential lies will help you navigate those twists and turns all the way along the way. So that’s what’s really encouraging. So back to, you know, I think careers, for instance, these days we talk about over in a career crisis, but the truth is careers are in crisis.

Betsy: I mean, the speed of change is so fast that understanding, again, what your unique set of potential is, it’s going to have to be something you keep revisiting. So that’s the value of knowing that these, this information doesn’t change about you. And you can kind of keep coming back to it as you face new opportunities and questions.

Stacy: You wrote a book about all the, about this topic. And I know a lot of the work that you are doing with this book is targeting people that are in those later stages of their career, really supporting them in being better leaders, in being more self aware. And you talk about also career wellness. Can you share a little bit about your book, your hidden genius, which I know you co authored with Alex? You can tell us maybe a little bit about your co author relationship on that. And with the book, what you hope the book will do in the world.

Betsy: Well, I have wanted to write this book for so long, ever since, actually, I had my aptitudes tested and did this brain spa curriculum for people. I would send them to Johnson O’Connor, and I knew it was so expensive. So it’s just not something everyone could have. But finally, because of you, science, we’re able to offer this to a huge span of people. Your hidden genius is about unlocking and uncovering both your aptitudes and your interests and helping you self navigate these twists and turns of your life. We wrote the book really geared towards people wanting to have healthier careers, and that’s why we use the term career wellness. Just like going to the doctor, we don’t need to be getting up every day, dragging, feeling like, you know, I hate my job or I hate my life or what’s missing?

Betsy: I’ve got this nagging problem. Career wellness is about being satisfied in your career. It is about being energized by your career, but also understanding having a full life is more than your career. And so, again, back to not putting your career or your job on the witness stand. When you feel unhappy, it’s asking yourself, all right, these forces in me, these aptitudes, are they being met at work? Is there something I should talk to my team about? Where I could be shifting sort of the focus of my work over to more writing for the newsletter for the team, or leading the team in a different way, or managing projects? I mean, what would it be? And your app sheets will give you clues to this.

Betsy: When you take the assessment, you’ll hear all this, but you know, that’s being well in your career is thriving and being satisfied in your daily work, but also having a life outside of that work that meets those unmet aptitudes that no one job can do? So you talk about the spatial ability, for instance, and taking a jewelry class or even playing golf meets a spatial ability, for instance. There’s lots of things you can do. All of this is in the book as well. And just that one shift to using that unused aptitude can make the day and the week doing something that doesn’t use it at all that much happier.

Stacy: I think, though, that layer of life is such an important piece because you’re right. It is so easy to go to your job or whatever, these things that you kind of view as fixed things in your life. But actually, we have so much capacity in our everyday lives to make different, more fulfilling choices. What are some? Do you have an example or a couple of examples of how either you or other people you’ve supported over the years have implemented this approach into their lives to really live a more full, meaningful career. Well, lifestyle.

Betsy: Well, I know I work in the financial industry. That’s my day job, and I do marketing. I really enjoy it. I love my team there. But about, I guess 15 years ago I started a blog because I love contemporary arts and just drawn to that always had been my job had really nothing to do with that. And I did it just for joy. And I ended up with maybe a million followers on this blog that I wasn’t charging money for. I just was doing it out of joy. And that made my everyday so much better. I also pushed myself to learn technology and that was 15 years ago about how to apply, you know, use all the tools for WordPress, etcetera. So that enhanced my paid job.

Betsy: So that’s an example of just doing something for joy that really allowed me to open up so many other opportunities. So even, in fact, now I’m on the board of the Guggenheim Museum in Venice, which would never have happened had I not pursued that interest and gotten to know that community so much better. So that’s just one example for me personally. I can also give you an example of an aptitude that I really lack, which is visual scanning detail around, maybe spotting an error and editing that kind of thing for teams. This is such an interesting one to me because some people just are very good at spotting errors and mistakes. They just naturally are. And some people, like me, you have to see something four or five times to spot the problem.

