Alex Ellison and Betsy Wills: EPISODE LINK

BOOK LINK: YOUR HIDDEN GENIUS

TRANSCRIPT:

Colleen: Welcome back to Hot Flashes and Cool Topics. We are going to have a really

interesting conversation today so get your notebooks out ladies. We have Betsy Wills

and Alex Ellison on the show. Welcome ladies.

Betsy and Alex: Thank you

Colleen: Well, we are really interested in talking about aptitude in midlife because we get a lot of emails from

women saying I’m over 50. I’m not happy in my career anymore. I want to pivot,

but I don’t know what I want to pivot to. So your book, Your Hidden Genius,

really goes in depth about finding kind of which of the four aptitudes that might

apply to us. So I thought we could start with, why is aptitude so important for

when we’re looking for a job that we might enjoy? And I’ll with Betsy.

Betsy: Great okay well it’s the perfect time actually in midlife to evaluate and revisit where

your natural and innate abilities lie. Our aptitudes or what I would say are hard

wiring are stay with us throughout life and they become fixed by the time

we’ve gone through puberty but you can take an aptitude assessment and learn what

they are. And they will be the same at 17, 27, 47, 77.

So they’re really, you know, fixed information that we can keep returning to redeploy

into skills. And they really uncover why it is we enjoy certain things and why

other things are more of an uphill battle.

Bridgett: – You know, before we came on the air,

I was talking with Alex about when I was in high school back in the dark ages.

Betsy: – Me too, me too.

Bridgett:  – Back in 1986. And I remember I was telling her,

I went to my guides counselor office into the big old block white computer with the

floppy disk and took this test. And I ended up being an elementary school teacher.

But at that moment in my brain, I was like, I don’t to be a teacher. So I knew

the questions they were asking me and how to not go toward the ones that were

going toward teaching. And Alex, you had a really good explanation as to why that

was happening. Why was it happening?

Alex: You’re not alone, Bridgett, because that’s the

problem. The limitation with self -reported surveys, because you could game it.

You’re like, I do not want to be a teacher. I’ve talked to people who said, I did

not want to do what my mom or dad did. So I intentionally answered the opposite

way. So you kind of had this fix and you were not recognizing your innate aptitudes

because the only way to really see what those are is through an objective

assessment. So these are when you take the assessment that’s included in your hidden

genius, you’re going through a series of timed brain games and you don’t know what

they’re looking for. You cannot game it. And so you’re getting something that’s

really true and objective about you. It’s not a timestamp of where you are in your

life. It’s really enduring. Yeah.

Betsy: And you know, I was, I graduated from St. Cecilia

in, in Nashville in 1985. And those were the tools. I mean, I always say it was

the Stone Age, truly, in reader guidance. And thank God we’re not there we’re not

there anymore. I mean, it’s a new day. Think of every area of our lives where data

is transforming them. So, you know, healthcare, you would never just self -report that

you had breast cancer to your doctor and not expect that they would run tests,

right? And so today, we have personalized medicine, and they run tests, they get lots

of data. The same is true with dating. You know, a lot people now use those

algorithms and find the love of their life and much more efficiently in some

ways or at least a friend using the data. Well career management and career guidance

has now made that leap and the way it’s happened is using aptitude assessments.

So, the great news is for all of us who are mid -life or at any age or stage

you can get those aptitudes assessed now, and you will have gotten the same

information you would have gotten at 17 had you had the advantage of this. So it’s

never too late to know what they are.

Colleen: – Yeah, and that’s really interesting that

your aptitude doesn’t change as you get older because we’ll hear women say for

whatever reason, financial, family, I had to take this job and I’ve been in this

career for a long time, but there’s always been this whisper of an interest in

something and now that I am 40, 50, 60, I’ve always wanted to write a book or

I’ve always wanted to start my own business and so is that whisper your aptitude?

Betsy: That’s a great question Colleen. I mean I think we all sort of either have observed

this in ourselves these little you know inclinations, or they were observed in us at

a young age, but we pushed them aside. We didn’t explore them. Here’s what actually

happens. A lot of the times with that natural aptitude is you ignore it because you

think, because it’s easy to you, you think everyone else can do that. You think

everyone else has that aptitude. A big discount. We call it. You’re discounting

yourself.