Betsy: Well, I’ll find myself writing emails or, you know, reading over something that’s going to be published for my work, and I just do not see the error. I have to take a lot of time to do it. I think when you’re a leader or in charge of a team, this can be misconstrued as, oh, that person’s lazy or they’re not working very hard. But when you understand, oh, this is not the best role for them, to be the editor of this or that, or create the PowerPoint or whatnot, then you can talk about it in a way that’s not hot and you can kind of coach them. Either take more time with that project or offload that to someone who just has a eye for that. That’s a better role for them, is to do that extra editing work for you.

Betsy: For me, when I’m going to send an email, I’ve managed myself and I reread it, you know, two or three times. If it’s very important just to make sure there’s not an error. And nine times out of ten, there is. So that’s just one example of how knowing these aptitudes, it’s given me the confidence and the verbiage to advocate for myself and to manage better for my team.

Stacy: Yeah, I think those are such great examples. And it got me thinking about, you know, even just talking about editing. There are different types of editing that you do in the book world, and to have the freedom to go through the earlier stages of editing without having to be in the typo correcting mode, it’s really important for people. And it also, you know, made me think about how we run things through our team. We always have one person proofread everything, and that just lets all of us be free to, you know, do our thing without having to worry about it being word perfect. So I love those examples.

Stacy: If somebody is listening today or watching us, Betsy, and they’re in a real space of, I don’t want to say crisis, but they’re in, like, one of those moments of their life where they’re like, I dont know what is next. Theyre in that moment that you had when you were 32. Where do they start? What is the first thing that they should do? And then what are those steps they can take after that to start to move in the direction of this really full life?

Betsy: Well, first of all, dont panic.

Stacy: Great advice always la don’t panic.

Betsy: You know, it’s funny. I looked up the word crisis, and what it actually means is a greek word, and it means to turn, a turn for the worse, but it’s equally a turn for the better. So I love crisis because it just means you’re making a turn. That’s really the definition of that. And that can be very stimulating. If, if I were feeling that sort of empty dissatisfaction, what’s wrong with me? Career illness, if you will, or just, you know, day to day not feeling like you’re, sometimes I say you feel like you’re the walking dead. You’re just going through the motions. You know, obviously, I would say it’s a great idea to take the aptitude assessment and figure out, you know, sort of your baseline again. Again, aptitudes aren’t everything, but they’re a wonderful way to sort of rebuild.

Betsy: What is it that I’m most satisfied doing? And then how can I apply that to my learning and skill building? So some people talk about, you know, driving home from work and taking a different street. Have you ever heard that? That’s like a good synapse builder so you don’t take the same way home every day, you just take a different road. It’s kind of the same idea of opening up your mind to what your possibilities and potential might be and giving yourself the grace to start exploring. I don’t think it’s about let me find a new job right now, that’s one thing for sure. Or change everything or quit my job or move out of town or something like that.

Betsy: I think the first step is to take an assessment of yourself and understand where your potential lies and then dedicate time actually to exploring and trying some things, not going for the first thing that suggested. I think we talked about this concept of decision making. Do you remember talking about that? Where what I tell, for instance, young graduates and I tell any age person is most people think they’re making a decision when they’re really defaulting. And the difference between a decision and a default is a decision involves generating at least three choices. And I sometimes use an expletive here, but I’m just going to tell you, it’s freaking hard to develop three live choices at once. That’s a challenge in and of itself.

Betsy: But if you back up before you think you’re going to make a change and say, first I’m going to generate three choices, and you put your effort there instead of making the change, by the time you make the actual change or decision, it will be a good one.

Stacy: That’s one of my favorite things I have ever heard from you. You said all of this to me many years ago, your kind of decision approach. And it’s something I have carried forward with me. When I think about decision making and this idea of having three good choices in front of you really changes things. Cause one, you’re not going into it with this binary. I need to be a yes or no on this one thing. You are pulling forward options that are reasonable choices for you, like any of them, could be reasonable decisions, but you have now optionality in front of you. And then when you do make your decision, you can make it in a very anchored way and clear way.

Betsy: Clear headed.

Stacy: Yeah, right. And I’ve applied that life and it works.

Betsy: You’ll be wrong, by the way. You could still make the wrong, you know, or not. So let me say that. But inevitably, that process of bringing forward, I’m not trying to make the change right now. I’m trying to create three choices. That’s a very different thing and that’s fun. You know, they start talking to people and I trying things out, taking a lesson in tennis or, you know, whatever it is you’re trying to do. And that becomes actually a fun exercise versus this pressure of, I have to make a change right away. I always say you wouldn’t marry the first boy you kissed, or woman you kissed, if you will, and you wouldn’t buy the first house you look at, but you’d be surprised how many people actually do that. And that usually ends to in disaster. So, that’s.

Betsy: That’s just the way I think about making change through a crisis. And, the energy it takes to get those three choices going, those are real. And that’s where I think understanding your aptitudes first gives you that confidence and motivation. Just, you know, look beyond what you know right now and realize there’s a big world out there and it’s there for you.

Stacy: I love that approach. I mean, again, I’ve been using your advice for many years. And the other layer to that for me and how I think about decision making came from one of my mentors when I was in finishing up my undergraduate degree. And she said to me, after a long walk when I was hemming and hawing about two very different decisions in my life, she said, Stacy, I’m going to share with you advice my mentor gave me when I was around your age. You make a choice and then you make another one.

Betsy: There you go. That’s been tagged forever, and that’s a great one. I’m going to tm you on that.

Stacy: Isn’t it so powerful?

Betsy: You said that so much more eloquently. Of course. You’re a beautiful writer.

Stacy: I can see why it’s such a freeing orientation. But the thing I like about your layer to it is that you’re making an informed and thoughtful decision based on options you created for yourself, not a default that was handed or the simplest thing to make a binary choice. And then you can move into it, knowing that life is open and limitless, and you can always make different choices and always move in different direction.

Betsy: Right. You know, I think in my TEDx I bring up the fact that you would not believe how many people make a career decision because they sit next to someone on an airplane.

Stacy: Yes, I learned about audio talk, but.

Betsy: You know, people have a lot of influence because we get panicked and a bit desperate when we’re unhappy. That’s the truth. So giving yourself the opportunity to step back and really understand yourself, think about the wellness of your career or your life, and put as much attention into nurturing and making it healthy as you do everything else and you’ll start to find that it really yields wonderful results and opens up worlds of opportunity. And that’s what gets me excited about people having this self awareness and back to, you know, on teams. It really helps resolve conflicts when people can talk about themselves in a very authentic way and advocate for what they can offer a team in the best way and what they really need to let be on the sideline, which is humbling.

Betsy: But at the same time, when you could have those frank conversations, you don’t have the same sort of blame game going on with your boss. You don’t look at other people as a flawed version of you. And that’s really important. That empathy, that love, I’ve found in parenting, same thing. Huge amount of understanding that my child is not me. But look at these wonderful things that they have, their abilities that we can nurture, that have nothing to do with me at all. And I need to. My job is to make sure that comes out the best in them and that those things get nurtured, not that they need to be a little mini me in some way.

Stacy: That’s a great point of awareness. And it dovetails so nicely with today. I had this awareness. I was getting ready for a meeting, and I remembered early on, much earlier in my business, I remember thinking, gosh, if I just had two of me, you know, I could do so much. And today I was like, gosh, I’m glad I don’t have two of me because I have all of these areas that I’m not great in and I have other people that are great at them. And what a richer environment to work within when we all bring different things to the table and we all bring strengths and we can support each other in areas that, you know, we don’t have that. And I don’t want to put strength and aptitude together because I know they’re different things.