Alex: Exactly. We do this all the time. We think, oh, well, that’s so easy. We,

you know, when we talk to people and we debrief after they’ve done the assessment,

they say, “Oh, that exercise, that was so easy. That wasn’t a real thing, was it?

Oh yeah, no, that is not easy for everybody.” Other people want to throw their

computers out the window when they’re doing that exercise. And so it’s stopping and

celebrating those things that have always come easily to you and have always made

you feel like you were in your flow and element. And that’s actually something you

need to be celebrating.

Colleen: – Can we talk about the four aptitudes?

Bridgett:  – That’s what I was gonna say

Colleen: – So, well, let’s start with the first one, spatial visualization. Betsy, what does that mean for

someone and how does that apply in aptitude?

Betsy: – Well, let me back up real quick and

just say, you know, there are 52 aptitudes that can be measured. And in the book,

we focus on those four, the core four a lot. And then you actually, when you take

the assessment that’s included with the book, you’re gonna actually learn about 14.

But back to the spatial, because we picked the four that really influence a lot

when it comes to our jobs and careers and our applications. And spatial ability is

like a fork in the road for people. The assessment, if you remember, is a paper

folding exercise. And again, if there’s one that menaces people, that’s the one,

because some people can see the answer on that one just in two seconds and other

people will never see the answer. It’s not good or bad to be spatial but if you

are and we learn that from the assessment there’s a whole host of possibilities for

you that more than likely and again women particularly you’ve probably never explored.

So spatial ability you know starts emerging and people very young you’ll notice the

mothers out there or parents out there. Some children are building the Taj Mahal out

of Legos at age, you know, four and other people, you know, they just don’t want

to build the treehouse in the backyard or put the bike together. They’re just not

interested in that type of thing. That’s early spatial ability coming out, but we

don’t truly know really if you have spatial ability, you know, until you’re maybe

entering your teens. But if you have it, There are so many careers that you may

have never considered before engineering, architecture, landscape design, graphic design,

so many things using that spatial ability. And for people who really don’t have it,

they tend to think like things that are much more abstract. It could be teaching,

philosophy, any number of things, but they don’t have an urge to work with their

hands. So uncovering that and confirming that with the assessment opens up just so

many new ideas for you to explore.

Bridgett: You know, and then we’ve got the other ones there as well. And I’m looking at

them. I’m hoping

Alex: — Idea generation, Alex. Idea generation. We were talking about this

a little bit before. I said– we first talked on the call. I said, I love the

name of your show. And they immediately said, yeah, we’re big idea people. And I

guess that’s probably, you were probably correct in that, but you could use the

assessment to confirm that. You know, what we talk about all the time with these

aptitudes, unlike, you know, other tests we’ve taken, you know, growing up, is

there’s no A or F, there’s no pass or fail, there’s no good or bad, really.

It’s you either have this aptitude and it should be used in this context to really

help you thrive, or you have this aptitude and it could be used in this context to

help you thrive. So it’s all about finding the right settings and situations for

yourself. And idea rate is a great example because Betsy and I score in the

opposite way on this one. So Betsy is what’s called a brainstormer. And so people

who are brainstormers, they have an aptitude for a rapid rate of idea generation.

It’s not looking at the quality of your ideas. It’s literally how quickly you think

on the spot. You know, I was watching the Grammys on Sunday night. And you know,

the rapper, only the third to win, you know, best rap album, Doechii, she is a

brainstormer, man. I mean, people who can do freestyle rap like that is like a flow

of ideas, and there’s no, there’s no stopping it. I, on the other hand, score on

the opposite end, I’m what’s called a concentrated focuser. I’m all about

implementation and execution. I usually will execute the first idea that comes to my

brain. I usually will get very excited about that. I sometimes get a little bit

stubborn about it, but I don’t let any moss grow under my feet. I’m like, let’s

just go, let’s just try it, right? And I just like to jump in. And so there are

different, different scores that actually can create a wonderful team or pair. In

this case, writing a book, right?

Betsy: And so there was this push and pull and this

back and forth between our two aptitudes. And I think that ultimately ended in a,

in a better book.