Betsy: Well, they’re connected, but not the strength is. Is really not the same thing, to your point. But, you know, I think about, there’s this one aptitude also that is assessed. We assess 14, just so you know, out of the 52, but one is inductive reasoning. And on a team, this. This really comes out. I’ll just make a brief description, but I. Inductive reasoning. Some people can take disparate pieces of information, maybe three pieces of information, and draw a conclusion under time pressure really quickly. And usually they’re right. Like, sometimes these people are told you have a really good gut, for instance, or instincts.

Betsy: They tend to need to use this aptitude, and it can cause trouble on a team because they see where the puck is going, and sometimes the rest of their team doesn’t see it as quickly, and the team just gets anxious because they’re like, yep, we’re moving on. We’re going to do this. We made this decision, and everybody’s like, oh, my gosh, I had no idea. Give me some time. But people on the other end of that continuum are more fact checkers. They need more information, and sometimes they need to be pushed into the pool to make a decision. So they make excellent hiring managers or risk managers, or they’re the person raising their hand going, you know, I think we need to just check this one last thing, and that could save the day.

Betsy: But working together, there’s roles for both types, and sometimes you need someone who can draw that conclusion really quickly, and sometimes you need that person to say, ho, ho. Let’s wait just a second here. So it’s interesting. You need all kinds on a team to be successful. You can’t have all one or the other.

Stacy: It’s so true. And I love the idea of having a team take the aptitude assessment because it all signs them language to be able to communicate with each other.

Betsy: Yes. And like I said, not judgmental. It’s not good or bad. It’s just what it is.

Stacy: Yeah, that seems, that’s a really important anchor and something I hope people will take away from this conversation that they really are. There’s not a, it’s not good or bad to have this or that or not have this or that. It just simply is. And it’s information about yourself, like the fact that you have blue eyes or brown hair or, you know, you have these different qualities about yourself. And I think it’s important that we don’t attach that value judgment to your results with the aptitudes.

Betsy: Exactly. Yeah.

Stacy: Betsy, I love all the work that you’re doing in the world. I know your book comes out in January of 2025. Where can people follow you and stay up to date on the release of the book and celebrate the release with you when it comes out?

Betsy: Well, thank you. Yourhiddengenius.com is where I would go, and there will be lots of information. There’ll be facilitator guides for people who want to use this on a team. There’s career wellness guides for book groups. If you want to read it, you can pre order. Obviously, it’s going to be released January 21, but I hope people will pre order it. What we didn’t talk about was the book, which is priced at $29, includes the code, a unique code to take the assessment. So that’s a great opportunity for people. So it’s a wonderful gift for people who are in transition, know someone who is in transition families, and of course, corporate and team members. So, you know, we hope everyone will be using the language of aptitudes as they grow and change and think about their lives. Just like Enneagram has been popular.

Betsy: You know, I’m a two with a six wing or whatever it is. It gives you a language in the book and lots of stories. We’ve interviewed in the book about 80 different people from all walks of life, all ages stages, from the White House usher, who’s 69 years old, to Carla hall, who’s on top chef, to Simone Gertz, who is an inventor and YouTube star. So we’ve got all different kinds of people that you can hear about. We’ve got a person who’s a dog trainer in Seattle who’s fantastic. So you’ll see yourself in the book with these stories, and I think you’ll get a lot out of this new understanding of what your potential is.

Stacy: Well, we’ll be sure to link to the book and we’ll look forward to celebrating with you January 21 of next year when it comes out. Betsy, thank you so much for being with me today. I really appreciate you sharing your time and your expertise with us.

Betsy: Thank you, Stacy. I’ve loved it.

Stacy: And thank you to you, our listener, our viewer, for being with us today. I hope that this was a really impactful conversation for you and that you will go and learn more about aptitudes, pre order Betsy’s book and embark on that exploration of having a well career, well life. I want to thank, as always, Rita Domingues for her production of this fine podcast. I couldn’t do without her, and I am very grateful. And if you’re still listening and you have a moment, would you leave a five star rating and review of this book podcast? It really helps us reach more listeners with the message of living a life that is beyond better. And I will be back with you before you know it.