Bridgett: Yeah. And That’s what Pat Shea was that we knew .

– Yes, yes, that was a fabulous story, yes. And how she went to the women’s prison

and she works with it at YWCA, was put on her feet. – Yes, she didn’t know she

had to make a speech, right?

Betsy: She arrived and these are the stories all through the

book to illustrate, but again, Pat Shea arrives at the women’s prison and she

thought picking up, you know, something they done, going to say, Hey, how are you?

And they were like, okay, so are you ready? We’ve allotted an hour. And she

was like, what? And because she had that idea rate, she was able to,

and she had practiced her, you know, speech giving skills, not necessarily the same

speech, but she was able to improvise. And that’s a great advantage as a as an

idea rate person, but let me just say this, because I have idea rate, you wouldn’t

want someone like your surgeon or your pilot to have this. So don’t despair.

If you don’t have it, that’s going to be good news. That’s what’s unique about

aptitudes is many times the things that are not as strong in us unlock our

opportunity.

Bridgett: That’s what I like too. I didn’t have a chance to take the assessment yet because

I’m trying to find an hour and a half time, which I can’t be uninterrupted to take

it. But what I did like about what you said, you know, you’re not going to pass

or fail this test. There’s no, and that is a, I’m so curious to see about my

assessment, what happens there because I don’t like being scored.

And so I know that about myself. Like, if I’m doing a fun quiz, I’m so happy and

carefree. But if I know this is going to be scored, or I’m going to get a grade,

I’m like, Oh, gosh,

Alex: we do a lot of prep work in the, you know, pre time to just

say, Hey, relax, because again, there truly are no bad scores. Somebody explained it

to me as if you think about a soundboard, what makes the beautiful music is the

combination. And so most people have, you know, between six or seven really dominant

aptitudes and then those aptitudes that aren’t as dominant, again, are often the

magic for them. So truly, there’s nothing to be nervous about. We all have test

anxiety, I know, but this is not that way. Yeah, you don’t want a soundboard that’s

all on high volume, right? All the dials are up.

Colleen: What about inductive reasoning? That’s the next one. Can you talk a little bit,

Alex, about that?

Alex: – Yeah, so this is one that, I think this is an interesting one

because it’s a problem -solving aptitude. And it’s looking at literally how comfortable

you are with information gaps and doing work where you always have incomplete

information. So some people are very comfortable with that. So put them in a

position where they’re an ER doctor and they have to sort of remediate the problem,

to keep the patient alive, even when they don’t have all the answers yet, right?

They just, they have to be able to act under that kind of pressure. People, but

also in less emergency situations like anthropologists, you’re studying people in

civilizations from 1 ,000 years ago, you can’t go talk to these people, you’ve got

to fill in the gaps. So people who score as inductive thinkers or diagnostic problem

solvers, we call them, they’re very comfortable with those information gaps. And then

the opposite, these are the fact checkers. And so the fact checkers are the

meticulous methodical researchers. They’re the ones who say, I need to sleep on it

and I’ll get back to you tomorrow. These are the people who would have caught

George Santos before he got, you know, before all the lies came out, right? You

know, they’re the fact checkers, they’re the opposition researchers for those political

candidates. And we need both, right?

And actually there’s a story we tell in the

book about the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. And it was around Thanksgiving and I

said Betsy, I want to know what aptitudes one would need to be to be the producer,

to be able to put this parade on, but what a massive scale project, right? And I

thought for sure this person would need to be a diagnostic problem solver, the quick

under pressure, you know, information gaps, super comfortable. The opposite was

actually true. It turns out that the Macy’s Parade has an 18 month runway. And the

person who was the creative director had everything locked in months in advance.

And intentionally, you know, because he did not like last minute, you know, putting

out fires and problem solving, he had made sure all the eyes were dotted. There

were backup plans to his backup plans to his backup plans.

Betsy: Right. Yeah. What was

the Santa Claus thing he said? Yeah. The Santa sprains an ankle. We’ve got three

other Santa’s in the wings ready to go. You know. And so that was a surprise

to us, but what a delightful surprise to see, you know, that this it’s actually

this this thing that this fact checker, which might be a deficit in some situations

is absolutely the asset in this particular job. And we talked about that a lot, you

know, there again, there’s no good or bad attitudes. It’s just an aptitude used in

the wrong setting could feel like a deficit.

Bridgett: Was this the one that had when COVID

came around and we all thought the parade happened?

Betsy & Alex: Yes. Yes, and

Betsy:  and it’s

completely different like what we saw on television is not at all what happened It

was an actual illusion.

Bridgett: Yeah, that was crazy. That was crazy. Yes. And so So then

number four was that the sequential reasoning. Yes, Betsy.

What about sequential reasoning?

Betsy: Well, this is really what we sometimes call the

logic aptitude. It’s people who kind of see the big picture very quickly, they don’t

like to bother with the steps, okay? So, they can fall into the trap.

Let’s say everything has sort of a yin and yang or an Achilles heel. But these are

people who can kind of mostly solve problems in their head or figure out the steps

in their head without writing something down. So, they wouldn’t write an outline for

a paper. They really hate geometry where they have to write out all the steps for

the teacher. That’s a bother for them. They can fall into the trap of feeling like

their team is our mind readers. Because it’s all going on in their head and so

stopping to explain something can be, you know, not so fun for them. It’s a great

skill when, you know, they have to figure out a problem on the fly or reroute a

trip, for instance. They don’t need to stop and even write it down. They just do

it in their head. But it can have its own set of challenges. The opposite end of

this continuum are people we call process supporters. And these are people who love

to maintain systems. Usually, they’ve got their hyper organized, their filing cabinets

are all neat and orderly.

My husband for instance, Okay. And, you know, I’m like, he’ll send me a calendar invite. I’m not kidding.

If I talked to him on the phone in five minutes and I say, I’m going to stop by

Whole Foods and pick up some salad for dinner and then I’ll see you at home, he’ll

send me a calendar invite for that. Like, okay, well, that’s what you’re doing,

right? But that’s a process supporter. And all of this is necessary to keep the

trains running on time. Again, it’s all good, but it does rule a lot about what

you enjoy doing and how you find satisfaction.

Bridgett: Right, you know, I was going through

that trying to find before I took the assessment and I’m like, I think as I went

along, there was something about conventional and I’m like, I think I’m conventional.

Betsy: Nothing wrong with that in this context. Again, I know you’re not

Bridgett: – Oh my God,

I think I do like to have a plan out there.

Colleen: – She loves a plan. She loves a

plan.

Betsy:  – Well, think about people who love a template. You know, like an entrepreneur

maybe not need a template, but we always talk about, you know, in this one, some

people like to take something from good to great. And so they’re the great

improvers. And they really can’t think with a blank page on certain planning things,

but man, they can improve anything if there’s a template. They just work better that

way. – That’s interesting.

Alex:  – Process supporters are the people who actually let the

cake cool before they ice it. – There you go. – Oh. – That’s a good one, yeah.

Colleen: – Yeah, that wouldn’t work for us.

Bridgett:  – We’d follow the steps.

Colleen:  – Another thing that I

think is really interesting and helpful for our listeners is that, Betsy, you talk

about career Wellness is a whole life strategy. Yeah, because I don’t think

Especially for women we realize that you’re a I’m a pivoter every 12 years.

I pivoted a job I never thought that was a big deal, but as I get older people

like what do you mean? You I went from an attorney to a Pilates instructor to a

podcaster. Okay, I Feel that you take your experience from each position and and

bring it forward. But there were people who thought I was insane for leaving the

law to become a Pilates instructor. They were like, why would you do that? But can

you talk about how career wellness is a whole life idea?

Betsy: Yeah.

So I think the two words we’d say is there’s boredom and there’s burnout. Okay.

And the bottom line is we’re all if we look back, going to pivot many many times

some of us stay closer in the field that we started in but generally in women

we’re playing many many roles all at once oftentimes that’s you know fact but

let’s talk about being a lawyer for example do we have to you know you can

literally become sick in your career and the reason for that is you might just,

I say, would be you’ve got unmet aptitudes that are not being worked out and you’ve

ignored them. So these rear their head, eventually. Now, the best thing you can do

is, you know, recognize what your aptitudes are because no one job is ever going to

satisfy all of them. But my suspicion, Colleen, is that you have a spatial ability

and that that’s one reason you liked Pilates. It’s very much a 3D type of exercise

and that law is highly abstract. The other end of that continuum, generally.

Um, now, if I were talking to you right when you were starting, I might have

always said, think about real estate law where you’re going to get to use that 3D

ability or patent law or create an application that uses this 3D ability on the

side, you know, because we all need to make money and there’s different times of

our lives where the salary matters more. But career wellness is about A,

not letting your career get ill and tolerating something so long that it’s eroding

you inside, but also coming at it like you were taking care of your body to be

healthy and knowing what your attitudes are allows you to go, “Okay, this is what’s

going on with my career. I’m using most of my attitudes. I’m not overtaxed or too

many of them, but I’m gonna work hard to make my whole life better by really

nurturing my applications or vocations or volunteer work, for instance.

Bridgett: – And you know, a lot of people, I think you said this earlier, Alex, you kind of

say, “This is what my parents did.” Or even the education system itself can kind of

put you into a role or maybe make you feel like you are not qualified for

anything. Can you address how taking these assessments and aptitude, finding out what

your aptitude is can be helpful?

Alex: – Well, that’s why we say Bridgett, it is a whole

life strategy because so many of us,

you know, eighth grade, you know, teacher said or our 11th grade, you know, math

teacher said as the word, you know, and that’s what we’re going to live by.

Or we take those early career counseling sessions as sort of a life sentence.

And really, you know, with the world changing so rapidly, technology changing so

rapidly, the nature of your work will change multiple change multiple times throughout

your life. Or even when you’re at the end of your career and you’re thinking about

how you want to spend your free time and your applications, you’re going to be

reevaluating. And so these forks in the road are going to cause us to reevaluate

how we’re spending our waking hours. And the wonderful thing about an aptitude

assessment, it doesn’t matter when you took it, it is the compass that you can

return to remind yourself of how to navigate the storm. these things about you

remain constant when everything else seems to be shifting. And I think that’s a

really wonderful feeling, especially as we get older, I think there’s these feelings

of obsolescence. Like, am I still relevant today? And it can really cause a lot of

dread and anxiety. And the answer is yes, absolutely, because your talents are always

relevant. It’s just a matter of getting creative and how will you apply them in

different contexts. So this is something that we believe is you’re constantly

reevaluating throughout your life. It’s not just a one and done early in your career

and you have to live by that for the rest of your life.

Betsy:  – So yeah, I think it’s

important to point out your aptitudes are not skills.

So if you have an aptitude like sequential reasoning, it can be developed and that’s

what we talked about in the book, like here’s all the different ways you might

deploy that. And so whatever age you’re in, you can always continue to learn but

this gives you sort of a finer sift of where you should start looking and trying

things.

Bridgett:  And it’s amazing too because you can use that because podcasting wasn’t a

thing. I graduated from high school or even college. It wasn’t a thing.

So it is something that you could use as new careers develop, your aptitude

could still apply.

Alex:  – Yeah, think of all the skills you picked up just podcasting,

just technical skills that you never do. We’ve all learned to zoom after all sort

of. (both laughing)

Colleen: – So for someone who may be in her fifties and she decides, I really wanna pivot

my career. They take the aptitude test, she takes the aptitude test and she comes

out with one of the, you know, 15 that you said that would come out as, what does

she do with that? Like, I know in the book you give stories, which is wonderful,

but what can, what is like the first thing she should look to for that?

Betsy: Well, first of all, she’s going to come out with a combination. So as unique as our

fingerprints. Okay. So, so it’s not going to be, oh, you’re this, that’s it. It’s

going to be, okay, you’ve got all this kind of collection of things. But what’s

neat about You Science, which is the platform on which this is based, is all those

aptitudes have been mapped to thousands and thousands of jobs. So there’s actually a

fit like dating that you will be presented with online. And that’s really handy.

Now at 50 years old, you know, you’re probably not going to go back to engineering

school. And it may bring up a lot because you might have a combination that if you

were 17 would say, you know, consider engineering, but don’t despair, look for

patterns. We always say, don’t take it literally. But if you saw tons of engineering

things come up, for instance, you might want to explore working in some type of

technical field, you might go back and get a certification and I know somebody went

back and got a certification in medical imagery, for instance, on the weekends.

I mean, it may or may not be paid work, though, that you’re gonna pursue next.

Every situation is different, but you’re gonna find out a huge amount of information

of what types of jobs would be fits for you and why. So that’s one outcome.

Alex, you can talk about what else you—

Alex:  – Yeah, sometimes it’s like the discussion.

Yeah, you know, so yeah, you’ll get a discussion guide, which is great because that

gives you language to now be able to advocate for yourself with your boss or your

teammates to say, you know, these are the kinds of situations that fatigue me. I

always sort of knew this intuitively, but now I have language to describe why this

wears at me or why this fatigues me. It’s also an invitation to raise your hand

and sit in on those design meetings if you’re spatial or to, you So, to sit on a

board, to volunteer to do the fundraising, you know, you’re going to get some

suggestions that are career suggestions, but you might turn those into applications.

You might also just make subtle pivots at your existing job and take on new tasks

and try to delegate out other tasks. And so this language makes you a better

advocate for yourself.

Right. I mean, that was for me the biggest, the biggest thing

is I knew certain things were frustrating and certain things were fun, but this

assessment was an invitation to stand up and to say, I wanna do that.

Can I please have a seat at the table?

Bridgett:  – Yeah, another thing I like so much about

this assessment, this particular one, that if you buy the book, you have a code

that you can use, but it’s not crazy expensive. Can you talk about how,

I’ll ask Betsy how you can go about taking this assessment, the various ways you

can do that.

Betsy: Well, it’s good to know this is, You Science, which is the company I

co -founded in 2010, we actually bought the assessment, it’s been going since the

1920s, but it’s literally about $750 to take it,

okay, because you have to go to a center and you had to been, you and do it one

-on -one, computing power, and what we did with you, Sciences, we brought it into an

online, we mapped it with the government to all these jobs, we did a lot of

technology advances using a lot of money and drove the price to $49 actually.

But because I was fortunate enough to be the co -founder of this, I was able to

offer it with the book for just the price of the book. So every book comes with a

sticker on the back or if you downloaded, you can, there’s a code that you’ll

figure out and that’s all self -explanatory on the site. But we’re just thrilled

because the reason we wrote the book in the first place is for people like us, you

know, I was 35 when I took it for the first time. Alex was 25, we, you know,

all ages can benefit from this. And we just, that was the goal it’s really a

mission as much as it is a book.

Colleen: Alex can you talk about how aptitude is not an

enneagram or the Myers -Briggs because I think a lot of people think I’m an eight,

I’m a this, you know that’s how are they different?

Alex: Yeah I’m a one. I recently

discovered that that I had mistyped myself. I love all of this and I always have

loved any tool to help with self -discovery. And when I first started using

assessments and exploring them, it was in my own counseling practice. I wanted to

find tools that would help my clients discover what they wanted to do in terms of

their education and careers. And what I realized was that just as Bridgett was

saying, her experience in high school is students can game these things and adults

can game these things too, you know, right? We all have our own bias that can mess

with the results. And so as much as I loved the self -reported interest and

personality assessments and surveys, as much as I love those, and I think they are

good conversation starters and they do reveal some interesting things about us, I did

want something more objective. And so that’s where the aptitude assessment piece comes

in. But I don’t think that anyone is better or worse. They’re just different tools

for different projects, if you will. So I love Enneagram as a way to explain

relationships, romantic and otherwise, and how we show up and what our shadow sites

are and sort of how we’re reacting and what we’re trying to cover up,

maybe from childhood and all of these things. Like I think there’s a lot of

dimensions there to the Enneagram and Myers -Briggs is also a wonderful personality

tool. And interest surveys too. And I think an interest survey,

the more life experience you have, perhaps the interest survey is a little more

reliable because you actually have been out in the world and experienced your

interests and explored them further. But certainly, aptitude assessment is the only

objective measure of your traits. You cannot game it. And you really cannot assess

what your aptitudes are without an assessment. Someone couldn’t just come up to you

and say, you’re definitely spatial. I could have a, I might have a hunch, you know,

but you really would have to assess that.

Betsy: – Yeah, we all look at other people,

unfortunately, as a flawed version of us. And this takes that away. It’s kind of

handy ’cause, you know, your confidence in the score, we see students and adults

every, likewise sit up straighter when they get their results because a lot of times

they feel like, oh, I must have failed that. And then they get their results and

they’re like, oh, wow, I had no idea. It’s really, it’s really wonderful to watch.

It’s sometimes a wonderful invitation to explore new activities that you had closed

off to yourself.

Bridgett:  Yeah. Another thing I like about that, the way you would take it

on your own computer, I know whenever I’ve taken a test, and this is probably

something about me, But if you’re in that big exam room and you’re taking whatever

of that exam is and you’re, somebody’s already finished and you’re like, oh, I’m not

even halfway finished. That’s just another relaxation point, I think.

Betsy: – Yeah,

you don’t have to have Arrid Extra Dry. (both laughing) – Always

helpful.

Bridgett: – Yes, yes, do they still make that? (both laughing) –

Betsy:  But, I don’t know. – Yeah, Yeah, one of those, but you know, a quote that I just,

Bridgett: I don’t know why this stuck out to me when I was reading it. It was “the learning

curve to competence can be steep, but once you’ve scaled it, you’ll find yourself on

even ground. “

Bridgett: Yeah. So if you want to either one of you want to just talk about

that.

Betsy:  But I think this is a good time to do a little exercise if y ‘all are.

Because it relates to this – Very much. All right, so take a pencil out. Maybe your

listeners will do the same thing. And just write your name, write your full name,

like first, middle, last, do it. – Okay. – Okay.

Then when you’re finished doing that, I want you to switch hands and do the same

thing.

Colleen: – This could take a while.

Bridgett: – I remember this from the book. Yeah, good.

Betsy: Okay, so how did that feel writing with your non -dominant hand?

Bridgett: Really difficult.

Colleen: Yeah, and much harder. Yeah, and slower, right? You know. Yeah, I’m still doing it.

I have a long name.

Betsy: Okay. Okay. Well, if for some reason you’ve had to use your

non -dominant hand, say you were in a horrible accident, right, And you did it

consistently, even if I made you use your non -dominant hand till the end of the

day, you would get better with practice, okay? And so aptitudes are like this.

Like certain things are a little bit more of an uphill climb, but with practice, we

can become competent. But Bridgett and Colleen, you’re never going to be a

calligrapher if that situation were to occur, okay? Okay. So what your aptitudes are

is it’s knowing how to go through your life using your dominant hand. So it doesn’t

give you an excuse not to have to be competent in things that aren’t your strengths

or your aptitudes, but it is a clue to be like, let’s do more of this stuff

that’s in my dominant space. Does that make sense? So when we talk about learning a

job back to your quote, sometimes learning a job can be harder than actually doing

it. So take heart, this isn’t a dream killer. If you wanna do something, you can.

But let’s really focus on the things that come naturally and easily to us. And

let’s reveal what they are with this assessment and then lean into those.

Alex: – We’re

kind of challenging the notion. Americans especially, we love people who work hard

and we reward that. We like to see people who work hard be rewarded. But I do

think many of us are working hard at the wrong things. And so it feels like

walking into a wall all the time. You’re working harder and harder and not quite

seeing the growth that some of the people around you are seeing. And so when you

work to and play to your attitudes, you actually see this growth and you feel it.

You feel like you’re in your element. Yeah, it’s motivating. Yeah. And that’s really

ageless, which is wonderful for our demographic as well.

Colleen And Bridgett and I just, we

appreciate the fact that you’re giving options for people, you know, they know what

they don’t want, but they don’t necessarily know what they want. So sometimes just

figuring out, okay, well, I have an aptitude for this, put you in the right

direction. So “Your Hidden Genius” is the book and you get to take the test with,

I don’t know, call it a test. It’s an assessment, it’s an assessment, it’s games,

you get to take the assessment with it and Betsy and Alex thank you so much for

joining us today this was really informative. Thank you for having us. It was a fun

conversation.